Feature

L'Enfant et les Sortilèges:  
Ravel's Enchanted Morality
Kamyar Atabai 

Photo inscribed, "To Manuel Rosenthal, affectionately,
Maurice Ravel and Mouni", circa 1928. (BNF, Paris)

The eventual completion of L'Enfant et les Sortilèges was due to the endeavors of Raoul Gunsbourg, the impresario of the Monte-Carlo Opéra. Gunsbourg had recently produced Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole with great success, and desired another opera to form a double-bill with it. In the spring of 1924, he commissioned Ravel with a formal contract and a deadline set for the end of the year. By the autumn of 1924, Ravel was well behind in his work. In a letter of September he wrote, "I am working for Monte-Carlo not without anxiety when I compare what is done with what remains to be done."[11] On October 13, he wrote, "I'm still hard at work...I'm up to the verses 'Wedgwood teapot and Chinese cup' which Colette has just sent me."[12] By November, the rate of work had accelerated: "I am seeing no one but my frogs, my negroes, my shepherds and various insects."[13]

By early 1925, the opera was finished, and Ravel was ensconced in Monte-Carlo, supervising rehearsals and retouching bits of the score. He was highly satisfied with the work of all involved in the production: "Thanks to a marvelous orchestra which loves the work, and a conductor the like of whom I have never before encountered, everything has worked its way out...The roles are remarkably performed."[14] The opera officially premiered on March 21, 1925, conducted by Vittorio de Sabata and choreographed by a young Georges Balanchine.

The reception at Monte-Carlo was enthusiastic: "a masterpiece of imagination, fantasy, humor and sensitivity...and a worthy descendant of the eighteenth century opéra-ballet."[15] Matters were somewhat different at the Paris premiere at the Opéra-Comique on February 1, 1926. Writing to her daughter about the stormy reception, Colette remarked, "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges is playing twice a week before a packed but turbulent house. The partisans of traditional music do not forgive Ravel...for his instrumental and vocal audacities. The modernists applaud and boo the others, and during the 'meowed' duet there is a dreadful uproar"[16]: a typical Parisian premiere of the first quarter of the century.

Critical opinion, too, was divided. In La Liberté, Robert Dezarnaux wrote that the opera was "not convincing. It seems void of music! Why? Because the music never has the opportunity to expand...The rapid succession [of differing styles] bewilders the mind, fatigues the ear--and what is worse, is not amusing."[17] Writing on the same day (February 3, 1926) in Le Temps, Henry Malherbe came to a startlingly different conclusion: "a work of incomparable enchantment ... It is impossible to describe all the carefully selected riches, all the subtle notations, the rhythmic forms, all the tours de force of this classical and spiritually sensual score."[18] That the score provoked such diametrically opposed reactions is testimony to Ravel's provocative musical style.

Though never one to comment at length on his own work, in his short Esquisse Autobiographique, Ravel conveyed his thoughts on the style of the opera. He wrote, "The emphasis is on melody, allied to a subject which I chose to treat in the spirit of American musical comedy. Mme. Colette's libretto allowed this freedom in treating the magical story. The vocal line is the important thing. Even though the orchestra does not reject virtuosity, it is none the less of secondary importance."[19] Though Ravel's statement of purpose is lucid, the phrase "in the spirit of American musical comedy" requires further clarification. Roger Nichols interprets that "Ravel possibly meant that it was meant to be a number opera, in which the characterization of each number, helped by the selective use of a large orchestra, was more important than homogeneity of style or of musical material."[20]

Ravel was well aware of the diverse nature of the work, remarking, "there is a little bit of everything in it...a little of Massenet, of Puccini, of American music and of Monteverdi."[21] He anticipated criticism on these very grounds: "I can assure you that this work in two sections will distinguish itself by a mélange of styles which will be severely judged."[22] Certainly, "the tenuousness of its structure...[and] its arbitrary qualities"[23] invited the treatment Ravel lavished upon the libretto. It would be wrong to accuse Ravel of mere whimsicality in his heterogeneous mixture of styles. The music reflects his utter faithfulness to Colette's text, matching its mercurial moods with accuracy, and moving with grace from the wildness of Arithmetic's polka to the hushed serenity of the shepherds. To cast both set-pieces in the same vein would have been an error of judgment and taste.

Writing about the music, Roland-Manuel noted a "will to simplify, and the need to make the sound-texture lighter--to aerate it as it were--which represent the most deliberate movement yet made by Ravel towards stripping bare his material."[24] This spare texture permeates the opera from the very beginning, with two oboes playing parallel fourths and fifths (the Child's motif) while the principal melody enters on the double bass. The Child's theme resurfaces in the celesta after the duet of the Teapot and the China Cup. Lastly, we hear it once again in the oboes during the final orchestral section of the animal's chorus. With its gentle meanderings, the motif perfectly captures the mood of a bored and restless child.

