Ravel, that master of tender irony, has left in his wake two supreme ironies: of being viewed as archetypally French, and of his musical forms often being viewed as conventional. French though he was, his temperament, humour, expression and technique are all distinct from French habits and stand out, by their incisiveness and bursts of raw sensuality, even from his contemporaries Fauré and Debussy. Besides the technical daring inherited from his Swiss-born engineer-inventor father, the foreign element that most strongly colours Ravel's character and music is the Basque-Spanish heritage of his mother. In a letter of 1911 to Joaquín Turina, written from Spain, Ravel signs himself off, ‘A thousand friendly greetings from your (or my) motherland’, and his letters from the Basque region or to relatives there are peppered with Basque phrases as well as Basque forms of place names.

Viñes and the early piano music

Ravel's closest and most influential childhood friendship, from the age of thirteen, was with Ricardo Viñes. A month older than Ravel, Viñes arrived from Barcelona with his mother in 1887 to study in Bériot's Conservatoire class (which Ravel joined in 1889); apparently it was the two mothers who first met, in 1888, with Mme Ravel delighted to discover a fellow-Spanish-speaker. In their teenage years, Viñes introduced Ravel to the prose poems of Gaspard de la nuit and then, in 1907, introduced him to Manuel de Falla (just before Ravel repaid Viñes handsomely for that introduction to Gaspard); above all, it was Viñes whose brilliant and subtle piano playing first brought a whole series of piano masterworks to the public.