Ravel’s La Valse made musicological headlines earlier this year thanks to a startling announcement by David Lamaze, a professor at the Conservatoire de Rennes. Attentive listeners have long been aware that the three-note figure E-B-A is so common in Ravel’s music as to serve almost as a musical fingerprint. As Lamaze is French, he knew these notes by their French names, mi-si-la, and he came to imagine them as an encoding of the name “Misia.” Misia Sert was one of Ravel’s closest friends. She maintained a salon frequented by a Who’s Who of artists and musicians and her portrait was painted by the likes of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Her half-brother was Cipa Godebski, for whose daughters Ravel composed his Ma Mère l’Oÿe (“Mother Goose”), and she herself was the dedicatee of both La Valse and the song “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”) from Ravel’s song-cycle Histoires naturelles. “It has never been done before,” stated Professor Lamaze, “to take one person and to place them at the center of a life-long work.” His analysis of La Valse reveals that the mi-si-la motif appears at crucial junctures of the musical structure. What’s more, he finds that at the work’s beginning, before the waltz grows desperate, Ravel has interlinked those notes with an extra A and E; as the only two vowels in the composer’s surname, they may represent the name “Ravel.” By linking the names Misia and Ravel through these musical means, Lamaze believes, the composer may be revealing a romantic attraction he was never comfortable professing in real life.
—JMK