Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye — The Children Behind Mother Goose

Classical Music Through Human Connections #14

Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye — Mother Goose.

Sleeping Beauty, Little Thumb, Beauty and the Beast — familiar fairy-tale worlds appear one after another in music of remarkable delicacy and imagination.

Today, Ma mère l’Oye is also widely known in its orchestral form. But it did not begin as a large concert work.

Its story begins with two children in a family close to Ravel: Mimie and Jean Godebski.

Ravel and the Godebski Children

Ravel was a close friend of Cipa and Ida Godebski and spent time with their children, Mimie and Jean.

He was fascinated by childhood, toys, fairy tales, miniature objects and mechanical inventions. In the Godebski household, this imaginative side of Ravel found a natural setting.

On September 20, 1908, he completed the first piece, Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant — Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty — for piano four hands.

Four further pieces followed in 1910, creating the five-movement suite now known as Ma mère l’Oye.

The printed score makes the connection unmistakable. On the title page appears the dedication:

“Pour Mimie et Jean Godebski.”
For Mimie and Jean Godebski.

Five Fairy-Tale Pieces for Four Hands

The original piano-duet suite consists of five movements:

1. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant — Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty
2. Petit Poucet — Little Thumb
3. Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes — Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas
4. Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête — Conversation of Beauty and the Beast
5. Le jardin féerique — The Fairy Garden

Ravel drew on stories by Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.

The striking feature of the music is not virtuoso display but restraint. Ravel deliberately simplified his musical language in order to evoke the poetry of childhood.

The textures are often transparent, the melodies concise, and the gestures economical. Yet within that apparent simplicity, every harmony, register and color has been carefully chosen.

The Children in the Dedication Did Not Give the Public Premiere

Ma mère l’Oye was written for Mimie and Jean Godebski, but they were not the performers who introduced the complete suite to the public.

The first public performance took place on April 20, 1910, at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, during the inaugural concert of the Société musicale indépendante.

At the piano were two young musicians: eleven-year-old Jeanne Leleu and fourteen-year-old Geneviève Durony.

This gives the work an unusual human story.

Mimie and Jean inspired the music.

Jeanne and Geneviève carried it onto the public stage.

A work created within the private world of friendship and childhood was passed from one pair of children to another before reaching its first audience.

Ravel and His Teacher Gabriel Fauré

There is another connection in this story.

Ravel entered Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1897. Fauré recognized the originality of the younger composer, whose musical language was already moving beyond many academic conventions.

Fauré had also written a piano-duet suite connected with a child: the Dolly Suite, inspired by Hélène Bardac, known as “Dolly.”

Teacher and pupil therefore created two very different works for piano four hands, both connected with children in families close to them.

It is a small but fascinating link between Fauré and Ravel: personal relationships became the starting point for music that eventually entered the international repertoire.

From the Piano to the Orchestra

The journey of Ma mère l’Oye did not end with the piano duet.

In 1911, Ravel orchestrated the five pieces himself.

The transformation reveals one of his greatest gifts: orchestral color.

In Petit Poucet, the orchestra evokes a child wandering through the forest. In Laideronnette, delicate percussion and unusual instrumental colors create an imagined exotic world. In Beauty and the Beast, contrasting instrumental voices give the two characters distinct personalities.

Ravel does not rely on sheer orchestral weight. Instead, he creates atmosphere through carefully balanced combinations of woodwinds, strings, harp, celesta and percussion.

Then Came the Ballet

In 1911, another person entered the history of the work: Jacques Rouché, director of the Théâtre des Arts in Paris.

At his request, Ravel transformed Ma mère l’Oye into a ballet.

He did more than simply arrange the five existing pieces. A Prelude, the Danse du rouet et scène and connecting interludes were added so that the separate fairy-tale scenes could become a continuous theatrical work.

The ballet was first performed at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris on January 28, 1912, conducted by Gabriel Grovlez.

In only a few years, music created for two children at one piano had expanded into a work for the concert hall and then into a complete theatrical world.

Why Simple Music Can Be So Difficult to Play Well

One of the most revealing things about performing Ma mère l’Oye is that musical depth does not depend on the number of notes.

The writing often looks simple. The textures are clear and the melodic lines are rarely crowded.

For that very reason, every detail becomes exposed.

How does one note lead into the next? How much space should a phrase have? How closely should two players match their sound? Where should the music breathe?

In a duet, even a small difference in tone or direction can change the character of an entire phrase.

Ma mère l’Oye therefore offers a different kind of difficulty from overtly virtuosic music. It asks the performers to listen closely and to create color with very little material.

A Journey That Began with Children

In 1908, Ravel wrote a small pavane for Mimie and Jean Godebski.

By 1910 it had become a five-movement suite, introduced to the public by two other young musicians.

In 1911 the music entered the orchestra, and in 1912 it reached the ballet stage.

Without Mimie and Jean, Ma mère l’Oye might never have taken the same form.

Without Jeanne Leleu, Geneviève Durony and Jacques Rouché, its later history might also have been very different.

Ma mère l’Oye is another example of music whose life was shaped by human connections.

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Ma mère l’Oye for Two Flutes

Japan Duo Notes has arranged all five movements of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye for two flutes.

The arrangement is written for two flutes only, with no piano, while preserving as much as possible of the delicacy, transparency and fairy-tale atmosphere of the original music.

Just as Ravel reduced his musical language to evoke the world of childhood, this music invites two players to concentrate on tone, phrasing, balance and the way their sounds blend together.

Related Articles

• Fauré’s Sicilienne, Op. 78 — The Forgotten Stage Music That Became a Classic
• Saint-Saëns’s The Swan — From a Private Musical Gathering to the World Stage

Sources

• The Morgan Library & Museum — Maurice Ravel, Ma mère l’Oye: cinq pièces enfantines, first edition.
• Philharmonie de Paris — materials on the composition and first performance of Ma mère l’Oye.
• IRCAM — Maurice Ravel, Ma mère l’Oye, ballet catalogue entry.
• Opéra national de Paris — Maurice Ravel biography.