Rapsodie espagnole.

March 1908. Although the Hispanic vein had continued, more than thirty years after the premiere of Carmen, to delight Parisian and Monegasque audiences¹, the Spain dreamt by the young Ravel was quite unlike the fashionable espagnolades of the day. To the Iberian thematic material, to Baudelaire's "In the perfumed country the sun caresses"², which had accompanied the musician since 1895, and to the nocturnal impressions of his pianistic Habanera drawn from the Sites auriculaires, he offered the Sunday Parisian audience at the Théâtre du Châtelet, on 15 March 1908, his first large orchestral work — one that would become a cardinal reference.

Roland-Manuel, in 1928, noted:

In the Rapsodie espagnole there resounds for the first time that nervous, feline orchestra whose transparency and clarity are exemplary, whose joyful and dry sonority is like the very mark of Ravel. Roland-Manuel, 1928³

Setting aside the Ouverture Shéhérazade of 1899, "poorly received"⁴ by the audience, the bitter failure, in February 1907, of the orchestration of Une Barque sur l'océan⁵⁶, and leaving aside the sonorous setting of the voice-and-orchestra cycle Shéhérazade of 1903, this Suite in four movements for a very large orchestra was the first fully deployed manifesto of Ravel's orchestral mastery.

Of its genesis, very few elements remain: Arbie Orenstein⁷ nonetheless specifies the date of October 1907⁸, Ravel's "Spanish year", during which he was concurrently composing what would become L'Heure espagnole. That year does indeed appear as an epigraph on the Durand edition of the piano four-hand reduction (D. & F. 6999, first published in March 1908⁹).

As for the orchestration, thanks to the autograph dating that appears on the final bar of the orchestral manuscript¹⁰ of Feria: "January-February 1908"¹¹, we fully grasp the arduous character of the end of the winter of 1907-08, spent completing the orchestrated version of this Rapsodie without an h, expressed for instance in the words of the letter of 3 March 1908 sent to his colleague — and nonetheless friend — Ralph Vaughan Williams:

I've had a frightful amount of work these last few days. My Rapsodie espagnole has to be given at Colonne on 15 March. Only the 4^th part was orchestrated! Ravel to Vaughan Williams, 3 March 1908¹²

While the context of the composition of these Spanish scenes remains to be documented, the premiere was extensively commented upon by the musical press. Both admirers and detractors devoted no small amount of space in their columns to the review of the young musician's new opus — a young musician who had by then moved from successive failures to scandal, into new polemical shots. From this querelle des anciens et des modernes, which commented on the boos of the stalls and the bravos of the gallery, and on the composer's friends who nevertheless succeeded in encoring the spirited Malagueña, was reported, during the rehearsals and the concert¹³, the discontent of the orchestra's musicians in the face of the difficulties of the score, the "excess of mutes"¹⁴ in the strings, or the mocked effect of "progressive muting" in the brass¹⁵.

Ravel himself noted, in a letter of 25 March 1908¹⁶:

Like guinea fowl, the rehearsals, corrections, reductions, etc. grant me a brief respite. But I sense them returning, turbulent… it went well on Sunday, Colonne proved full of devotion and skill, and the audience full of warmth. The critics are more lukewarm, but that matters less. Ravel, 25 March 1908

We know that the first engraving of the Durand "Orchestral Score" (D. & F. 7128 — first printing of one hundred copies), together with the "Separate Parts" (D. & F. 7124), came off the presses of the Imprimerie Chaimbaud in July 1908, bearing the stamps of the engraver-artist Charles Douin.

In keeping with common practice — the publisher destroying whatever was not definitive — no trace remains of the initial, temporary material used for the work's premiere. Of this creation, under the baton of the venerable Édouard Colonne¹⁷, all that survives, directly on the manuscript, are strokes of blue or red pencil to aid performance, together with red-ink markings (from Colonne or from Durand's editorial manager?) intended to correct copying errors, recopyings, or modifications of the composer's indications — the recurrent case, seen in later Ravel manuscripts, of mutes for the solo strings while the string tutti plays without mutes…

Moreover, on this thirty-stave music paper, with Ravel's fine handwriting — rare in that it is in violet ink, of great graphic quality, which allows one to distinguish without hesitation, for example, all the subtleties of the string writing in its many divisions — one also sees the pencil indications made in preparation for engraving (counts of the number of staves per page, corrections, redistribution of the instruments of the "Batterie", etc.). On each fascicle that makes up the suite, on every opening page, as legal marking, appears the ink stamp of Durand & Fils¹⁸.

The Parisian association orchestras, which did so much for Ravel's fame, hold in their libraries materials that were acquired in the 1920s. That of the Orchestre Lamoureux shows a first use in 1926, with similar dates for the Orchestre Colonne, which may indicate a new printing of the material in the 1920s¹⁹. Among the corrections entered by hand in the separate parts appear, among others, the missing bars for the tuba or the double basses, erroneous substitutions between the second clarinet and the bass clarinet, or the reallocation of the elements of the "Batterie" so as to limit the number of players required for this plethoric ensemble.

Unfortunately, no explanation in the form of corrections remains regarding the famous figure 19 of Feria: with the thorny question of the metric correspondence between the episodes — differing between the piano version and the orchestra — and the strange case of the ritornello motif missing from the orchestra yet clearly present in the preparatory version for piano.