In the years 1905-14 Ravel produced some of his finest works, including the piano pieces Miroirs, Gaspard de la nutt, Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose), and Valses nobles et sentimentales, the extraordinarily accomplished Piano Trio, the orchestral Rapsodieespagnole the ballet Daphnis et Chloe, and the opera L’heure espagnole (Spanish Time).

Following the outbreak of World War I, Ravel volunteered for the air corps but was turned down after failing his physical (he was underweight and had a hernia). Eventually he saw action as a driver in the motorized transport, but in 1916 he came down with dysentery and had to be hospitalized. During a long recuperation in Paris, he completed the piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin, dedicating each of its six movements to a friend or acquaintance who had fallen in the war. The experience of war, his illness, and his mother’s death, early in 1917, cast a pall, and it is tempting to see the first major work Ravel produced after the war—the menacing and surprisingly violent symphonic poem La valse— as an effort to exorcise some demons. For Serge Koussevitzky he created a brilliantly fantastic orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922, but the main work of the early 1920s was the remarkable operatic evocation of childhood dreams and fears, L’enfant et les sortileges (The Child and the Magic Spells).
 

Ravel’s postwar interest in jazz and in such coloristic devices as bitonality stimulated him further, markedly influencing certain pages in his famous orchestral showpiece, Bolero, from 1928. Between 1929 and 1931 Ravel worked simultaneously on two piano concertos—one in D for the left hand, brooding and focused, and one in G major, airy and effervescent. The latter Ravel intended for his own use; its scoring is brilliant, and there is a jazzy flavor to much of the writing that lends a sultry feel to the concerto’s quieter pages and imparts a wonderful vibrancy to its climaxes. The left-hand concerto is a striking contrast in its solemnity, power, and predominantly dark orchestral textures. In the fall of 1932 Ravel was in a traumatic taxi accident that may have triggered the onset of Pick’s disease; he experienced increasing debilitation and died five years later, after brain surgery.