APPARITIONS AND VISITATIONS Ondine (Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit, no. 1) The first poem Ravel selected for his composition Gaspard de la nuit, named after Aloysius Bertrand’s collection of prose poems, is from the Third Book in Bertrand, a section that is entitled La nuit et ses prestiges (The Night and its Distinctions). As shown in the chapter discussing Debussy’s Ondine, the water-spirit in its fairy-tale version is not literally related to the night. In the Bertrand poem, however, the allusions point very much to the realm of the not-clearly lit, the dream- like, the surreal. Moreover, it was the story of the mermaid—cool and shimmering, attractive but without deep feelings—that had made Hoffmann famous above all. In the narrative version of Frédéric de la Motte-Fouquet’s romance of two women—one a mortal, the other the immortal daughter of the waves—in love with the same man, as well as in the famous fairy-tale version, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the story captivated wide audiences. Various adaptations for the stage included E. T. A. Hoffmann’s and Albert Lortzing’s operas Undine, Antonin Dvorak’s opera Rusalka and Jean Giraudoux’ acclaimed play Ondine. The tale as it was perceived by romantic audiences is of the paradise in the depths of the waters, left with high hopes in search of a man’s love that alone can give a mermaid her soul. Mortality thus gained seems a small price to pay for that unfathomable asset called “soul,” but when human incomprehension and rejection cause the return to the waters without a return to blissful innocence and joy, one is inclined to weep in empathy with the betrayed creature from that strange, beautiful world.” Bertrand in his poem clearly focuses differently. (For Bertrand’s poem Ondine and a fairly literal translation, see the following two facing °5For a synopsis giving the plot of the opera Ondine and a brief account of Andersen’s fairy-tale version, The Little Mermaid, see above under Debussy’s Prélude Ondine (pages 123-126). The three Bertrand poems Ravel selected for his composition are quoted here from Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit (Paris: Payot, 1925). The English translations are mine. 181TALES AND POEMS “Ecoute! - Ecoute! - C'est moi, c’est Ondine qui fréle de ces gouttes d'eau les losanges sonores de ta fenétre illuminée par les mornes rayons de la lune; et voici, en robe de moire, la dame chdtelaine qui contemple a son balcon la belle nuit étoilée et le beau lac endormi. “Chaque flot est un ondin qui nage dans le courant, chaque courant est un sentier qui serpente vers mon palais, et mon palais est bati fluide au fond du lac, dans le triangle du feu, de la terre et de I'air. “Ecoute! - Ecoute! - mon pére bat l'eau coassante d'une branche d'aulne verte, et mes soeurs caressent de leurs bras d’écume les fraiches iles d'herbes, de nénuphars et de glaieuls, ou se moquent du saule caduc et barbu qui péche a la ligne.” * Sa chanson murmurée, elle me supplia de recevoir son anneau & mon doigt, pour étre |’époux d'une Ondine, et de visiter avec elle son palais, pour étre le roi des lacs. Et comme je lui répondais que j'aimais une mortelle, boudeuse et dépitée, elle pleura quelques larmes, poussa un éclat de rire, et s'évanouit en giboulées qui ruisselérent blanches le long de mes vitraux bleus. pages.) His accent is not at all on those qualities that, in the various fairy tale versions as well as in the operatic and theatrical realizations, appear in the foreground. Indeed his poem does not present the story from Ondine’s perspective but from the man’s point of view. His Ondine is “murmuring a song” and begging to be married. When learning, in answer to her plea, that the man is in love with a mortal woman, she overcomes her dejection very quickly and returns to—or remains in?— her playful state. Thus not pity but smiling indulgence with the child-like creature is what Bertrand’s poem evokes, and what Ravel chose for his piano work. The poem is in five stanzas. The initial three deal with Ondine; the remaining two, separated by an asterisk, with the man whom she hopes to marry. The bipartite structure thus corresponds very directly to the two main characters. That this twosome is, however, a hope primarily em- braced by Ondine is mirrored in the fact that her three stanzas contain several further instances of pairs, while his stanzas don’t; see the two- fold “Listen! Listen” in the first and third stanzas, the juxtaposition of Ondine with the “lady of the manor” in the first stanza, the “each..., each...” in the second stanza, and the mention of father / sisters in the third stanza. 