The second central theme is that of Mother's: descending fourths first heard in the rich sonorities of the clarinet, bass clarinet and bassoon, providing a marvelous tonal contrast with the ethereal sound of the oboes for the Child. Mother's theme is crucial in the last pages of the score. The Child calls out "Maman" on a descending fourth before the animals attack him, a cry they pick up in their attempts to summon her once he is injured in their melee. With Mother's re-entrance in the final moments of the opera, her theme thrillingly pervades the entire orchestra. Simply and tellingly, the opera ends with a single "Maman" sung by the Child on a descending fourth, accompanied solely by strings.

Though not omnipresent, the two themes supply a skeletal frame for an opera of disparate elements in which there exists "a repudiation of thematic development, and the break-up of the continuity of the recitative."[25] Despite the presence of these two small motifs, Ravel has little interest in unifying the opera by thematic means. Rather, one way Ravel unifies the opera is via his deliberately sparse orchestral fabric, which maintains chamber-music clarity of texture throughout. The pastorale for the shepherds and the scena for the Princess exemplify the simplicity of the sound texture throughout. Only a small kettledrum and woodwinds accompany the pastorale. The opening section of the Princess's aria is strictly contrapuntal with the soprano voice matched note for note with a flute.

Other sections of the opera are more orchestrally indulgent with Ravel using novel combinations of instruments and orchestration to achieve the desired effect: the duet of the Armchair and the Sofa has "the slightly trivial and grotesque timbres of the bassoons and contrabassoons, the burlesque effect of the minuet-like theme played on the piano with a lutheal attachment, the ridiculous tremolo of the flutes and the trembling trills of the small appoggiatura motifs in the English horns."[26] The orchestra accompanies the Teapot's ragtime with a xylophone, whip, cheese grater, wood blocks and trombone slides, while the Chinese Cup's fox-trot has "chinoiserie" in its pentatonic scales and the repetition of seconds in the celesta. In contrast, the music of the second half in the garden is a return to a more aerated structure, with strings and harps for the Dragonfly's aria, a piccolo for the vocalise of the Nightingale, and a sparse use of strings and woodwind for the Bat's aria.

Ravel's precise and painstaking use of instruments allows for an expanded aural landscape, while remaining at all times apt for the material at hand. The instruments (for example, a cheese grater) and their uses (lutheal attachment for the piano--an early form of prepared piano) may be novel, but they are not intended as novelty. Instead, Ravel's method serves to characterize the many roles concisely within a few bars of music unique in sound and quality to each role; a necessity as the opera is short and the set-pieces numerous. This refinement of orchestral fabric and precision in instrumentation is so rigorously applied that it becomes an aesthetic strategy that unites the opera into a coherent whole, despite its inherent diversity. Everything is calculated to achieve maximum effect in a minimum amount of time.

Despite its brilliance, Ravel had no desire that the orchestral writing should dominate the text. L'Enfant et les Sortilèges is an opera where "interest in the melodic line, a concrete entity, takes complete precedence."[27] Ravel retains little of the quasi-parlando style of his earlier opera L'Heure Espagnole, in which the vocal lines were strictly anchored in French prosody. Nevertheless, the Child's vocal line is still mostly declaimed (except for his Massenet-inspired aria "Toi, le coeur de la rose" and his duet with the Princess), as is the entirety of Mother's role. Otherwise, Ravel fashions a dazzling array of vocal styles and effects, all contributing to the instant definition of the twenty-one named roles in the opera. The distinct styles include a florid coloratura aria for Fire, a vocalise for the Nightingale, sliding notes and operetta-like runs for the Sofa, falsetto notes for the tenor roles of the Teapot and Arithmetic, portando singing and blues for the Cats, and un-notated speech such as the coughs of the Squirrel and the squeaks of the Bat.

The emphasis placed on the vocal line reaches a climax in the scena of the storybook Princess. As Roland-Manuel explained, "No longer is it a musical conversation, but a simple discussion turned into music, an arioso recitative that turns into an air in the central section. The expression broadens to the point of lyricism in the course of a large section whose eloquence is no longer surprising: melody has ceased to be the slave of the word and has become a companion free to develop according to its own nature."[28] When the clarinet arpeggios enter in the second section of the Princess's aria, Ravel leaves declamation far behind. The opera truly begins to sing, a lyricism that continues in the limpid valse-chantée of the Dragonfly, and suffuses the second half of this "fantasie lyrique."

Ravel in Vienna, between 2 dragonflies from L'Enfant et les Sortilèges,
costumed by Eugène Steinhof, March 1929. (BNF, Paris).

