Maurice Ravel

Rejected for the last time in the Prix de Rome of 1905, Maurice Ravel became the occasion of a national scandal that changed the leadership of the Paris Conservatoire and put his own composition teacher, Gabriel Fauré, at the head of its reform. Born in Ciboure on the Basque coast and raised in Paris, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire. Miroirs, Gaspard de la nuit, the String Quartet, Daphnis et Chloé, L'Enfant et les sortilèges, La Valse, Boléro of 1928 and the two piano concertos are among his works; in 1922 he orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He died in Paris in 1937. He had entered the Conservatoire in 1889 as a pianist, studying with Charles de Bériot and falling in with Erik Satie and Ricardo Viñes. His early works include the Habanera, the Pavane pour une infante défunte and the Menuet antique. Daphnis came as a commission from Diaghilev and was staged by Fokine in 1912; the Pictures orchestration was made for Koussevitzky and Bolero for Ida Rubinstein. A volunteer in the war, he served as a driver near Verdun in 1916–1917 and was discharged exhausted in 1917. Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate in 1928. His neurological illness began in 1932, before a minor taxi accident that October, and prevented him from writing down his projected opera Jeanne d'Arc.