Concerto for the Left Hand.

It was in June 1937 that the Durand publishing house submitted for legal deposit the first engraving of the full score and separate parts of the Concerto for the Left Hand ("alone", according to the poetic pleonasm inscribed in ink by Ravel as the epigraph of the orchestral manuscript)¹. Yet it is indeed the date of 1930 that appears, in the composer's hand, on the manuscript carefully preserved at the Morgan Library in New York City, as well as on the Two-Piano Reduction, made by the composer himself (Private collection A. Taverne)². A tumultuous premiere in 1932 in Vienna and seven years of strange waiting, due to the exclusivity required by the commissioner, for an editorial process carried out during the final months of the composer's life, then afflicted with an incurable neurological illness.

"Ravel had already taken his leave of this earth and was living on another planet" Colette, on the composer's final months

According to Colette, Ravel "had already taken his leave of this earth and was living on another planet" and was suffering "the worst period of mental darkening"³. An irreversible clinical observation which presupposes that the composer did not take part, or only from a great distance, in the first official engraving and printing of his masterpiece.

The context of the premiere, given on 5 January 1932 in Vienna by its commissioner Paul Wittgenstein, went beyond the trivial journalistic legend which recounted a Ravel furious to discover, during the concert, all the textual modifications knowingly introduced, in addition to the wrong notes, by the one-armed pianist without any authorisation from the composer. Commentators have mentioned the two men as estranged while omitting to specify that they met again, on at least one occasion, in Paris, at the French premiere of the work, on 17 January 1933, at the Salle Pleyel. There Ravel conducted the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris — prepared by Roger Désormière. A key date in the historiography of the work which, curiously, is passed over in silence, even by highly serious musicological works, in favour of the concert given in March 1937 by Jacques Février and Charles Münch (for the first time, therefore, on the newly issued Durand material).

To the essential question of which scores were used for the premiere of the work, it is very little known that Wittgenstein and his Viennese agent Georg Kugel had an orchestral score and its material engraved in 1931 at their own expense, and that this score, unofficial and never deposited (Ravel had signed an exclusivity contract with Durand in 1929), travelled from orchestra to orchestra for many years, prior to the first Durand engraving and the end of the commissioner's exclusive performance rights. A few copies of this score "als Manuskript gedruckt", 87 pages, red cover, in-8° format, still survive: at the British Library and, above all — an essential object — Roger Désormière's annotated copy, kept in Paris at the Musée de la Musique (Philharmonie de Paris)⁴.

This unofficial score, never deposited, travelled from orchestra to orchestra for many years. On the 1931 Viennese engraving

The study of this initial engraving, based on the composer's manuscript, piously preserved by Désormière, and printed from a manuscript engraving made by a Germanic copyist (one can perceive a few Gothic characters and a curious mixture of French and German abbreviations) reveals extremely valuable indications of corrections to wrong notes and other modifications of agogics or phrasing. A 1930 proof, according to Arbie Orenstein's dating⁵, corrected by the composer alongside his faithful Lucien Garban, also sheds precious light on the original text.

A most moving and unique fact concerning the legacy of the Ravelian corpus: in addition to the many press articles reporting on the performance, from the Paris premiere of 17 January 1933 there remain one minute and fifty seconds of "sonorised" images, for the "Actualités Pathé", of a rehearsal filmed at the Salle Pleyel, according to the intertitle card, of the Concerto for the Left Hand alone⁶. The opportunity to observe the strange modifications of the pianistic text by the creator (still confirmed by the radio recording of the Amsterdam concert of 1936 under the direction of Bruno Walter⁷), the size and layout of the orchestra which, during this rehearsal, was conducted by Désormière.

Ravel took the podium only for the concert itself "with the composure that was customary for him whenever the baton fell to his hand", according to the account of Alfred Bruneau⁸.