Pierre Boulat
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Maurice Ravel
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The "Chinese salon" of Montfort-L'Amaury. Mirror placed very low, narrowed door with lowered handles, miniature furnitures, Ravel had created a trompe l'oeil universe adapted to his small size. -
Maurice Ravel
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Part of the collection of automatons and fetish toys he had accumulated. -
Maurice Ravel
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He loved Rococo, Baroque, trinkets fashioned during the Revolution, the Directory, the Empire or the Restoration. -
Maurice Ravel
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Ravel's gramophone. He was the first composer to be recorded on record. Exploit for the time: the Concerto en Sol, created by Marguerite Long, was recorded in less than 3 months in 1933. -
Maurice Ravel
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Ravel's bedroom with a bed style "Bonaparte cot" and inverted Greek columns. -
Maurice Ravel
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Concerto for the left hand. Already suffering from the brain disease that was to prevail, Ravel wanted to prove that one could juggle as well as with both hands all over the surface of the claver. It takes a steel technique to resist such a tour de force: in 17 minutes, the left hand touches 2200 times the keyboard. Composed in 1931, for an Austrian pianist mutilated during the war, it mixes effects of this "Jazz" he discovered in U.S.A. -
Maurice Ravel
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Ravel's typewriter. At the end of his life, Ravel used this machine for his mail. Reached since 1928 of a cerebral affection he could no longer transcribe on paper the words or notes of his scores.Beside the letters of Manuel de Faya, Stravinsky or Colette, a writing from his hand, in which he recounts the enthusiastic reception he received at Carnegie Hall in New York. -
Maurice Ravel
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Casting of Ravel's right hand resting on his last writing. In the background of the hand, the toy dog gri-gri which he never separated. His illness was gradually blocking the mechanisms that put consciousness in touch with the outside world and condemned this lucid and sharp mind to live in a kind of fog. He died on December 28, 1937.
Inspired Homes / 10 – Maurice Ravel’s
It was at the “Belvédère” in Montfort-L’Amaury that Maurice Ravel, composed his famous Boléro.
Once famous and celebrated everywhere, continually solicited for tours abroad and worldly obligations, Maurice Ravel seeks to isolate himself to work. In 1921, he acquired this house in Montfort-L’Amaury, where everything will be redecorated according to his tastes: Chinese living room, bedroom with a bed style “Bonaparte camp bed” and inverted Greek columns.
Given its small size -he was only 1.52 meters high – everything was also restructured on his scale. Ravel had kept a very youthful character and a childlike simplicity. Passionate about toys that inspired him a lot of works, he also collected the most heterogeneous collectibles. For fifteen years, he accumulated in the “Belvedere” of Montfort-L’Amaury, as a witness will call them,”authentic little horrors”.
