The famous musical triptych Gaspard de la Nuit, whose original and complete title is Gaspard de la Nuit: Trois Poèmes pour Piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand, is a work for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel in 1908. It is inspired by a collection of prose poems published in 1842 – one year after the death of its author, the French romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand –, a work in which the poet pours a very personal, magical and phantasmagoric impression of the Middle Ages.
Gaspard, the treasurer of the night
The name "Gaspard", derived from its original Persian form, denotes the keeper of the royal treasure. So, in a very free translation of the title of the piece and the collection of poems, it could be translated into English as "the man in charge of the treasures of the night", which is not so far from the opinion of the contemporary German musicologist and pianist Siglind Brum, for whom "Gaspard de la Nuit" alludes to the keeper of the precious, the obscure and the mysterious.
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| Ondine, by Arthur Rackman, 1909. |
Three of Bertrand's six poems were translated into music by Ravel to form this sort of "sonata" in three movements, which he named after the poems chosen: Ondine, Le Gibet and Scarbo, the names of three characters from this 19th-century work of fantastic literature, if we agree that "the gallows" (le gibet) is also one of them.
The last movement, Scarbo, is the one that has made this piece famous because of its enormous technical demands. It appears that Ravel achieved his purpose: to write a more difficult work than Balakirev's Islamey, also famous for its difficulty.
The rendition, outstanding, is by the French pianist Helene Tysman.
The three movements, with commentary, follow the video.
Ondine. It is the most colorful and sensual movement. In the poem, Ondine is a mermaid who sings to a man, to whom she describes her fantastic world trying to seduce him. But the man is married, and to a "mortal". When he tells Ondine this, the mermaid cries and laughs, then disappears as quickly as she appeared. On the piano, the performer must create an atmosphere that is both soft and bright, with subtle differences in the "touch" for water that ripples, rushes, shimmers or leaps.
Le Gibet (7:29) A picture of desolation and misery. The solitary corpse of a man hanging from a gallows (le gibet) stands out on the horizon. The sound of bells coming from within the walls of a distant city creates a sepulchral atmosphere of hopeless resignation. The movement is made up of three relentlessly repeated motifs: a B flat in ostinato (the bells), a melodic chord progression, and a second cantabile melody. "You don't have to be afraid that it sounds monotonous," said one pianist; in fact, monotony is an integral part of the movement.
Scarbo (13:08) The narrator describes his fear of Scarbo, an evil goblin who comes in the middle of the night, sometimes to dance but sometimes he hides and only makes noises, only to reappear suddenly. In the end, when the madness becomes unbearable, Scarbo disappears. With its repeated notes and two terrifying climaxes, this is the highest point in technical difficulty of the three movements. Difficulties include repeated notes in both hands and double-note scales of major seconds in the right hand. The movement ends without fuss, like a disappearing gnome.