182APPARITIONS AND VISITATIONS “Listen! - Listen! - It’s me, it’s Ondine who brushes with these drops of water the resonant diamonds of your window lit by the gloomy moonlight; and there in her silken robe is the lady of the manor contemplating from her balcony the lovely star-bright night and the beautiful, sleeping lake. “Each ripple is a ‘child of the waves’ swimming with the current, each current is a path winding towards my palace, and my palace is built fluid, at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of fire, earth and air. “Listen! - Listen! - My father beats the croaking water with a branch of green alder, and my sisters caress with their arms of foam the cool islands of herbs, water lilies and gladioli, or make fun of the sickly, bearded willow that is fishing with rod and line.” * Having murmured her song, she begged me to accept her ring on my finger, so that I would be the husband of an Ondine, and to visit her palace with her, so that I would be king of the lakes. And when I replied that 1 loved a mortal woman, she wept a few tears, sulking and peevish, then broke into laughter, and vanished in showers of rain that drizz~ led white across my blue window pane. Focusing on the content of Ondine’s words, one finds that she char- acterizes herself by way of contrast and metaphor. In the first stanza, she distinguishes her own immediacy, naiveté, enthusiasm and playfulness from the noble attire (silken robe), noble demeanor (contemplate) and noble place (balcony of a manor) of the rival. She also associates herself with gloomy moonlight—and thus with mystery, unpredictability, emo- tioality, while the lady is presented with the much more rational and con- ventional perceptions of the “lovely star-bright night and the beautiful sleeping lake.” In the second stanza, she asks to read each ripple as an “ondin,” * each current as a path, thus interpreting the entire lake as a manifestation of the water spirits. How complete and perfect her realm should be imagined is expressed. through the use of the four elements and the perfect geometrical symbol: her palace of water is located in the “triangle of fire, earth and air.” In the third stanza, metaphoric and non-metaphoric images merge into a real fantasy. The father strikes the water (which, as we have learned before, actually constitutes his children, the “ondins”); the sisters’ arms—of foam, of course, since each sister is a ripple—caress the islands, and in doing so foster flowers and plants. Their anthropomorphizing mockery of French onde = wave, ondin = child of the waves, ondine = female child of the waves. 183TALES AND POEMS the pitiful weeping willow at the lake shore as well as the father’s use of an alder branch depicts the water spirits as integrated in a larger natural environment. In terms of structure, Ondine’s three stanzas form an entity distingui- shed by both symmetry and progression. The very conspicuous repeated “Listen! Listen!” at the beginning of the fist and third stanzas creates the impression of an A B A form. At the same time, a strong sense of conti- nuity is achieved. The contemplation of the “sleeping lake” at the end of the first stanza leads to a further description of that lake in stanza II, and the mention of Ondine’s home at the close of the second stanza prompts more details about her family in stanza III. The speech attitude in the remaining two stanzas is distinctly diffe- rent from that in the first three: immediacy gives way to narrative, logic (“Having..., she...”) and reasoning (“so that...”; “and since...”). The fourth stanza gives an account of what Ondine hoped with regard to the man, and why; the reasons as perceived by the man—“so that I would be the husband of an Ondine,” and “so that I would be king of the lakes”— sound very different indeed from those familiar from the fairy tale! The fifth stanza briefs us about the man’s reply and Ondine’s reaction—that of a child who sulks for a moment and forgets immediately as she contin- ues to play. In terms of the images and metaphors employed, the final stanza creates a bridge back to the first stanza: the “mortal woman” is, of course, the “lady of the manor”; Ondine is once again volatile and playful, splashing water around; and the rain on the window panes recalls the initial setting in stanza I. The fact that the first three stanzas are presented in quotation marks seems to suggest that we are dealing with direct vs. indirect speech. How- ever, a closer look at stanzas IV and V reveals that they, too, are in the first person singular. The two speech patterns are thus rather to be read as the man’s voice as narrator beginning with a verbatim quotation of what he heard (or: thought he heard) the water spirit say. Going even one step further and considering the setting that, accor- ding to both his own and Ondine’s stipulated account, provides the back- drop for the encounter, one wonders even more who—and whether any- body at all—is actually speaking. The two-fold mention of the window pane makes it clear that Ondine is “out there” and the man “in here.” Furthermore, at the end of the poem Ondine seems to vanish into the rain drops streaming down the window, the same rain drops that first brought 184APPARITIONS AND VISITATIONS her into the picture. Is she, then, not just an hallucination of a man about to be married (to a mortal woman, of course), a fantasy inspired by the play of rain drops, in which the narrator pits the playful, child-like creat- ure against the noble, well-dressed and poised woman who will be his wife? The “reasons” why he should marry her—‘so that I would be the husband of an Ondine,” and “so that I would be king of the lakes”—seem to confirm this interpretation: they focus entirely on what he would be; no mention of Ondine’s longing for a soul, and her need for his love to obtain it. While the fairy tale can usefully be read as a metaphor of a girl’s initiation into adulthood with, especially