Ravel Mother Goose Suite
Ravel Mother Goose Suite Dances Program Notes
Maurice Ravel composed Mother Goose, for piano (four hands) as Children’s Pieces, with two specific performers in mind – two children of friends. The two children who premiered it, in 1910, were not his original the dedicatees – but they were aged six and seven! He orchestrated it the next year. It draws its inspiration (and title) from what is, in France, the main collection of children’s books, Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, (Tales from my Mother Goose, 1697, the French model for the German Brothers Grimm book.) I. Ravel composed this simple movement first, a courtly Pavane for Sleeping Beauty. II. Tom Thumb, lost in the forest, seeks his trail of crumbs. The music courses through varying time signatures, with a melancholic melody passed between oboe, English horn and cello. Imaginative violin harmonics and trills depict the birds: they have eaten the crumbs. III. Liaderonette, Empress of the Pagodas, is Dzthe little ugly one,dz served by her minions in a miniature Chinese court. Pentatonicism (think of a five-note scale using the black notes on a piano) provides the building blocks of the music. IV. Beauty and the Beast: her melody is mostly in the clarinet solo, and the contrabassoon (with a low and grumbly range) is the Beast, until a harp glissando represents his transformation – his music is now played in a concertmaster solo. V. The Enchanted Garden is a meditative and gorgeous paean to nature and conclusion of the piece. Born: March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France Died: December 28, 1937, Paris, FranceMa Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) is a suite of five orchestral pieces by Maurice Ravel, based on fairy tales by Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy. Originally composed as a piano duet for children, Ravel orchestrated it with exquisite delicacy, creating one of the most magical and translucent scores in the repertoire.
Ravel composed the original piano version in 1908 to 1910, and the orchestral version was premiered in Paris on January 28, 1912. A ballet version with additional movements was premiered the same year.
A typical performance of the five-movement suite lasts approximately 16 to 18 minutes.
Listen for the extraordinary delicacy of Ravel's orchestration — he uses the instruments of the orchestra with the lightness of a watercolor painter, creating textures of almost supernatural transparency. The Laideronnette movement features a pentatonic scale evoking an exotic Eastern world, and the final movement The Fairy Garden closes the suite in a luminous blaze of enchantment.
Ravel composed the original piano duet for the children of his close friends the Godebski family, intending pieces simple enough for young pianists to play. The genius of his subsequent orchestration lies in how he transformed these deliberately simple pieces into something of profound orchestral sophistication without losing their childlike innocence.
