The Ravel Code

40 years ago, many of us around back then listened to Beatles songs in search of clues. We even believed, at one point, that Paul was dead and the clues were in Beatles songs, LP covers, and the like. Now, in 2009 along comes another theory.

We’ve heard the hypnotic Bolero, the masterpiece composed by Maurice Ravel. In another work, detectives are suggesting he encoded the name of a woman inside a piece of work entitled La Valse. Could it be? Anything’s possible. Here’s the story from the BBC…

The French composer, Maurice Ravel may have left a hidden message – a woman’s name – inside his work.

A sequence of three notes occurring repeatedly through his work spell out the name of a famous Parisian socialite says Professor of Music, David Lamaze.

He argues that the notes, E, B, A in musical notation, or “Mi-Si-La” in the French doh-re-mi scale, refer to Misia Sert, a close friend of Ravel’s.

Well known in art circles, she was painted by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Ravel never married, but Misia was married three times. Ravel composed some of his work while staying on a boat belonging to Misia and her second husband.

“It has never been done before. To take one person and to place them at the centre of a life-long work,” says Lamaze, who is working on a book about Ravel and Misia.

Lamaze believes Ravel was romantically inspired by Misia. “To put the feeling of love at the very central point of the creation without us knowing it. That is typical of Ravel, I think.”

Secretive

Ravel was notoriously secretive about all aspects of his life, from his compositional process to his private life.

The Mi-Si-La motif appears, in particular, at crucial phases of Ravel’s work La Valse, says Lamaze.

At the beginning, in depicting a man and woman dancing a Viennese Waltz, he entwines Mi-Si-La with A and E – thought to denote Ravel.

Initially planned in 1906 as a tribute to the waltzes of Johann Strauss, La Valse became a much darker work when he completed it in 1920, following his experiences serving in the World War I and the death of his mother.

BBC Radio 3 features Ravel’s The Waltz on Saturday at 1215 GMT or catch up later at BBC iPlayer .