i. Ondine 
ii. Le Gibet 
iii. Scarbo 
 

Written in 1908, the three movements of Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (‘Treasurer of the Night’) are each based on a poem or fantaisie from the collection Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (‘Gaspard of the night – Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot’) by the French Romantic poet, playwright and journalist, Aloysius Bertrand. Indeed, Ravel subtitles the work: ‘Trois poèmes pour piano d’après Aloysius Bertrand’. 

Premiered in Paris on 9th January 1909 by Ricardo Viñes, the work is famous for its difficulty. The critic Charles Rosen wrote, for example, that “The third and last piece, ‘Scarbo’, is the most sensational work for piano of the early twentieth century. ‘Scarbo’ is a demon dwarf goblin that suddenly swells to gigantic size, and Ravel achieves an unprecedented effect of terror. It has the reputation of being technically one of the most difficult pieces ever written.” 

The first piece in the suite, ‘Ondine’, is based on the poem of the same name. Telling of the water nymph Undine, who sings to seduce the observer into visiting her kingdom deep at the bottom of a lake, Ravel conjures the sounds of water falling and flowing in woven cascades.  

The second movement, ‘Le Gibet’ (‘The gallows’), evokes a mournful, morbid scene. Bertrand’s poem begins, “Ah! ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit, ou le pendu qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire?” (“Ah! that which I hear, was it the north wind that screeches in the night, or the hanged one who utters a sigh on the forked gallows?”). A repeated, ostinato B-flat in octaves is played in the middle of the keyboard throughout, around which a plaintive melody grows and subsides. This imitates the tolling of a bell; “C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville sous l’horizon” (“It is the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon”). 

Of the final piece in the set, Ravel remarked, “I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me”. ‘Scarbo’ depicts the nighttime mischief of a small goblin flitting in and out of the darkness, disappearing and suddenly reappearing. With its repeated notes and two terrifying climaxes, this is the high point in technical difficulty of all the three movements.