The vocal techniques of the various brief arias and duets again demonstrate another singular quality of the opera: the mélange of musical styles that the form dictated and Ravel composed. L'Enfant et les Sortilèges can seem like neo-classicism run amok, with its imitations of past forms side by side with a contemporary sound. In less than an hour of music, Ravel provides a ragtime for the Teapot, a fox-trot for the Chinese Cup, a bel-canto aria for Fire, a minuet for the Sofa and the Armchair, music-hall blues for the Cats, an a-cappella fugal chorus for the flora and fauna of the garden, a medieval organum for the Child's theme, a folk song derived pastorale for the Shepherds, and mimetic vocal music for the Owl, the Frog and the Nightingale.

That the whole does not fall apart is due both to Ravel's affection for and interest in past forms, and the deliberate over-riding miniaturization of all the forms, as if they are being witnessed from a child's point of view. No one can truly confuse the Fire's aria for Donizetti or Bellini, nor are we meant to. "The backward-looking affectation which is so characteristic of Ravel's music"[29] saturates the entire opera, so that "the piece brings together, by its heterogeneous writing, the entire history of European musical language since the parallel organum of medieval times up to the contemporary conceptions of timber, of time, of the discontinuity of musical discourse, passing by Renaissance polyphony, baroque dances and counterpoint mixed in with the techniques of jazz."[30]

Of all the forms explored by Ravel in L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, perhaps the most significant is the eighteenth century French tradition of opéra-ballet. Two prominent elements characterized the classic opéra-ballet: the use of dance as an integral part of the story, and imitative music that depicted the natural world. As Colette's libretto was written originally for a ballet, the dance in L'Enfant et les Sortilèges is extensive, though always allied with the vocal line and the narrative. The dances Ravel composed include a sarabande, a fox-trot, a ragtime, a polka, a "valse Americaine", a rondo, a minuet and a waltz. The dances are not just divertissements; they propel the action and often provide the rhythm for the vocal lines. This resemblance to opéra-ballet was noted by contemporary critics who dubbed Ravel "a descendant of Couperin, [Rameau]...and, in general of the eighteenth-century French descriptive composers."[31]

Ravel and his cat Mouni in the garden of his home Le Belvédère
in Montfort-l'Amaury, 1920's. (BNF, Paris).

Of Ravel's descriptive music, Jourdan-Morhange wrote that "without copying their cries, by a single sonorous touch, he made them [the animals] tangible and alive...the trees, the plants, the animals spoke to him in a fraternal tongue."[32] The Cats' duet remains the pinnacle of Ravel's achievement in imitative music. A bitonal passage in the clarinets introduces the amorous felines, after which follows the singing in a "cat language" carefully considered, highly varied (miinhou, mornâu, moâu and méinhon) and unabashedly erotic, composed by Ravel after he had "first asked Hélène Jourdan-Morhange to imitate their meows."[33] Honegger called the duet "the most remarkable part of the score. Naturally, Ravel was not concerned with imitating the mewing of cats; but he has so used it as to build up a melodic line deriving from it. In it is to be found the whole crux of so-called 'imitative' music."[34]

Viewed through the prism of opéra-ballet, L'Enfant et les Sortilèges is a wholly unified work of art--the older form reveals both the shape and the over-arching aesthetic strategy of Ravel's opera. Ultimately though, the success of the opera resides in Ravel's instinctive ability to understand the world of a child, and to compose for "a play which revolutionizes emotional values as easily as the laws of perspective,"[35] where the anguish of a grandfather clock which cannot stop chiming is as moving and believable as that of a lonely child in a bewitched moonlit garden. Besides, Ravel's "predilection for perfectly crafted miniatures of all sorts"[36] is accurately reflected in the opera: are not each of the twenty odd arias in the opera just that? "Since childhood he had possessed a taste for the fantastic"[37] that Colette's libretto allowed him to indulge wholeheartedly.

Mechanical nightingale in Ravel's home, Le Belvédère. When  
the key is turned, the bird comes to life, shakes its wings, 
opens its beak and sings. (Thomas Renaut, ASA Editions).

A small man, and highly sensitive to his "physical deficiency," Ravel never entirely quit the enchanted world of childhood, in fact clung to it with a near-obsessive love for and worship of his mother--"undoubtedly the deepest emotional tie of his entire life."[38] He was also fond of children (though he had none) and cats (of which he had many). Though physically absent for most of the opera, Mother (with the comforting and warm sonorities of her theme in the clarinets) is the emotional crux of the opera. Only upon her return, signaled by the shimmering sound of the entire orchestra playing her motif, are we sure that all will be well, and that the sortilèges have taught their lesson of universal love and forgiveness to the Child. The Child's ingratitude towards his mother sets the opera in motion, and only his heartfelt cry of "Maman" can bring the opera to an end, as he realizes he has wronged the only one who will always love him. It is this personal emotion that Ravel invests in the opera that makes the piece so moving, instead of a sterile exercise in musical stunts and amusing irrelevancies.

 Notes