Gaspard de la nuit

The right hand plays closely packed chords, ppp. Below them the left hand has a slower melody, marked très doux et très expressif, several notes below the top of the piano texture.

In Bertrand’s poem, Ondine touches a moonlit window and offers the man inside her ring. “Mon palais est bâti fluide, au fond du lac” — “My palace is built of water, at the bottom of the lake.” She asks him to marry her and become king of the lakes.

The arpeggios run from the low bass to the high treble. Ravel sets the melody in chords among them, with hairpins from pp to forte within a single arpeggio. The pianist must sustain the longer melody notes through the figuration.

In the final paragraph of Bertrand’s poem, printed before the movement in the Durand score (1909), the man tells Ondine that he loves a mortal woman. The water spirit sheds a few tears, bursts out laughing and vanishes in a shower down the blue windowpanes.

Near the end the accompaniment stops. A single line is played in the middle of the keyboard, Très lent, with rests below it.

Both hands play a rapid passage, Rapide et brillant, which slows and is followed by ppp arpeggios in C♯ major. Bertrand’s last image is “mes vitraux bleus” — “my blue stained-glass windows” — with water streaming down them.

A B♭ in octaves repeats throughout while slow chords move beneath it, in a rhythm independent of theirs. Ravel marked the piece Très lent and asked for the soft pedal throughout.

Bertrand’s poem lists small, horrible sounds near a hanged man, among them a fly at the dead man’s ear and a spider making his necktie. The source is named in the line “C’est la cloche qui tinte” — “It is the bell that tolls.” Beyond the town walls, the setting sun reddens the hanging body.

Ravel and Ricardo Viñes read Aloysius Bertrand as students, along with Baudelaire, Poe and Mallarmé. A new edition in 1908 brought Ravel back to him. He wrote Gaspard, “three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity”, between May and 5 September, and Viñes gave the first performance on 9 January 1909.

Ravel writes the piano part on three staves. High and low chords move around the repeated B♭, which passes between the hands. Where the chords fill the keyboard, the B♭ continues to sound inside them.

A melody enters in the upper register above the repeated B♭. Ravel marks it un peu en dehors, mais sans expression, slightly brought out but without expression. The B♭ continues below it unchanged.

The piano texture fills out again in long, tied chords. The bell note, still B♭, sounds between them. Ravel’s instruction from the first page still applies: “without hurrying or slowing to the end”.

OE1FEU made this recording of the piece on a Bechstein D 282 concert grand in the Kaisersaal, and dated it 3 April 2020. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike licence.

On the last page the melodic fragments stop. Low bass notes are held under the repeated B♭, and the final bars drop to ppp. The B♭ continues until the last chord.

Three low notes rise in the piano. A soft repeated note sounds beneath a held chord, then stops. Ravel puts a fermata over the silence and marks it très long (very long).

The piano accelerates through rising figures to Vif. The hands move far apart and play bass notes and high chords at the same quick tempo. Sudden rests interrupt the passage.

Bertrand’s narrator hears Scarbo laughing in his alcove, then “grincer son ongle sur la soie des courtines de mon lit” — “his nail scraping the silk curtains of my bed”. The dwarf spins on one foot and rolls around the room like a witch’s dropped spindle.

The rising three-note figure of the opening returns in new octaves. Repeated notes and leaps carry much of the writing, and the small figures expand into large groups of chords.

The opening returns with its low three-note figure, held chord and repeated notes. This time the repeated notes lie lower in the bass. Ravel marks the soft pedal and writes almost nothing in the upper register of the piano.

In Bertrand’s poem the dwarf grows between the narrator and the moon “comme le clocher d’une cathédrale gothique” — “like the tower of a Gothic cathedral”. A little golden bell shakes on his pointed cap.

The piano plays ppp repeated chords, then a final run up the keyboard. Ravel marks the passage Sans ralentir, without slowing. Bertrand’s poem ends “et soudain il s’éteignait”, “and suddenly he went out”, like a candle.