- Une barque sur l’ocean (A Boat on the Ocean) was originally written for piano. It comes from Ravel’s Miroirs, a set of five piano pieces, composed 1904-5. Ravel orchestrated Une barque in 1906.1
- The orchestral version premiered on Feb. 3, 1907, performed by the Colonne Orchestra under the direction of Gabriel Pierné. It was poorly received and Ravel retracted the orchestrated version, which then wasn’t published until 1950.2
- Ravel was serious about hating his own orchestration of this piece. In 1926 a friend, Manuel Rosenthal, met Ravel in the street. Ravel was looking “absolutely furious,” and when Rosenthal asked him why he was upset, Ravel replied, “I’ve just had a shouting match with them [staff at office of music publisher Max Eschig], because I’m refusing to let them play the orchestration of ‘Une barque’ billed in Wolff’s concert on 30 October!”3
Sources
- Barbara L. Kelly, “Ravel, (Joseph) Maurice,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed December 11, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000052145.
- Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 85.
- Quoted in Roger Nichols, Ravel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 282.
Cut IDs
20075, 21043, 40129