Notice

Among acclaimed critics and historians of the Belle époque, Louis Laloy used the above phrase to describe Ravel's maturing musical thought in 1907, as did René Chalupt, the first compiler of the composer's correspondence, in describing his epistolary style long thereafter. Though “gentle irony” and cognates surface repeatedly throughout and beyond Ravel's lifetime, Norbert Albrecht's judgment of some thirty years ago in the distinguished German literature still obtains: long after the composer's death, irony remains terra incognita in terms of Ravel criticism. To retrace responsibly within limited space we may begin with Henry Bidou's thoughts at Ravel's death: early biographer of Chopin, military historian, author of works on Africa and nearly exact contemporary, Bidou placed Ravel succinctly amidst the interdisciplinary ferment important to present questions: “Above all, Ravel was of his time. He was twenty years old in 1895, the generation that in literature followed so closely the true ‘Symbolists,’ sharing in their dreams, yet mixing in something ironic and brilliant of their own… . In music, the generation of 1895 found their perfect expression: the music of Ravel.” Bidou remembered well: a more detailed description of this world, echoed several times over by Ravel and others throughout his career, has come down to us from Tristan Klingsor, poet, friend of youth, and fellow member of a boisterous, all-male, musico-literary cénacle meeting regularly between what Roger Shattuck has aptly described as The Banquet Years, and the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. The group's adopted name of Apaches—a term in rather wide circulation at the time—was as ironic as Klingsor's chosen pseudonym, and contemporary and subsequent accounts of the ardent traffic between composers, writers, and artists on either end of the receding nineteenth century were only reinforced upon Ravel's death. Klingsor, shortly after Bidou, writes in a different venue: “One must not forget that this was the time of Mallarmé, Jules Laforgue, and Mac-Nab—Symbolists, decadents, mischief-makers all, competing for the approval of the few hundred that constituted our Paris.”