I. Provenance

Among many influences of Ravel's youth were clearly those springing from Baudelaire's “doctrine of correspondences,” or (as the phenomenon became known later) synaesthesia, the simultaneous stimulation and/or perception of different senses. With deep roots in German Romanticism, synaesthesia found a culmination of consequence in the French Symbolist aesthetics of the fin de siècle. While Martin Cooper may have been correct in dubbing Debussy “supreme transliterator from one sense to another, … the musician who more than any other artist fulfilled Baudelaire's theory of correspondence between the arts.” Cooper's certainty resembles that of Edward Lockspeiser questioned in the preceding chapter concerning the peerless, “telescopic” nature of Debussy's descriptive genius. Baudelaire's correspondances permeated Ravel's thought, too. Though the topic of Wagner and Debussy has been visited (and revisited), a relationship of issue with regard to Ravel has yet to be established. Since Ravel's thought was reinforced by readings of Hoffmann, Poe, Baudelaire, and French Symbolists, Wagner's influence on him was shrouded but significant—that of synaesthesia, the effects of sound upon varying senses, as expressed musically. In early works such as the Sites auriculaires, Jeux d’eau, and Miroirs, the correspondances unfold rather straightforwardly from the ideals of allusion and suggestion. In subsequent works, however, such as Gaspard de la nuit, the Symbolist legacies of Baudelaire and influences of Wagner accommodate those of Hoffmann, Poe, and nineteenth-century keyboard writing. The result is an uncommon absolute music that draws the listener into a unique landscape of Symbolist allusion and Romantic narration.

As with irony, the more scholarly and methodological investigations addressing musical synaesthesia date from relatively recent times, and—as, too, with irony—it is likely that synaesthetically informed musical perception has been with us for a very long time, perhaps always. Josef Burjanek, among others, has suggested that musical experience is in itself rooted in correspondances, more than a hint of which, of course, may be traced to interpretations of the Greek musiké—unknown fusions of music and poetry, tone, and word—and to subsequent understandings of the phenomenon reaching into the decade of Ravel's early maturation.