Analysis of Ravel's Menuet sur le Nom d'Haydn

Maurice Ravel’s Menuet sur le Nom d’Haydn, composed in 1909 as part of a series of compositions commissioned by a French magazine from composers including Debussy and d’Indy, is at first glance quite a simple piece. The piece, like the others commissioned with it, is written based on the theme “B-A-D-D-G”, a musical transcription of Haydn’s name using the German tradition of “H” being what we would call “B natural”, “D” and “A” being their respective pitch names, and Y and N corresponding to where they would fall if the scale were repeated through the alphabet (“D” and “G” respectively). This progression of notes appears repeatedly through the song, a total of 8 times, sometimes in the melody, others in the background. In measure 19, in the left hand, Ravel even uses the same theme backwards (G-D-D-A-B); in measure 25 he intentionally uses the notes achieved by rotating the staff of the original melody 180 degrees (D-G-G-C#-B).

The piece, at fifty four measures long, is in rounded binary form (AABA, the form traditionally used in minuets), a form which Haydn used extensively in his symphonies, sonatas, and other instrumental works. The “A” theme itself, and much of the “B” theme, is analyzable in terms of tonal harmony, though even in these parts Ravel stretches the rules to fit 20^th century influences, including Jazz. For instance, the first two chords, “ii⁷” and “iii⁷” in the key of G major, would almost never be seen next to each other in tonal harmony. Most of the chords in the first theme have at least a seventh added on to them, sometimes even an altered seventh as in the “V” major-major seventh chords in bars five and six, moving towards the half cadence in measure eight. On the first beat of measure seven, Ravel even employs a vi¹¹ chord, which would essentially never be seen in classical period music.

The “B” section, however, moves into much more complex areas than the “A” section. It rapidly modulates through a series of keys, and though up to measure 38, it maintains a fairly strong tonal center with-in each two or four bar phrase, the seventh and ninth chords obscure much of the connection to traditional harmonic patterns. Beginning in measure 38, however, Ravel combines a simple upward chromatic scale with a series of descending chordal patterns in the right hand and ascending chordal patterns in the left hand, creating an incredibly complex and dissonant harmony, all over a B pedal, which builds tension and volume into the return of the A theme at the end of bar 43.

The final iteration of the “A” theme is similar to the first and second iterations, although the second half of the theme goes briefly into C major (IV of G major), leading into the last six bars, a coda which modulates through the keys a minor and A flat major (ii and the Neapolitan of G major respectively), into the final cadence in G major. Though these key changes are direct and fairly chromatic, the idea of altering the second theme going into the coda is absolutely a device that was used during Haydn’s lifetime. Menuet sur le Nom d’Haydn is a piece that is at once modern and classical; the ornamentations, phrase structure, and most of the tonal movement serves the same purpose as the music of a Haydn minuet would (though Ravel’s minuet is far less “danceable”) tonally, but the chromaticism and “jazz chords” give it a deeply modern edge.