Absolutely. Funnily enough, in a panel discussion years ago I was asked which piece of music I wish had been written but hadn't been (if you follow me). I suggested a second opera by Debussy - quite the most mothwatering prospect I could imagine then, and now. Those implications remained just that in Pelleas - to think what he might have produced had he written another in, say, 1912 or so (before his illness and the late-period style set in)! 

Hmmm. 

Yes, well, I don't think Ravel's exactly a conservative either, but I guess you're right that once certain distinctions are established the preference is a matter of personal orientation (though I suppose there must be some who swing both ways, as it were). Even though there are lots of pieces by Ravel that I like very much, if you asked me which of the two composers I prefer I'd always say Debussy, and that still seems like the right answer even though there are pieces by him that don't actually do very much for me and pieces by Ravel - the two piano concertos, La Valse, the two operas, some (but not much) of the piano music - that do a lot. I guess I like the idea of Debussy better.

Surprised no one's commented on Ravel's artificiality, which seems to shadow even the darkness that, as someone else said, often shadows his work. I can't think of many composers who make such an effort to evoke emotional darkness and at the same time to present it with a level of emotional remove - maybe this is why some people find La Valse so unconvincing: for me it's not unconvincing at all, it's just a very strange emotional colour.

Both composers are well-placed in Div 1 (or Premiership, as I believe it is now known) of the Chichivache Classical Composers League.

Not having any musical training, I cannot follow the musical arguments you put forward - although possibly I hear them without recognising the fact.

Last year R3 broadcast a series of recitals of the complete works for solo piano by Ravel and Debussy, played by Artur Pizarro. I turned off the phone and listened to every concert. One of the greatest musical pleasures of my life - exquisite, reflective, sensitive, finely-drawn music. I rushed out and bought the complete Debussy, I must get the Ravel too. Again, at a recent concert in Marlborough -

Debussy - sonata for cello and piano 
Fauré - 3 nocturnes for piano solo:
  No 1 in E flat minor
  No 4 in E flat major
  No 6 in D flat major
Debussy - sonata for violin and piano 
Ravel - piano trio

A magical evening. You can argue about who is greater if you like. I'm more than happy to lump them both together, and enjoy the results q;o)

Surely....

"'Museek goes like zis, and wizin zat I have ziss accent...."

etc

Tommo

PS  I like your way of explaining it though, and get your gist

I'm not sure if I quite see either composer in such a way. Debussy is the more elusive - it's not difficult to see the roots of aspects of his music both in Wagner and simultaneously a reaction against Wagner, then also a quest to find radical alternatives to Germanic modes of thematic and harmonic development (though some suggest that Schumann's more fragmentary utterances are an important precedent for some of Debussy's music). But all that notwithstanding, where did this musical language come from? All this use of parallel harmonies*, extremely radically new approaches to the use of timbre as a structural determinant (in very different ways to earlier spectacular orchestrators and colourists such as Berlioz or Wagner), the use of quasi-cinematic perspective to create interrelationships between different categories of material, and so on? Surely one of the most innovative composers of all time.

I've given up on trying to establish hierarchies between the two (though I suppose if pushed I'd opt for Debussy); whatever, the roots of Ravel's music and what it seems to be doing, seem more easily comprehensible. If Debussy sought a genuine alternative (though one which overlaps) to later Germanic romanticism, Ravel in his pre-war works inhabits some of that world but with a degree of objective detachment. I don't really see this as emotional distance in the way that t-i-n suggests (actually I find it extraordinarily emotionally intimate music), more of a fascination in the grotesque which is obtained through a certain objectification (Gaspard as a type of parody of romanticism, for example). There is certainly a tendency towards exoticism in pre-war Ravel (as there is in Debussy), perhaps somewhat less deeply absorbed in Ravel (as for example in Alborada del Gracioso, the Rhapsodie Espagnole, the Piano Trio, Shehérézade or Ma Mère l'Oye), yet the intricacy of the harmonic and other language he both brings to these types of materials and develops out of them makes this far from tokenistic. But in the String Quartet, Valses nobles et sentimentales in particular there is a foreshadowing of the more radical side of Ravel that is developed in the war and post-war years. As powerfully as with any composer, I have the sense of pushing aspects of 'tradition' to their very extremes, to breaking point, sometimes cataclysmically. The most obvious piece to do this (and perhaps the greatest of all Ravel's works) is La Valse, but something of this exists in those earlier pieces as well (and the influence of Fauré, Ravel's teacher, seems significant in this respect, actually, though Fauré developed this aspect of his work most significantly at a similar time to Ravel). Few composers could believe in music and tradition in quite the same way after World War One; Ravel portrays the decay of the all certainties, the old culture, with more than a little feeling of profound regret, in Le Tombeau de Couperin and even more so in the Left Hand Concerto, and the Duo for Violin and Cello. But on the other hand, I'm not sure how to fit works like the Les Enfants et les Sortiléges, Boléro or the G major Piano Concerto into this picture; they seem to occupy a very different world indeed. That side of Ravel, using classical structures with a modern level of harmonic sophistication (though with less of the sense of crisis as in the Quartet or some other works) is most powerfully expressed in the joyous Violin Sonata.

So I suppose the difference I see between the two has to do with their differing relationships to 'tradition', Debussy to some extent creating a new tradition of his own, Ravel making his oblique relationship to it rather more explicit. The psychological and emotional complexity seems more inwardly directed in Ravel, whilst Debussy is more of a visionary. Both incredible composers.

* I sometimes wonder the extent of Debussy's knowledge of organum and the like in this respect? Considering he often uses parallel harmonies to depict something ancient or timeless.

Couldn't agree more, but:


Which British composers do you think are like that?