Ex. 3-14: Pavane pour une infante défunte (edited)

Ravel wrote this piece for solo piano in 1899, at 24, while he was a student of Fauré. Fauré had brought him to the musical evenings of the Princesse de Polignac, an American-born princess whose father made Singer sewing machines. She asked Ravel to write the piece, and he dedicated it to her.

A pavane is a slow court dance of the 1500s and 1600s, and an infanta is a daughter of a Spanish king. No real princess is meant. Ravel said that he chose the words of the title for the pleasure of their sound. He also said that the music was meant to suggest a pavane "that a little princess might once have danced at the Spanish court."

The pianist Ricardo Viñes, his friend since they were boys, first played it in public in April 1902, and the audience loved it. Once, when a pianist played it too slowly, Ravel told him: "Next time remember that I wrote a Pavane for a dead princess, not a dead Pavane for a princess."

Ravel himself came to be less happy with it. In 1912, at 36, he was reviewing a concert as a critic, and the first piece was his own Pavane. He wrote that he now saw its faults: "the influence of Chabrier, which is too obvious, and the rather poor form."

He arranged it for small orchestra in 1910. In 1939, two years after his death, an American dance band had a hit with "The Lamp Is Low," a popular song made from its melody.

The version in this app was arranged for solfège practice.

Vlado Perlemuter worked through all of Ravel's solo piano music with the composer in 1927.
From the album Ravel: Piano Works
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