Maurice Ravel

Born into a cultivated, music-loving bourgeois family, to a Swiss father and a Basque mother, Maurice Ravel showed a talent for the piano. He entered the Paris Conservatoire. A pupil of Gabriel Fauré and Emmanuel Chabrier, he made friends with Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé and later Manuel de Falla, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Serge de Diaghilev, Colette and Toulouse-Lautrec. He failed to win the Grand Prix de Rome because of Jules Massenet, and fought in the First World War at Verdun. He refused the Légion d'honneur ("but all his music accepts it", said Erik Satie). A committed bachelor, he lived alone in Montfort-l'Amaury. Now famous, he made a triumphant tour of the United States in 1928. Insomniac, he suffered from what he called "cerebral anemia". After an accident while riding in a cab, he stopped composing and died following an unsuccessful brain operation.