Review of Peter Kaminsky Ed., Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (University of Rochester Press, 2011)

[1] A monochromatic portrait graces the front cover of this recently released collection of essays on Ravel. With his gaze fixed at a point beyond the bottom left corner of the cover and an enigmatic smile a la Mona Lisa, the visage of Maurice Ravel is arresting. Its sense of mystique is heightened by the soft camera focus, which blurs all of the composer's features except for his left eye at the center of the portrait, and mono-directional lighting submerges half his face in shadow. Lack of clarity constrains the gaze of the reader, stimulating curiosity. We wonder what lies beyond the unreal perfection that the portrait allows us to see. Did Ravel's averted gaze forestall the communication of telling emotions? Did his smiling lips silence revealing remarks? This portrait of Ravel epitomizes a facade-it is an illusion that defends the privacy (one might even say secrecy) of the composer's inner being.[2] Kaminsky's volume promises to bring the reader beyond this facade. Its title proclaims that Ravel will be unmasked, and in the introduction, we learn that we shall understand Ravel's music beyond its surface aspects-beyond the pianistic virtuosity, sonorous extended tertian chords, and tonal cadences. We also learn that the essays in the volume will re-examine the "master tropes" of Ravel scholarship: Ravel as a classicist, a masked personality, an artisan, a virtuoso, as someone who was "artificial" or "cold," who engaged the aesthetics of imposture, and who was preoccupied with ornamentation (2). The reader is thus excited by the anticipation of discovering facets of Ravel that his public image has hitherto obscured, as well as the promise that we shall by such knowledge attain greater intimacy with a great musician.[3] "De-mystifying" Ravel, however, can also be perilous. Revealing the composer's "trade secrets," especially by deconstructing the technical means that underlie or help create the iridescent surface of his music, might reduce its ineffable beauty, which seems in no small part sustained by the opacity of the tropes that have dominated the composer's public image. Kaminsky's introduction assuages some of the reader's fears, however. He explains that the book will re-examine the tropes in Ravel scholarship by engaging rather than glossing over the "surface" aspects of his music. It will seek less to debunk those tropes than to ride the wave of a recent trend in Ravel scholarship, which is to "interpret these tropes in positive ways, as enabling imaginative and novel approaches to Ravel's musical language" (3).[4] By and large, the book fulfills its promise. Steven Huebner's opening essay considers literary sources of influence on Ravel's music, ranging from the openly acknowledged to the merely suggested. Huebner first considers Edgar Allan Poe, whose creative philosophy Ravel openly admired. He then discusses poets whom Ravel never cited, but with whom he frequently kept company: Leon-Paul Fargue and Tristan Klingsor. Finally, he makes a case for the influence of Henri de Regnier, who inscribed poetry on Ravel's autograph manuscripts for Jeux d'eau and Valses nobles et sentimentales. Huebner's essay is followed by another excellent one by Barbara L. Kelly that details how critics and biographers have portrayed Ravel's artistic persona. Kelly also provides glimpses into how the composer's own representations of himself do not entirely fit into-or, one might say, add dissonant overtones to-the aesthetic position in which he was posthumously placed.[5] Other essays in the volume engage in creative exegeses of Ravel's main works. The discussion of La Valse by Volker Helbing, for example, is memorable both for its identification of Ravel's oblique references to traditional (Straussian) waltz idioms as well as for its violent and dramatic language, which prompts me to suggest that "maelstrom" might be a more suitable metaphor for the form of the work than Helbing's chosen term "spiral."(1) Peter Kaminsky breaks new ground in his analysis of L'enfant et les sortileges by correlating elements of Ravel's formal and tonal design with psychoanalytic aspects of the opera's scenario. …