Speaking of question of the week - I am going to send two DVDs to Ruzanna Arustamyan of Armenia, for not only answering correctly that Ravel left the score of the 'Introduction et Allegro' at his shirt-makers, but for sending me the entire anecdote!
"In the spring of 1905, Ravel, then thirty years old, was invited to go on a yacht trip. The composer had just come through a bruising scandal: he had been denied the Prix de Rome for the third consecutive year, and the resulting outcry had forced the resignation of the director of the Paris Conservatory. Now he was anxious to put this strain behind him and go sailing to Amsterdam, then up the Rhine as far as Frankfurt, and back to Le Havre.
But complications stood in the way of Ravel’s yachting holiday. First, the Erard Company, maker of harps and pianos, had commissioned a work for harp that he had to finish before he could go. Usually a slow and meticulous worker, Ravel finished this piece in "a week of frantic work and three sleepless nights". And then there was the matter of proper clothing. Ravel was the most fastidiously dressed composer who ever lived (for his American tour of 1928, he would take along twenty pairs of pajamas and fifty pastel shirts); now he hurried to his tailor to order the proper clothes for a yacht trip. In his haste, Ravel left the manuscript of the Introduction and Allegro sitting on the tailor’s counter. Fearing the worst, he returned from the trip several weeks later to find that the tailor had carefully saved it for him."
[Link to lovely star clipart, pastel like Ravel's shirts, here!]
