![]() ![]() Ravel’s life and artistic production were deeply linked to his childhood memories: little wooden horses, little mechanical robot dolls – many of the ornaments in Montfort L’Amaury are reminiscent of childhood memories. He was an intellectual dandy too – unusual artistic contexts excited him, such as Japanese art or jazz, (Léon). He was childish, a dandy, loved beauty, and he was keen on fashion (Mahler) and on the inventions of the Twentieth century (Mercier). He tended to be ruggedly individualistic, his relationships with others were social but distant, and his choice of friends was based on affinity but did not imply emotional reciprocity. From his letters we may also deduce that his intelligence was analytic-speculative, with a tendency to classify and to isolate individual elements for use in methodical intellectual construction. Ravel was a brilliant, intelligent, ironic, self-controlled, shy person, revealing obsessive personality traits – constant striving for order, and perfectionism (Achache) – as confirmed in his letters. After 1932, relevant events can be traced in Ravel’s life to reveal the progressive decline leading to his death in 1937.Īspects of the Personality of Maurice Ravel Yet I was incapable of doing anything, except sleep and eat” (Baeck). In 1932 Ravel was injured in a taxi accident in Paris some months later he wrote to De Falla that the accident “…was not so serious: chest bruises and some facial cuts. A complete diagnosis of Ravel’s final illness is still an enigma, since no post-mortem was performed moreover, some documents concerning Ravel’s health during the war years – his health had been fragile since his youth – are situated in the Army Medical Archives at Limoges, and are inaccessible until 2025.Īfter some remarks about Ravel’s personality, we shall review the neuropsychological literature produced about the case, discuss it, and provide a neuroscientific perspective on the tragic decline of a genius. Researchers have been studying the Ravel case since 1948. In 1948 Théophile Alajouanine, an eminent neurologist of the last century, published a very relevant article about aphasia and artistic creation, a landmark publication on this topic, concerned in part with Ravel’s final illness.
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