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\u2018My only mistress is music.\u2019 Ravel\u2019s declaration of absolute fidelity to his art must be a paramount consideration in any discussion of any aspect of his creativity or his personality \u2013 not just his sexuality, favourite subject for speculation though that is.<\/p>
Music was Ravel’s life, his passion, and nothing would induce him to sell it short by producing a score of less than complete integrity. There is scarcely one Ravel work that is not wholly comprehensible in musical terms or that requires reference to external circumstances to explain it. However, recently, there have been efforts to trace the progress of the disease that was to lead to the composer\u2019s death, at the age of 62, in 1937.<\/p>
The French writer Jean Echenoz<\/a><\/strong> holds such a fascination for the subject that in 2006 he published a novel about it. His Ravel<\/em><\/a><\/strong> is redolent of research at Le Belv\u00e9d\u00e8re, the Ravel house at Montfort-l\u2019Amaury, and yet so faulty in biographical and musicological detail that it carries little credibility as either fact or fiction. <\/p> Of course, if there are signs of mental decay in such works as Bol\u00e9ro<\/em> and the Left-hand Piano Concerto<\/strong><\/a> in D \u2013 two of the greatest orchestral works in the 20th-century repertoire and at the same time two of the most commonly chosen subjects for neurological case study \u2013 we should not shrink from learning about them. But anyone who takes the risk of associating the repetitions in Bol\u00e9ro<\/em> with frontotemporal dementia, for example, should be very certain of the facts.<\/p>What are Ravel’s greatest works?<\/h2>