Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was born to a music-loving family in Ciboure, France, to a Basque mother and a Swiss engineer father.

He moved to Paris with his family as an infant. It soon became clear that Maurice was musically gifted, so his father arranged for him to have piano lessons with a well-known teacher. In 1889, aged just 14, he entered France's most important musical college, the Paris Conservatoire.

Ravel left the Conservatoire in 1895, but went back in 1897 to study composition with Gabriel Fauré and counterpoint and orchestration with Andreé Gédalge. However, Ravel never got a prize for composition, so he left Fauré's class in 1903.