in the more explicit versions, the very problematic image of the fish tail split into two legs that are needed to love a man, and the interpretation of the painful loss of virginity as a precondition for attaining a soul, the message of Aloysius Bertrand’s poem is quite different. This is clearly a man’s fantasy, in which a luring water spirit sings a “murmured song,” evoking options the waking mind rejects. The dream of being king in a realm of perfection, beauty and irresponsible playfulness is but a delightful backdrop for the more serious and responsible obligations in real life, and the mate thus rejected is not hurt but remains in her element. The epigram that precedes Bertrand’s poem sheds further light both on this interpretation of the poem and on the music it inspired. Taken from Charles Brugnot’s Les deux Génies, the excerpt reads: ... Je croyais entendre Une vague harmonie enchanter mon sommeil, Et prés de moi s'épandre un murmure pareil Aux chants entrecoupés d’une voix triste et tendre. (... ..-- I thought I heard A vague harmony that enchanted my sleep, And near me a scattering murmur similar to Songs interspersed with a sad and tender voice.) Vagueness, sleep and what is thought to be heard point to the illusory quality of the story; the enchantment perceived suggests wish fulfillment, and “murmur” and “song” refer directly to the way Bertrand’s male narrator describes Ondine’s utterances. Ravel’s musical rendition of the poem integrates all significant as- pects shown in the poem. 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It is intriguing to ponder the fact that the six-five chord invariably mixes the two tonal genders: it is either a major chord with a minor sixth or a minor chord with a major sixth.” Most notably, Ravel’s work is definitely a song. The texture allows clearly to distinguish two components: vertically, a tune supported by an accompaniment in varying patterns; horizontally, the different lines of a clearly phrased song. In three instances, a line is preceded by one or two introductory bars, and the whole song is rounded off by what would in a vocal piece be an instrumental coda. The example, given on pages 188-189, shows the thirteen lines of the song. Both the music-analytical letters within the example and the verbal remarks at the margin give a short account of the thematic material and its structural organization. (In addition, the indentation pattern aims to reflect the overall structure: Ondine’s lines are flush left, the man’s lines are strongly indented, while “the other woman’s” two short contributions are set to begin half-way between those of the principal characters.) Relating the music to the poetic text, one can make the following eight observations: [1] Just as there are two main characters and “the other woman” in the fairy tale, so Ravel invented two themes and, in addition, a melodic line that, for the time being, will just be referred to as “contrasting character.” [2] Both themes consist of a “core” (or “trunk”) and a number of complements. The characteristic features of the “trunks” seem to relate the themes to the protagonists of the tale: on the one hand there is the somewhat languishing, wave-like, repeated outline of the theme-1 trunk (see bars 3/4) that might stand for Ondine; on the other hand there is the less accommodating (owing to the whole-tone tetrachord descent), more narrative character of the theme-2 trunk that one would connect with the man, the first- person narrator of the poem. 97, i Here are the details: bars 3/4, 15/16: Ce-major six-five chord with lowered sixth, against melody in Gz minor; bars 9/10: G#-minor six-five chord with major sixth, against melody in As minor, bars 33-38: Gz-major six-five chord with lowered sixth, against melody in Ds Phrygian; bars 45/46: Ds-major six-five chord with lowered sixth, against melody in At minor; bars 83/84: Gs-minor six-five chord with raised sixth, against melody in Ds minor, with additional altemation Ds/Ds and juxtaposition of B./Bs within the G: chord; bars 92-94: C#-major six-five chord with lowered sixth in both hands, no melody. 188APPARITIONS AND VISITATIONS [3] The intriguing fact that for Bertrand, Ondine may be a product of a man’s fantasy rather than a real creature encountering him on some level of reality, is mirrored in two musical details: - First, the two themes exchange their most significant comple- ments. This is most noticeable in the case of what, in my example on the following pages, I have labeled component d, the “slow-waltz,” folk-song like subphrase that is established in line 2 as a complement to theme 1, taken up in lines 5/6 as a complement to theme 2, recalled in lines 9,11 asacomplement to theme 2, and again in line 13 as a complement to theme 1. The same holds true for the bass-register component g which, at the beginning of the second half of the song, is introduced. in lines 7/8 as a complement to theme 1 andtakenup inline 10 as a complement to theme 2. - Second, the two themes also share accompaniment patterns. The principal accompaniment pattern of the piece, in which a repeated triad alternates with a single note—the sixth over the triad’s root—creates the impression of shimmering. This qual- ity has often been associated with the water Ondine calls her home. In