People Will Talk

In today’s voyeuristic society it’s easy to get people’s attention by showing them the seamy side of life. Reality-based television is the rage, its “stars” people you really wouldn’t want to have as your friends, whose only claim to fame--of the 15-minute variety--is that they survived. Or didn’t.

Who cares?

The unfortunate consequence of our culture of voyeurism is that other forms of creepy sensationalism are spreading beyond journalism, as shown by the tendency of those with more serious pursuits to think that an expose is the same thing as biography or that conjecture and supposition carry the same weight as fact. Such people can be forgiven, perhaps, if their job is to write for one of the supermarket tabloids (whose readers apparently believe those tall tales anyway), but not if they’re trying to say something meaningful about the life and work of a well-known, historically significant creative artist. Alas, that hasn’t stopped a lot of them from giving hearsay their best shot and embracing the “Entertainment Tonight” approach to biography.

In music, even at the highest academic level, there’s been a lot of this sort of thing during the last decade, much of it centering on sex. A few years ago, Schubert was outed, and recently there was a big brouhaha about Tchaikovsky, who was certainly gay. But was he deeply ashamed of it and tormented by feelings of guilt and fear, as Anthony Holden and others suggest, or not particularly preoccupied by the matter, as Alexander Poznansky seems to think? Holden rightly quotes Tchaikovsky’s own words on the subject on the flyleaf of his book: “The notion that one day people will try to probe into the private world of my thoughts and feelings, into everything that I have so carefully hidden throughout my life . . . is very sad and unpleasant.”

Well, this is that day. Several classical record labels have put out CDs with music on them by known gay and presumed gay composers, identified as such simply because it seems like a neat thing to point out. And a chorus of writers and publishers has risen in unison to answer Tchaikovsky’s plaint with a short, brutal refrain: “OK, everybody in the pool.”

Benjamin Ivry’s “Maurice Ravel: A Life” is the latest in a long parade of portraits that could easily have been titled “The Secret Lives of Gay Composers.” Ivry comes to the task with a background in art history and credits as a journalist, poet and translator. His previous biographical efforts have focused on Arthur Rimbaud and Francis Poulenc. He starts out by asserting that Ravel’s sexuality was “a major motivation for his art.” That’s such a blanket statement (and so lacking in any kind of specificity) that it’s almost impossible to confirm or challenge. It’s about as meaningful as saying that Ravel’s sexuality was a major motivation for his breathing. A little further on, Ivry gets more precise: “That Ravel was a very secretive gay man is the thesis adopted by this book.” Finally, climbing all the way out on his limb, he proposes: “By frankly addressing the question of his homosexuality, this book aims, more than merely to drag Ravel from his posthumous closet, to achieve a closer understanding of his motivations and works, along with a more accurate image of the man.”

Unfortunately, that’s not what Ivry gives us. The image of Ravel that emerges from the pages of this book is that of a mere dandy without a serious thought in his head who at some point turns into a childlike, reclusive old queen without a serious thought in his head. I doubt very much that’s what Ivry intended, but by parroting so much of what Ravel’s gay friends and acquaintances had to say about him over the years, by giving every rumor credence and filtering even the tiniest detail through the lens of “sexuality,” that’s what he does. Many of Ravel’s contemporaries led openly gay lives; Ravel did not. He was secretive in everything, in all of his emotions . . . perhaps, to be sure, because homosexuality dominated the picture. But there is no definitive, first-hand testimony that he ever had a homosexual encounter, let alone a liaison, with anyone. His most important relationship, involving the deepest emotional attachment of his life, was the one he had with his mother.

So Ivry spends a lot of time jumping to conclusions based on farfetched suppositions and vague, third-party testimony. He makes an Olympian leap when he suggests that Ravel dedicated the song “l’Indifferent,” from the cycle “Sheherazade” (1903), to Emma Bardac “perhaps as an explanation of his indifference to her sexual advances.” This because Leon Leclere (a.k.a. Tristan Klingsor), the author of the words to that song, later said that a nameless woman who was talented and Jewish had had designs on the composer. It’s true that Bardac had a thing for composers. During the 1890s she was the mistress of Gabriel Faure, Ravel’s teacher at the Paris Conservatory. And, after meeting Debussy in 1903, she quickly lured him away from his wife, eventually becoming the second Mme. Debussy. Bardac was also a singer--reason enough, it would seem, for Ravel to dedicate a song to her, especially since she and he moved in the same circles.

About the music--the real reason we should be interested in Ravel--Ivry says nothing new and nothing particularly penetrating. Much of the time he’s on target with his descriptions, but occasionally he wanders off into nebulous regions where the inclination to poetry seems to get the better of him. About the “Menuet antique” he says: “A pounding, pulsing rhythm of Pan’s dance is given to harmonies that sound tantalizingly like those of Bach’s ‘Chaconne.’ ” Describing the “Malaguen~a” movement of the “Rapsodie espagnole,” he comments that “wild castanets and drum alternate inexorably.” And then there’s this: “ ‘Feria’ is like music heard from a passing ocean liner, when suddenly the music swerves closer to the listener.” What on earth does that mean?

There are also some embarrassing errors of fact. Robert Heger, who conducted at the 1931 premiere of Ravel’s “Concerto pour la main gauche,” was not primarily an “operetta composer” as Ivry describes him, but a veteran opera conductor who composed serious music, including real operas, on the side. Ivry (who elsewhere styles himself a “music appreciator” rather than a music critic) appears to have gotten Heger confused with Robert Stolz, who was an operetta composer. Elsewhere, Prokofiev is described in 1913 as being a “Soviet composer,” which he assuredly was not.

On the whole, the most perceptive things in Ivry’s book are the comments of others, including Lennox Berkeley, Aaron Copland, Samuel Chotzinoff, Charles Du Bos and Helene Jourdan-Morhange, who were not only keen observers of human nature but possessed powerful musical minds as well. Ivry is to be commended for including them. He relies heavily on quotes from a variety of other witnesses as well, many of which can be found, at greater length, in Roger Nichols’ “Ravel Remembered” (Faber & Faber).

The world still needs a truly thorough, and thoughtful, investigation of Ravel’s life and works. Ivry’s book is gossip seeking to elevate itself to the level of serious biographical and musicological discourse.