Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor had been gestating for at least six years before he finally sat down to write the work over the summer of 1914. At first, progress was slow, but when war was declared in August, Ravel put on a burst of speed to finish the piece so that he could he could do his patriotic duty and enlist in the French army. He was rejected from the infantry and the air force on account of his diminutive size and precarious health, but he learned to drive a truck and cared for the wounded at Verdun on the Western Front.
We’ll hear Ravel’s Piano Trio on this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” alongside a couple of other trios by composers of the next generation – Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud – both of whom had complex reactions to Ravel’s music.
Poulenc and Milhaud together formed one-third of Les Six, that collective of French composers who rose to prominence in Paris in the late ‘teens and 1920s. Each had his or her own distinctive style – the group’s other members included Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey – but together they displayed a united front in resistance to the so-called Impressionists (Debussy and Ravel) and most of all Richard Wagner. Any trace of Wagnerian portentousness would be blown out between the tent flaps, as the spirit of the circus, café and cabaret came to dominate a new aesthetic.
You’ll hear it embodied in Poulenc’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano (1926), which begins very somberly indeed, before taking off with irrepressible joie de vivre. The central movement is both elegant and wistful in a manner characteristic of this composer, and the cheeky finale is presented with an ironic smile.
Interestingly, Milhaud’s Suite for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1936) revisits material from incidental music he composed for Jean Anouilh’s play “Le Voyageur sans bagages” (“The Traveler without Luggage”), about an amnesiac World War I soldier. The piece falls into four movements: “Ouverture;” “Divertissement;” “Jeu;” and “Introduction et Final.” As the titles suggest, much of the music is sassy and full of play, and it is to be wondered what Ravel, a veteran of the Great War would have thought of it.
I hope you’ll join me for a trio of French trios, performed by musicians of the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical NetworkWWFM The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
PHOTO: Ravel in uniform
