he two great
ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloe,"
with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild
ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure
espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le
Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the
piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the
age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and
rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of
Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and
unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the
field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords
grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet
on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even
bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the
composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and
all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The
humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel,
on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the
artist "a qui l'absence de sensibilite fait encore une personalite," as
one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those
unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality.
Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a
very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of
corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And
so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and
"Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol";
setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for
chant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical
and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the
season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote.
Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de
Regnier: "Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation
inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la maniere de," parodying
Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of
Eric Satie, the clown of m