Jeux d'eau in E Major

Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (Play of Water, or Fountains) is a five-minute, standalone piano piece that possibly proved more groundbreaking than its 26-year-old composer had anticipated. Later, he remarked that this piece was “the starting point of all pianistic innovations that have been noted in my work.” Jeux d’eau was published in 1901 while Ravel was studying at the Paris Conservatoire under Gabriel Fauré, to whom he dedicated the work. He had learned plenty from Fauré’s clarity, poise, and personal harmonic language; but this glittering virtuosity is closer to Liszt, especially his “Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este” (“Fountains at the Villa d’Este” from Années de pèlerinage III) and its sunlit streams of arpeggios. The work resembles a sonata movement, based around two contrasting themes: a filigree, elusive opening, followed by a more overtly melodic idea. Ravel wrote that it was “inspired by the noise of water and by the musical sounds which make one hear the sprays of water, the cascades and the brooks.” On the manuscript he wrote a line from the French Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier: “A river god laughing at the water that tickles him.”