Suggested Listen: Gaspard de la nuit by Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit
In 1908, Maurice Ravel composed Gaspard de la nuit, a piano suite based on three poems from Aloysius Bertrand’s 1842 collection of the same name. In Bertrand’s framing tale, the narrator is lent a book in a garden by a stranger named Gaspard de la Nuit. When he tries to return it the next day, the man has vanished—later revealed to be the devil. The collection’s gothic and macabre tone carries through each poem and forms the backdrop for Ravel’s composition.
Unlike the traditional approach of setting poems to music with voice, as we see in Schubert’s Winterreise, Ravel writes for solo piano, translating Bertrand’s words into music alone. The three movements—Ondine, Le Gibet ("The Gallows"), and Scarbo—each explore different aspects of the gothic: tragic longing, eerie stillness, and supernatural terror.
Ondine
The first movement follows the water nymph Ondine, who sings to a dreaming man, tempting him to join her underwater kingdom. He refuses, explaining that he loves a mortal woman. She vanishes, laughing and crying, and the man wakes unsure whether it was all a dream. Flowing arpeggios and shifting textures evoke the shimmering water of the poem, while dynamic swells mirror the rise and fall of the waves. The music moves between power and stillness, capturing both the allure and the uncertainty of Ondine’s world. When she disappears—laughing and weeping—the movement delicately fades, leaving the listener in the same state of ambiguity as the man in the poem, unsure of what was real and what was dreamed.
Le Gibet
The second movement sets the scene of a hanging body swaying from a gallows at sunset. Bertrand begins with a quote from Goethe’s Faust: “What do I see stirring around that gibbet?” The poem lingers on the stillness of death, broken only by the faint sounds of insects and wind. Ravel uses a repeated tolling B♭ throughout the piece to evoke a distant bell. The music moves slowly, creating a suspended, uneasy calm that mirrors the scene’s eerie serenity.
Scarbo
The final movement tells the story of Scarbo, a goblin who torments a man at night. He darts around the room, growing and shrinking in the shadows, vanishing and reappearing without warning. The music shifts abruptly between silence and chaos, full of rapid scales, sharp contrasts, and strange rhythms. Ravel captures the narrator’s anxiety and disorientation as Scarbo blurs the line between reality and imagination.
Historical Context
Bertrand’s poems were written in the mid-19th century during a revival of gothic literature, marked by an interest in the supernatural, the mysterious, and the grotesque. Ravel composed Gaspard de la nuit in early 20th-century France, during the height of Impressionism. His use of layered textures and shifting timbres reflects that influence, while the content remains rooted in gothic imagination. The result is a deeply expressive work that blends literary inspiration with pianistic innovation.
Hear it Live
Gaspard de la nuit takes center stage at Counterpoint Concerts’ season-opening performance on September 26 at Dupont Underground. The performance by Counterpoint founder and pianist Natalia Kazaryan will feature live animation by AV artist Eric Lee, bringing the suite’s eerie and fantastical imagery to life as it’s performed.
