Lessons in harmony

The year is 1907 and Maurice Ravel is one of the most admired but also most controversial composers in France. An aloof, dandyish figure, he is at the centre of a group of rebellious artists who call themselves the Apaches. It is considered a scandal that he has never won the Prix de Rome, despite entering compositions for it several times. As for his personal life, he has no known attachments, and no one seems to know whether his romantic leanings incline him towards men, or women, or neither.

In December, Ravel takes on a new pupil: a rising British composer who is two years his senior, and has come to Paris for three months specifically to study with him. His name is Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The two men could hardly be more different. Ralph is down-to-earth, married, and currently engaged in a long-term project of collecting forgotten British folk songs – a musical form in which Ravel has no interest. All they have in common is that in clear but indefinable ways, each of them seems an archetypal representative of his own country. One of them ‘typically French’, the other ‘so English’. And yet this will be the beginning of a deep friendship – one which will come to symbolise the new, tentative alliance between France and Britain in the run-up to the First World War.