Jeux d'eau (Ravel)

[6] The piece was partly inspired by Franz Liszt's Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este (from his Années de pèlerinage).

It contains the line "Dieu fluvial riant de l'eau qui le chatouille" ("river god laughing at the water that tickles him"), which at the composer's request the poet inscribed on Ravel's manuscript, and is the heading in the printed score.

Perlemuter commented that the piece "opens up new horizons in piano technique, especially if one remembers that Debussy's Jardins sous la pluie was not written until two years later, in 1903".

[11] The first public performance was given by the pianist Ricardo Viñes in a concert presented by the Société nationale de musique on 5 April 1902, at which Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte was also premiered.

After commending Viñes's "singular virtuosity and delicacy" he praised the two Ravel works as "orderly, composed with great clarity and measure, while keeping the same refinement in harmony".

[12] He continued: Ravel's biographer Arbie Orenstein comments that among the other critics and the public the Pavane was found elegant and charming, but Jeux d'eau was thought to be cacophonic and excessively complicated.

"It now appears that the Pavane is a minor work, as the composer himself acknowledged, while Jeux d'eau is firmly established as an important landmark in the literature of the piano".