Sémiramis.

The French language, drawing on Greek myths, evokes something that "hangs by a thread." In the case of this Babylonian legend set to music by Ravel, one might say that Sémiramis hangs by a single line. For — most surprisingly — without the handwritten mention found in the diary of the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes (1875–1943), the composer's closest childhood friend, we would be utterly unable to establish the historiography of this juvenile score, preserved as a manuscript in Ravel's home until its acquisition in June 2000 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Viñes, blessed with a photographic memory, carefully recorded his daily activities in his notebook. On April 7, 1902, he reported that in the morning he had gone to the Paris Conservatoire to hear Ravel's Cantata, Sémiramis, which the orchestra conducted by Taffanel had studied, rehearsed and performed. He goes on to specify that the composer's family, Professor Gabriel Fauré, and fellow students attended the reading.

A researcher's first instinct in looking for traces and commentary about this event is to rush to the archives of the abundant artistic press of the time. Excitement soon gives way to frustration: absolutely nothing remains of this performance at the Conservatoire in the newspapers. And yet Ravel was already known in Paris; Viñes, two days earlier, had premiered Jeux d'eau for piano, and journalists did indeed cover that pianistic debut…

The Bibliothèque nationale in Paris preserves the diary of conductor Paul Taffanel (1844–1908). On the page for the year "1902," there is no trace, no mention of Ravel's Sémiramis. Nothing appears, either, in the Conservatoire archives deposited at the Archives nationales. Arbie Orenstein, in 1975, in his cardinal work on Ravel, was the first to mention this early opus regarded as a student exercise.

Faced with this near-total void surrounding the existence of the work, we return to Viñes's words, which clearly specify: "in the morning." What public concert takes place on a weekday morning within the classrooms of a Conservatoire? Rather than a public performance, it now seems logical that these pages — composed on a date impossible to determine today, on the antique subject imposed by the 1900 Prix de Rome competition — were given during orchestra class, as a kind of laboratory experiment: one of the rare private moments during which a young composer could hear his work performed by an orchestra.

It is therefore through the fortunate initiative of the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, one hundred and twenty-three years later, that Sémiramis finally leaves the narrow walls of a Conservatoire classroom to reach those of a true concert hall. An opportunity to sample the orchestral talents of a very young composer then bewitched by the oriental hues of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Balakirev.

On June 26, 2000, a public sale took place gathering various manuscripts and early works of Maurice Ravel from the archives of his house "le Belvédère" in Montfort-l'Amaury. Among harmony exercises and sketches, one work drew particular attention: the setting to music by the twenty-seven-year-old composer of the opening of a cantata, Sémiramis, on a libretto imposed for the 1900 Prix de Rome competition.

The most seasoned connoisseurs of this institution's history will be surprised. If Ravel did indeed enter the Prix de Rome for the first time that year, his elimination in the preliminary rounds did not open the doors of the château de Compiègne to him — the place where finalist candidates were then required to compose, in one month, a cantata on an unpublished libretto. It was thus in June 1900 that Florent Schmitt's Sémiramis was crowned.

A stormy companionship was then to bind Ravel to the Prix de Rome, ultimately leading to a famous episode in the history of French music, "the Ravel affair" — a resounding media event in which pro-Ravel supporters cried scandal following Ravel's fifth and final failure at this prestigious academic competition. A factual reading of the facts today allows one to dismantle the legend of the great injustice supposedly suffered by this thirty-year-old composer, already very much in the public eye, at the hands of an aging, sclerotic jury unresponsive to his talent.

Ravel in fact concluded his preparatory fugue that year with an aberrant unresolved major seventh chord — a bold gesture, a snub to a competition increasingly criticized for its disconnect from the modernity of contemporary musical creation.

Although criticized in its essence — a "false and harmful" genre, as Gabriel Fauré, Ravel's composition teacher, would say — the Rome cantata became over the years a fully-fledged exercise, codified and carrying expectations for which every young composer had to prepare in order to lay claim to the prestigious title of Grand Prix de Rome. Good preparation for the competition indeed required arriving at the château de Compiègne with musical ideas that could be reused — all the more easily as the subjects of the librettos, almost always drawn exclusively from antique or oriental inspirations, favored the use of picturesque elements readily reusable. One can moreover observe considerable self-quotation in the cantatas Ravel composed in the years when he reached the final round known as the "definitive competition."

It is therefore on the principle of a past examination paper that Ravel composed, in 1902, a piece of music on a libretto imposed two years earlier.

Ravel's Sémiramis nonetheless remains a very fine concert work that shows us a young composer already in full command of his means, and whose pedagogical aim probably makes its models and inspirations more conspicuous: one recognizes in filigree the orchestra of Rimsky-Korsakov, and one may be struck by a harmonic language that summons at times Franck and Debussy, while the specter of Wagner is at moments not far off.

Ultimately — and this is the most important point — one already glimpses what would soon become Ravel's brilliant, distinctive signature. One then listens to this student work while forgiving the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts for having been so unjust to Ravel at the Prix de Rome: posterity has avenged him.