Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:53:46.599Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ravel's Tzigane: Artful Mask or Kitsch?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2019

STEVEN HUEBNER Open the ORCID record for STEVEN HUEBNER [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Like all of Maurice Ravel's compositions, the virtuosic violin piece Tzigane, styled rapsodie de concert by the composer, rapidly became a mainstay of the concert repertory following its premiere with piano by the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi in April 1924 in London (her premiere of the orchestral version occurred in Paris on 30 November 1924 with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Colonne Orchestra). Yet, despite its popularity, no critic has included it among Ravel's major works. Reflections on Tzigane in the secondary musicological literature are very few indeed, which is somewhat surprising in the context of a new explosion of interest in Ravel. In his recent biography, Roger Nichols avers that ‘probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music’. Robert Orledge noted in 2000 that it ‘has never been among Ravel's most successful works’, a remark surely meant as a critique of the composition rather than a statement about its popularity with performers, which has been considerable. Alexis Roland-Manuel, a close friend of the composer, did not even discuss the piece in his biography of 1938. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, another close friend and consultant about the virtuoso figuration in Tzigane, confessed almost apologetically in her book on Ravel that ‘this rhapsodic piece is perhaps the only one in Ravel's oeuvre where I cannot locate – hidden in the intricacies of its tours de force – Ravel's characteristic flavour: in it, music has surrendered too much place to instrumental acrobatics’. In other words, she appears to suggest that Tzigane is a mere showpiece where Ravel's personal style has been eclipsed by fireworks, with an implicit criticism of pandering to market. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti spoke of the ‘resistance I always felt towards this brilliant and (to my mind) synthetically produced pastiche of Ravel's’. At the time of the premiere, the young Henri Sauguet told Francis Poulenc that ‘the aesthetic informing these pages is so antiquated that I am astonished anyone can still believe in it’.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 63 - 86
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anonymous. Review of Tzigane. The Times, 24 April 1924.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellman, Jonathan. The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Calinescu, Matei. ‘Kitsch’, in Five Faces of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. 229–31.Google Scholar
Chowrimootoo, Christopher. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Über musikalischen Kitsch’, in Studien der Trivialmusik des 19 Jahrhunderts, ed. Dahlhaus, Carl. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1967. 63–9.Google Scholar
Davies, Hugh. ‘Maurice Ravel and the Luthéal’. Experimental Musical Instruments 4 (1988), 11–14.Google Scholar
Demarquez, Suzanne. ‘Évolution’. Le Courrier musical, 15 March 1932.Google Scholar
Dorfles, Gillo. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Universe Books, 1969.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work, trans. Cancogni, Anna. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Newman, Channa and Doubinsky, Claude. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Heisler, Wayne Jr. ‘Kitsch and the Ballet Schlagobers’. The Opera Quarterly 22 (2007), 38–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holloway, Robin. On Music: Essays and Diversions 1963–2003. Brinkworth, Wilts: Claridge Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Hooker, Lynn M. ‘From Gypsies to Peasants’, in Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 96–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huebner, Steven. ‘Ravel's Perfection’, in Ravel Studies, ed. Mawer, Deborah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 9–30.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Ivry, Benjamin. Maurice Ravel: A Life. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000.Google Scholar
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Ravel, ed. Nectoux, Jean-Michel. Paris: Seuil, 1995.Google Scholar
Jean-Aubry, Georges. ‘Maurice Ravel on his New Works’. Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 1924.Google Scholar
Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène. Ravel et nous. Genève: Éditions du milieu du monde, 1945.Google Scholar
Konchar Farr, Cecilia and Perrin, Tom. Inventing the Middlebrow. Post45, 7 January 2016. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/07/introduction-inventing-the-middlebrow/ (accessed 17 September 2019).Google Scholar
Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. ‘Nature and Exile: Adorno, Mahler and the Appropriation of Kitsch’, in Sound Judgment: Selected Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 247–62.Google Scholar
Loya, Shay. Liszt's Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gyspy Tradition. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Mahler-Werfel, Alma. Mein Leben. Frankfurt: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1974.Google Scholar
Malvinni, David. The Gypsy Caravan: From Real Roma to Imaginary Gypsies in Western Music and Film. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marnat, Marcel. Ravel. Paris: Fayard, 1986.Google Scholar
Mawer, Deborah. ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, Deborah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 1–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mouchard, Laure. ‘Présences musicales tziganes à Paris entre 1867 et 1889: un exotisme bien parisien’, in Migration artistique et identité: Paris, 1870–1940, ed. Huebner, Steven and Lazzaro, Federico. forthcoming.Google Scholar
Nichols, Roger. Ravel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Orledge, Robert. ‘Evocations of Exoticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, Deborah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prunières, Henry. Review of Tzigane. La Revue musicale, 1 November 1924.Google Scholar
Puri, Michael. ‘Memory, Pastiche, and Aestheticism in Ravel and Proust’, in Ravel Studies, ed. Mawer, Deborah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 56–73.Google Scholar
Ravel, Maurice. Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Orenstein, Arbie. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.Google Scholar
Roland-Manuel., ‘Maurice Ravel ou l'esthétique de l'imposture’. La Revue musicale 6 (April 1925), 16–21.Google Scholar
Roland-Manuel., À la Gloire de Ravel. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1938.Google Scholar
Roland-Manuel., Ravel. Paris: Nouvelle revue critique, 1938.Google Scholar
Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Scruton, Roger. ‘A Fine Line Between Art and Kitsch’. Forbes, 21 February 2014. www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/02/21/a-fine-line-between-art-and-kitsch/#3ef7a80b18e4 (accessed 25 October 2018).Google Scholar
Solomon, Robert C. ‘On Kitsch and Sentimentality’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991). 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szigeti, Joseph. With Strings Attached: Reminiscences and Reflections. New York: A. Knopf, 1947.Google Scholar
Whitesell, Lloyd. ‘Ravel's Way’, in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Fuller, Sophie and Whitesell, Lloyd. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 49–78.Google Scholar
Whitesell, Lloyd. ‘Erotic Ambiguity in Ravel's Music’, in Ravel Studies, ed. Mawer, Deborah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 74–91.Google Scholar