Gaspard de la nuit

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Excerpt from Ondine, the first movement. Some areas are so complex, Ravel notates the piece on three staves.

Gaspard de la Nuit: Trois Poèmes pour Piano d'apres Aloysius Bertrand is a piece for solo piano by Maurice Ravel. It has three movements, each based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand:

Ondine, an oneiric tale of a water fairy singing to seduce the observer and accompany her to visit her kingdom deep at the bottom of the lake in the triangle of water, fire and earth. This piece contains technical problems for the right hand, like wild cadenza figures, chordal motifs, and chromatic notes and thirds.
Le Gibet, an eerie work in which the observer wonders at the scene he's witnessing. "It is a bell tinting at the walls of a city under the horizon and the carcass of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun". This piece contains over 20 different styles and textures in terms of melody, however, the repeating B-flats must remain the same style, that is like sad tolling bells.
Scarbo, a small fiend — half goblin, half ghost — making pirouettes, disappearing and scaring a person in his home. Scarbo could stand for "scarabée", a beetle. Its uneven flight, hitting and scratching against the panels of the bed, casting a growing shadow under the moonlight creates a nightmarish scene for the observer lying in his bed. The technical difficulties of the piece are wild arpeggiated figures, crossing hands, and rapid repeating notes.

Siglind Bruhn, in Images and Ideas in French Piano Music (Pendragon Press, 1997)[1] traces the name Gaspard to a Persian original form, where the name denoted the man in charge of the royal treasures.

According to Bruhn:

Gaspard of the Night, or, the treasurer of the night…creates allusions to someone in charge of all that is jewel-like, dark, mysterious, perhaps even morose.”

The piece is famous for its incredible difficulty, and for good reason; Ravel indeed intended the Scarbo to be more difficult than Balakirev's Islamey. For this reason, it is popularly considered to be one of the most difficult solo piano pieces in the standard repertoire, being surpassed by only very few works, such as selected works by Charles-Valentin Alkan and Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. However, there exist many surpassingly technically challenging modern works, such as those by Iannis Xenakis, Michael Finnissy, and Frederic Rzewski.

The work was premiered on January 9, 1909 in Paris by Ricardo Viñes.

Ondine is reminiscent of the tinkling of the water in a stream, beautifully woven with cascades. This movement was intended to describe the water sprite in Bertrand's poem, attempting to lure men into her domain. In Le Gibet, a B flat octave is played 153 times, to signify the tolling bell for a man being hanged in the distance. Scarbo, with its repeated notes and two terrifying climaxes, is the transcendentally difficult movement out of the three. This movement gives an impression of the fiendish mischief committed by a ghostly imp during the night, fading in and out of vision while changing forms, which is portrayed in those difficult crescendos.

The composer commented on this piece: "I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me." [2]

The manuscript currently resides in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas