Recollections Of My Lazy Childhood
(Mes Souvenirs d'Enfant
Paresseux)
an essay by Maurice Ravel
IN THE LAST FEW YEARS of his life, Ravel met the most tragic fate that can overtake anyone. He began to lose his mind. What made the disaster even more terrible was the fact that he had intervals of complete lucidity, during which he realized all too well what was happening to him. He died in Paris on the 28th of December, 1937.
Shortly before his death, during one of his lucid intervals, the composer wrote an essay that he called "Mes Souvenirs d'Enfant Paresseux" ("Recollections of My Lazy Childhood"), in which he discussed the various influences that shaped his career, gave a partial estimate of his own work, and voiced his own declaration of faith as an artist.
The article was published in the French newpaper Paris-Soir a week after Ravel's death. It has never been widely read here, was not reprinted. It appears here in my own translation.
Deems Taylor, 1938
For me [writes Ravel] there have never been several arts: Only one. Music, painting, and literature differ only as to their means of expression. So there are not various kinds of artists, only various kinds of specialists. The need for specialization becomes greater and greater as our field of knowledge broadens; for nothing, even in art, can be acquired without hard
study. Consequently it has become impossible for us to follow the example of Leonardo da Vinci, who managed to be an amateur of all the arts - even of painting!
As for myself, I was certainly born to be a musician; but if I am not a writer, it is simply because of the lack of the impulse to be one. I notice, for example, that when I read, my attitude is a professional one, as if I were a writer. The same with painting. I look at a picture, not with the eyes of a picture lover, but with those of a painter. This comes, perhaps, from the fact that as a child I was gifted in many ways; a fact that, needless to say, greatly worried my parents. It worried them all the more because my various artistic leanings were coupled with an extraordinary laziness. I never worked except "taxi" fashion; that is to say, in order to induce me to make the slightest exertion, I
had to be bribed.
In school, the only study that amused me somewhat was that of mathematics - to the great joy of my father, who was an engineer. My mother, who was a Basque and, like all the people of her country, a musician, would have liked to see me a little more zealous in my piano studies. But they merely bored me. However, the minute I took up the study of composition, everyone realized that my path lay in that direction. It even amused me! Which was not extraordinary, after all, since my interest in mathematics tended to bring me to music. I became interested to such a point that, inveterately lazy as I had been up to then, I began to work nights as well as in the daytime - a habit that, unfortunately for my health, has always persisted. My teacher, Charles Rene, started me working exercises in composition when I was no more than sixteen or seventeen; but it was not until three or four years later that I devoted myself to serious attempts at composition. I had made others before, but kept them carefully hidden. At the Conservatoire I was enrolled both as a composition student and as a pianist. In the latter capacity I was a member of the class of Camille de Beriot, who soon noticed that while I had definately the temperment of an artist, I had a minimum amount of zeal as an executant. Meanwhile I plunged ardently into the study
of harmony, counterpoint, and fugue, and not withstanding the fact that up to then I had written very little, I began to feel the itch to compose.
It was at that time that I began to make continual discoveries among the works of my favourite authors, feeling, meanwhile, that I had something to say in another direction. The influences that I felt at that time confirm me in my belief that there are not various kinds of arts. I did fall under the spell of one musician: Chabrier. Not yet has he been given the rank that he deserves, for modern French music all stems from him. He played, in music, the part Manet played in painting. And,
as a matter of fact, Chabrier owned some of the finest of Manet's paintings. The discovery of Debussy was less of a shock to me, in that I had already surrendered to Chabrier. And if I have been influenced by Debussy I have been so deliberately, and have always felt that I could escape him whenever I chose. In any case, I never completely accepted Debussy's principles, and I believe that that should be obvious to anyone. As a matter of fact, as regards musical technique, my teacher has certainly been Edgar Allan
Poe. To me the finest treatise on composition, certainly the one that has influenced me the most, is Poe's essay on the genious of a poem. Mallarme to the contrary, when he claims that the essay was written as a joke. I firmly believe that Poe wrote his poem, "The Raven," exactly as he says he did.
My passion for discovering new things, in painting, literature, and music, was not merely a phenomenon of my youth. I have always had it, especially about myself. It is this passion for discovery that has always driven me to try to renew my artistic self.
I never put down a work until I have made absolutely certain that there is nothing about it that I could not improve. The great thrill comes when I do put it down. After that I have no more interest in it. I have never tried to write in the style of Ravel. If I have found new ways of expressing myself, I leave it to others to discover them. If you want to convict me of inconsistency by hurling my earlier works at my head, well and good. I know that a conscious artist is always right.
I say "conscious," rather than "sincere"; for there is something humiliating about the latter term. A true artist cannot be sincere. The imaginary, the false, if you please, used to create an illusion, is mankind's one great superiority over the animals, and, when he undertakes to create a work of art, the artist's one point of superiority over the rest of mankind. Anyone who rests his claim on so-called spontaneity alone, is merely babbling.
In art, everything that is not significant must be rejected. Massenet, who was highly gifted, squandered himself through too much sincerity. He wrote down, literally, everything that came into his head; with the result that he spent his career saying the same thing over and over again. What he thought were discoveries were only reminiscences. As a matter of fact, artists seldom exercise enough self-mastery. After all, since we cannot say what we have to say without deliberately exploiting, and so translating, our own emotions, is it not better at least to be conscious of that fact, and realize that great art is simply a supreme form of pretense? The thing that people sometimes call my own lack of sentiment is simply my scrupulous care to avoid saying the obvious and unimportant.
As for the charge they level against me, of writing "only masterpieces" that is, of creating works that leave me nothing more to say in that particular idiom, I can only answer that, if that were true, I should be the first to know it and that there would be nothing left for me to do, except either to stop work, or to die. I say this, despite the example of the Lord, who took a long rest after having created the world... and who was so wrong!
first published ©1939 Garden City Publishing Co. Inc.
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