Piano Concerto in D major for the Left Hand

Like many composers, Maurice Ravel was a highly competent pianist who frequently performed his own music. Thus, it is not entirely surprising that he should want to write a piano concerto; what is surprising, though, is that it took him so long to do so — and when he did, he ended up writing two at the same time.

Ravel first began drafting a concerto based on Basque themes around the time he was 30, but World War I soon intervened, and Ravel enlisted for military duty. It wasn’t until 1928, after his American tour (which included time in Cleveland, where he conducted his own works with The Cleveland Orchestra), that Ravel began to work on a concerto again.

Work on that score, the Piano Concerto in G major, was interrupted, however, by a request for a left-hand concerto from pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had lost his right hand to amputation in World War I and had resumed his career by commissioning left-handed works from many of the era’s best-known composers, including Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Korngold, and Britten. The concerto was composed quickly, allowing Ravel to return to the two-handed, G-major Concerto, and premiered in 1932 with Wittgenstein as soloist. In the end, Wittgenstein preferred most of the other pieces he commissioned to Ravel’s concerto, unable to recognize its mastery.

The Concerto for the Left Hand includes many jazz touches. Ravel had been interested in this American art form since the early 1920s, when it first became the rage in the Parisian clubs he frequented. His enthusiasm grew during his 1928 visit to the United States. At a party given in New York in honor of his 53rd birthday, Ravel met George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue he was very fond of. Gershwin asked Ravel to take him on as a pupil, but Ravel declined, saying, “You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melodies and end up writing bad Ravel.”

In addition to its jazzy elements, the work projects an overall gloominess to its sound. Dark colors predominate, namely in the opening with its unusual solo for contrabassoon. It is quite possible that Ravel’s encounter with Wittgenstein brought back some of his own war memories. Ravel expert Arbie Orenstein sees the Concerto for the Left Hand as “a culmination of Ravel’s longstanding preoccupation, one might say obsession, with the notion of death.” It is certain that this concerto is a deeply tragic work — in stark contrast to its companion piece, the G-major Concerto — and perhaps the simple fact that he was creating the two concertos simultaneously allowed Ravel to take them in two very different directions.

Ravel gave the following formal outline of this work:

The concerto is divided into two parts which are played without pause. It begins with a slow introduction, which stands in contrast to the powerful entrance of theme one; this theme will later be offset by a second idea, marked ‘espressivo,’ which is treated pianistically as though written for two hands, with an accompaniment figure weaving about the melodic line.

The second part is a scherzo based upon two rhythmic figures. A new element suddenly appears in the middle, a sort of ostinato figure extending over several measures which are indefinitely repeated but constantly varied in their underlying harmony, and over which innumerable rhythmic patterns are introduced which become increasingly compact. This pulsation increases in intensity and frequency, and following a return of the scherzo, it leads to an expanded reprise of the initial theme of the work and finally to a long cadenza, in which the theme of the introduction and the various elements noted in the beginning of the concerto contend with one another until they are brusquely interrupted by a brutal conclusion.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

Discover more about Ravel’s visit to Cleveland with our Stories from the Archives.