Christopher Härtel”Nicolette” from Trois Chansons (1916) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)April, 2006

Ravel’s Trois Chansons represent a significant portion of his total

output of choral music. There is some speculation that he was put off

of writing for chorus after a choral work he submitted to the Prix de

Rome competition a decade earlier was snubbed, but whatever the

reason, he wrote only six choral works. The other five were all created

during the period between 1900 and 1905, and the Trois Chansons

were his only a capella works. Given the quality of the rest of his

music, it’s clear that this brief set of chansons merits further study.

The subject of this analysis is the first of the Trois Chansons,

“Nicolette”.

Ravel wrote both the poetry and the music for Trois Chansons

while he was waiting to be accepted into the army during the First

World War. Although he wished to serve, believing that his slight build

made him a perfect candidate for the newly-formed Air Corps, he had

powerful and politically-connected friends who saw to it that he was

kept out of combat1. Because Ravel was 41 years old in 1916 and one

of the most well-known figures in France, he was assigned non-combat

duty as an ambulance driver. Although he avoided the front-lines, his

duty station was close enough to Verdun (the most active battlefield of

the war) that he had several nearly-fatal misses. His correspondence

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shows that the war affected him profoundly. It was against this

backdrop of suffering and loss that the Trois Chansons were conceived.

Indeed, loss is a theme that connects all three of the chansons;

in the second, “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis”, three beautiful birds

of paradise come to the singer to tell of the death of a loved one in the

war. In the third, “Ronde”, it is innocence that is lost, as all the satyrs

and goblins and gnomes and demons that lurk in the forest of Ravel’s

childhood are scared away by grumpy adults. “Nicolette” is the most

interesting of the three in this regard; the eponymous maid loses her

virtue to the vile Seigneur Chenu. Nicolette enters into this transaction

with her eyes wide open; she’s trading her virginity for escape from

her social station. By becoming the wife (lover? consort?) of a wealthy

man, she will never have to return to the meadow. In the other two

chansons, the main characters have no choices; the bereaved lover in

“Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis” is left to die, heartbroken, and the

child in “Ronde” has to grow up eventually. Nicolette is the only

character in the Trois Chansons who has the opportunity to choose her

fate.

One of Ravel’s modern biographers, Benjamin Ivry, describes the

Trois Chansons as “Panic” works, meaning permeated by the lore of

Pan, the Greek God who watches over shepherds and their flocks2.

Certainly the other two chansons fit that description. In “Nicolette”, the

influence is more subtle. The setting is folk-like; there are some fairy-

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tale references (the Big Bad Wolf, Grandma’s house) but the landscape

of “Nicolette” is populated with humans.

The melodic structure of “Nicolette” is remarkable for its

simplicity. It is strophic, divided into four perfectly symmetrical 13-

measure verses for a total of 52 bars. The melody, which lies

comfortably in the A natural minor scale, is passed from voice to voice

as the new characters in each strophe are introduced. Although the

melody remains intervalically almost unchanged throughout, the

harmonic framework through which it is threaded is lush in its variety.

The chanson is metrically stable from strophe to strophe, following this

pattern: six bars in 2/4, followed by five bars of 3/4, ending with a

couplet in 2/4.

Within this tightly knit formal structure there would seem to be

little room to maneuver, yet Ravel creates four distinct strophes, and

by means of text painting and some fascinating harmonic

manipulation, he never loses the listener’s interest. The global

harmonic structure is simple and makes use of fairly conventional

tonic-dominant-tonic movement, beginning in the key of A minor,

moving to a plagal half cadence in the third strophe, and then

concluding with a mode shift into A major. This plagal HC at measure

34, and the final perfect authentic cadence in A major are the only true

cadences in the piece; each 13-bar strophe is punctuated by an open

HC at measure 8, and an open imperfect authentic cadence at

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measure 13. These “missing” thirds have the effect of blurring the

seemingly conventional harmonic structure. A closer look at each

strophe reveals Ravel’s true harmonic intentions.

The first strophe introduces Nicolette as she wanders in the

meadow picking flowers and looking covetously at all the fancy houses.

The most harmonically predictable of the four strophes, it begins with

the melody in the soprano line over block chords, as though it were a

folk song being played by an inexperienced pianist, complete with

some “wrong note” dissonances. At the approach to the open HC in

measure 8, we hear a tantalizing suggestion of bVII followed by bii6 .

As we come to the end of the strophe, we feel a subtle mode shift: iv –

bvi – III – IV – III – (i). The “ah” of the accompanying voices gives a

disconsolate feel to the undulating harmonic movement through the

mediant. The gesture is made more poignant by the gentle ritardando

and the open cadence, lacking the third, as though Nicolette has not

found what she seeks.

