Ravel enjoyed spending summers in his Basque homeland. He arrived at St. Jean-de-Luz in the summer of 1913, fresh from the scandalous world premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris, at which he had been abused by an indignant upper crust lady in the audience when he requested that she stop shouting her disapproval of Stravinsky’s score. The Basque country must have seemed exceptionally peaceful after such a hullaballoo, and Ravel found it almost impossible to tear himself away. He devoted himself to the composition of a piano trio, his first new piece of pure chamber music since the String Quartet of a decade earlier (though he had been contemplating the Trio since 1908), and, after the briefest possible return to Paris in the winter, he finished the first movement by the end of March.

Completion of the new work was interrupted by Ravel’s fruitless attempt to compose a piano concerto based on Basque themes. Once he had gotten bogged down with the concerto, he seemed to have difficulty in returning to the Trio and even told a friend that he was getting disgusted with the piece. The impetus to finish the work came when Germany declared war on France in August. Composition became the means by which Ravel sought oblivion from the horrors that were inevitable.

Ravel had tried to offer his services to his country by joining the infantry but was rejected for being two kilos under the minimum weight. Always very sensitive about his small size, Ravel no doubt took the authorities’ assurance that he was serving France by writing music as a patronizing rejection, and he wrote to a friend, “So as not to think of all this, I am working—yes, working with the sureness and lucidity of a madman.” So it was that in just under four weeks, by August 29, 1914, he had completed the entire score of the Trio. (Soon afterward, he was accepted into the Air Force, where he was put in charge of a convoy and composed virtually nothing else until his discharge in 1917.)

For all the haste with which it was finished, and despite Ravel’s distraught mind during the composition of the last part, the Trio remains a remarkably solid, well shaped work, one of the composer’s most serious large scale pieces (and it most assuredly is a large scale work, despite the fact that it is only for three instruments and not for an orchestra).

The opening Modéré presents a theme written in 8/8 time with the melody consistently disposed into a 3+2+3 pattern that Ravel identified as “Basque in color.” The second theme is a lyrical diatonic melody first presented in the violin and briefly imitated by the cello. These two themes and a tense connecting passage serve as the major ideas of the movement, building with increasing pace and intensity to a solid climax followed by a gradual descent to a gentle close.

The heading for the second movement, Pantoum, refers to a verse form borrowed by such French Romantic poets as Victor Hugo from Malayan poetry. What connection it has with Ravel’s music is a mystery. The movement serves, in any case, as the scherzo of the work, playing off a rhythmic string figure colored by the insertion of pizzicatos throughout and a simple legato theme that serves as the foil to the rhythmic motive.

As indicated by its heading, the Passacaille derives its shape from the Baroque form, more frequently labeled by its Italian name passacaglia, in which an ostinato melody or harmonic progression is repeated over and over as the skeleton background for a set of variations. Ravel’s approach to the form is, not surprisingly, a good deal freer than that of those Baroque composers who employed it, but the pattern is there to provide the framework for this wonderfully tranquil movement.

By contrast the Animé of the finale offers gorgeous splashes of instrumental color in a masterly display of brilliant writing for each of the instruments—long trills in the strings serving as a foil for dense chords in the piano in a triumphant close. —© S. L.