light of the poem, however, the shimmering quality could equally well be descriptive of the fantasized girl herself, depicting attributes the man’s longing would have her repre- sent. Rhythmically, the pattern is both irregular and safely predictable: the unusual grouping of 3+3+2 repeats very reliably on each beat of the bar—a woman delightfully volatile but well under control. The “shimmering” pattern accompanies lines 1/2, i.e. theme 1, is gradually altered, then given up in line 3, ie, the theme-1 developmt, reinstated in lines 5/6 ie, theme 2, (varied and infiltrated by another pattern). It continues through _lines 7/8 i.e. the return of theme 1, (albeit increasingly pene- trated by other material), recurs with the end of line 11, i.e. the theme-2 developmt, and once more in line 13, i.e. with the theme-1 trunk. 189TALES AND POEMS [4] The only complement that does not connect with theme 2 is component a. In its original form, it is launched from a weak beat after the longer version of the theme-1 trunk (see Ravel’s metri- cally irregular slurring in bars 5, 47 and 52, as over the metrically regular slurs in bars 10/11, 16/17 and, surprisingly, 85). This component—the first complement associated with Ondine—can be recognized in the initial gesture of the “contrasting character” and thus links the musical representative of “the other woman” to the female protagonist. [5] A symmetrical counterpart can be found in the recurrence of the melodic material (see line 12 or bars 75-82). Here what is last heard in connection with theme 2 makes its way into the “contrasting character”; the concluding bar of line 11 is inserted in line 12 between component a and its sequence. By means of this musical reference, Ravel seems to show the link of “the other woman” to the male protagonist... when all is said and done, so to speak. [6] In terms of accompaniment pattern, the two lines dedicated to the contrasting character use similar material. The opening gesture derived from component a is set apart from the remainder of the phrase; it is heard against a G#-major scale (bar 23), a C-major scale as white-key glissando (see bar 75), a black-key glissando (bar 77) and an arpeggiated B’ wave (bar 27). Component g—the one that is unique to this character—is first accompanied by a figure reminiscent of Ondine’s “shimmering” pattern. Closer in- spection, however, reveals significant differences: the pattern in bars 24-26 and 28 is both much more regular (consisting of a four-chord figure and its inversion) and more “grounded” (see the pedal-note D} in bars 24-26 and the E# chord throughout bar 28) than the water spirit’s floating figure, just as the prospective wife is distinguished from the fantasy mate. In line 12, component g is enveloped by a pattern that surrounds the melodic note D¢ (bars 78/79) with a repeated 6-against-4 figure featuring A}-C#-E#-D} in the lower part, Ed-A#-D#-A#-Fi in the upper part. Subsequently this envelope, rather than abiding by harmonic or otherwise inde- pendent rules, follows the melodic line in perfect parallel shift—a musical metaphor that seems to epitomize the lady’s “adaptabil- ity” in contrast to Ondine’s capriciousness. 1907 [8] APPARITIONS AND VISITATIONS An accompaniment figure shared by parts of the contrasting character and theme 2 is the ninth-chord in a large two-fold wave. First heard in bars 29/30 (A°/B’), the chord recurs in bars 39-42 (F#), bar 82 (D4?) and, slightly varied, in bar 91 (C™). It is both intriguing and revealing to notice that these bars, which musically link the male narrator to “the other woman,” are harmonically entirely conservative: no hint of the bitonality that pervades all that is under Ondine’s spell. Finally, Ravel’s choice of key signatures deserves a mention. He employs two diametrically contrasting signatures—seven sharps vs. no sharps—as well as, towards the very end of the piece, an “other” signature (five sharps). The piece opens with seven sharps and thus links this key signature to Ondine. The first half of the song (more precisely: line 1-6 as well as most of line 7) remains in this tonal realm. All sharps are canceled at exactly that moment when component g reaches into the bass register—as if to suggest that everything is allowed to appear from Ondine’s perspective until the moment when she actually reaches for the man. There- after, the transposed theme 1 (line 8) and theme 2 (lines 9 and 10) appear without accidentals. The seven sharps are reintroduced on occasion of the developmental processes spawned from theme 2, but given up again immediately thereafter. Thus line 12 (the other woman) begins in a notation without accidentals (the man’s tonal realm, as one may be tempted to interpret) but then turns to a tonal organization of its own, with five sharps (see from bar 77). The final line of the song begins under the tonal influence of the third party with five sharps and then returns to the man’s no- accidental key signature. The coda, however, concludes by re-em- powering Ondine: after an unaccompanied phrase without acci- dentals (perhaps a last, already almost disembodied longing for the mate that was not to be?), the final three bars return to the seven sharps and the original C#-major triad with added minor sixth, thus placing the mermaid back in her element. 191