The second strophe resumes the jaunty opening tempo, this time

with the melody in the bass. The block chord harmony is gone,

replaced by a tongue-in-cheek scary ‘oo’ sound in the accompaniment,

as the melody describes Nicolette’s encounter with the “friendly”

growling wolf. In a brief foreshadowing of the next strophe, there is a

strong but momentary suggestion of C major in mm. 18-19, with three

successive chords; F/C, G/B and C/G. These are immediately returned

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to the key of A minor, and quickly resolved to another open HC at

measure 21. By this means, Ravel subtly frames certain emotional and

psychological connotations of the text. The parallel modes of ‘A’

represent Nicolette, expressing her various states of mind using major

and minor. F major signals opportunity; love is portrayed in C major,

and the key of E signifies choices she must make. The brief suggestion

of C major in the second strophe pokes fun at the “love” the wolf is

offering her. Nicolette runs breathlessly away from the leering wolf

and Ravel leaves us with the same disconsolate progression that

ended the first verse.

The third strophe begins in a slower tempo with a startlingly

bright F major chord. The basses’ strong ‘G’ in the next bar sets up the

expectation of harmonic resolution to the key of C. Ravel frustrates

this by sending us back to F, stressing the importance of this

opportunity for Nicolette. The alto melody introduces the pretty

pageboy, dressed in blue hose and a grey doublet. Finally, C major

arrives, but rather than using this key to soothe the harmonic tension,

Ravel further unsettles us by shifting the whole choir into a disturbingly

high tessitura. The melody moves to the tenor, who asks in falsetto,

“Won’t you come to a gentle lover?” C is only briefly tonicized, and

before the listener has the chance to embrace the key of love, the

harmony gracefully pirouettes out of reach through an Amin(6) chord

to a plagal HC in the original key at measure 34. E major has arrived;

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the time for decision is at hand. Nicolette makes her choice, and the

ensuing harmony reflects her sadness with an exquisite procession of

extended harmonies, colored with 9ths and 11ths, bringing us back to

the lonely, open A chord at the end of the strophe. During the last five

bars of the verse, the melody moves from soprano through tenor to

alto, as the ensemble continues its role of ‘Greek chorus’ in narrating

Nicolette’s tale.

“Nicolette” also carries an interesting subtext about love as it

relates to Ravel’s own experiences. Ravel never took a life partner,

and from the accounts of contemporaries (and from his voluminous

correspondence) one gets the idea that, like Nicolette, love was not in

the cards for him3. When love appears to Nicolette in the form of the

pretty page, he is dandyish in appearance (not unlike Ravel himself)

and his part is sung by the tenors in an almost comical falsetto. The

harmony and rhythm immediately surrounding this part are

reminiscent of a circus calliope, as though in mockery of love. When

Nicolette turns away from the page, the harmony suddenly reaches its

most intense chromaticism, and the texture is at its most lyric. Ravel

was once asked why he didn’t replace his cherished Siamese cats

when they had all passed away. He replied that he preferred “the

certainty of not being hurt to the risks of pleasure”4.

The final strophe begins with the melody in the tenor, slightly

altered by the addition of Bb to turn the falling fifth into a tritone (Bb-

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E). This rides above a harshly dissonant bassline, creating movement

from Bb(add4) to E major, emphasizing the tritone on a harmonic as

well as a melodic level. The lyrics describe Seigneur Chenu (chenu is

French for “hoary”) as ugly, smelly, twisted, and fat. He offers

Nicolette his money. (Surely, as the heavy use of the tritone suggests,

this is a deal with the devil?) Nicolette wastes no time making up her

mind; she quickly throws her arms around him, and the basses’ melody

tells us, “Nevermore to the meadow will she return.” She has made

her choice, and from her perspective it is a good one. The final

harmonic progression is related to that of the other strophe endings,

but rather than shifting modes between iv and IV only to end on an

open A chord, Ravel starts with A minor, moving us up through the

progression C – D(9) – Cm7 to A major. Over the last three bars the

voices move sinuously up out of the murky low tessitura to the high,

luminous, final A major chord, giving us a sense that at last Nicolette

has achieved a state of grace; despite her loss, she has gained

something that she values more than her virtue, more than lust, more

than love.

“Nicolette” is an excellent example of the choral chanson;

compact, tightly knit, madrigalesque in its melodic simplicity, yet quite

harmonically sophisticated. Sadly, the Trois Chansons have garnered

little attention from biographers of Ravel, in some cases rating only a

footnote in the chronological list of his compositions. Although his

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choral works are few in number, they deserve the same level of

attention that scholars are investing in his other works.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Maurice Ravel , by William Seroff. Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York, 1953. p. 183-188: also Ivry, p. 95

2) Maurice Ravel: A Life , by Benjamin Ivry. Welcome Rain Publishers LLC, New York, New York, 2000. p.16, 94-95

3) Ivry, p. 52

4) Ibid, p.155

Other general sources:

Maurice Ravel: A Guide to Research, by Stepher Zank. Routledge Music Libraries, New York, New York, 2005

Ravel, Maurice, by Barbara L Kelly. Grove Music Online, accessed 3/15/2006

“Maurice Ravel.” Contemporary Musicians, Volume 25. Gale Group, 1999. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Thomson Gale, 2005

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