Maurice Ravel's father, Joseph, was affectionate, with a highly developed love for music and culture, and he did not The pianist Robert Casadesus recalled that his first sight of Ravel, in theĮarly years of the century, was at a concert, tenderly holding the arm of his aged mother, helping her to her seat.įrench biographers commonly assert that the fathers of great men were also great. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her blasphemies and obscure past, Ravel was a confirmed mama's boy. When Ravel enlisted in the army during World War I, he described his mother as a "monster" who wanted to hold onto her sons and not let them enlist to fight for their country. That she'd rather "be in hell with her family than in heaven all alone." As a widow, she was urged by a woman friend in Saint-Jean-de-Luz to come to church and pray Marie said Not get over it." And when Seroff asked Ravel's brother, Edouard, for information about his mother's early years, Edouard said that he "saw no reason why should talk about their mother in aīook about his brother." In any case, Ravel's mother was a violent agnostic, atypical of her time and place. Ravel was so horrified that for a long time he could Or a secret life as a "gypsy or even a smuggler": "A woman who wanted to hurt the composer," he says, "once told him his mother's true age. A romanticizing biographer, Victor Seroff, suggested that Marie might have had children before she met and married Joseph Ravel,
She was apparently born in the Basque region and spent some time in Spain, where she met Ravel's father.īiographers found that locals of Saint-Jean-de-Luz did nor recall her being born there, and Manuel de Falla praised her knowledge of Spanish, which indicates that he did not take her to be a natural speaker of the language.īut she would sing Spanish folk songs to Maurice, and these were a later inspiration for his work.īasque and Spanish women usually married young, but Marie apparently did not. The first thirty-five years of the life of his mother, Marie Delouart, are a near-total blank. Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, a small village in the Basque region of France, separated from the city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz by
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