1. Origins Having chosen three of the poems from Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (1836, pub. post. 1842), Ravel composed his own Gaspard de la Nuit (1908), premiered by Ricardo Viñes in Paris (1909). Said Ravel, "Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems. My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words." The frontispiece of the first