There are four minutes of Ravel that I hope I never get over.
“Le Jardin Féerique,” usually translated as the enchanted or fairy garden, barely breathes into life as the apotheosis of the childhood stories that Ravel gathered under the title “Ma Mère l’Oye,” or “Mother Goose.” Ravel wrote nothing more magical, and perhaps nothing so moving.
It begins in a hushed, hesitant atmosphere, an ineffably fragile melody sighing to a gentle, poetic accompaniment. Soon, that gives way to a tender duet for solo violin and viola, a halo of woodwinds around them, the strum of a harp and the chime of a celesta behind. Slowly the music drifts upward, melting back into the initial melody as it gathers itself to end in incandescent, irresistible C major, percussion sparkling through the string canopy of your dreams.
“I so enjoy looking at the faces of the musicians when they’re producing all that sound,” the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen said in an interview. “It is just a deep, deep, deep, spiritual, sensual, tactile pleasure. I think every composer, deep down, would like to be able to do something like that.”
For many listeners, “Le Jardin Féerique” casts an unusual spell. Why?
Often said to be a childlike man himself, Ravel wrote the first of the “Ma Mère” pieces, “Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant,” in 1908, as a piano duet about Sleeping Beauty for two young children to whom he told fairy tales. In 1910, he added four more miniatures to make the children a suite, basing three of them on old stories that he quoted in the score, and ending with “Le Jardin Féerique,” which had no such story attached. By 1911, Ravel had orchestrated the suite, and the next year he elaborated it into a ballet as well, his musical garden blooming into a glade for Sleeping Beauty, who awakens at dawn, with Prince Charming close at hand.