The French composer Maurice Joseph Ravel (1875-1937) wrote works in an impressionistic idiom that are characterized by elegance and technical perfection.

Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875, at Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées. From his Swiss father, a gifted engineer and inventor of a petroleum engine and combustion machine, he seems to have inherited that feeling for precision which dominates his scores and which once prompted Igor Stravinsky to characterize them (not unsympathetically) as the products of a "Swiss watchmaker." From his Basque mother Ravel learned to love the Basque and Spanish cultures. In later life there would be the summers spent in Saint-Jean-de-Luz (twin city of Ciboure). There would also be, spanning his entire creative life, works on Spanish themes: Habañera (1895) for piano, later orchestrated and incorporated in the Rapsodie espagnole (1907); Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899); Alborada del gracioso (1905); the opera L'Heure...