Maurice Ravel was a noted French composer of Swiss-Basque descent. Born in the latter half of the nineteenth century in a small village near Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France he was brought up in Paris since he was three month old. It is possible that he never went to school for his formal education; but began his training in music at home at the age of seven, being enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris at fourteen. Unfortunately, most of the faculty members failed to discover his genius, with the Conservatoire director taking up a hostile attitude towards him. Consequently, he was not only expelled twice from the Conservatoire, but his entries for Prix de Rome were rejected five times, creating a furor among liberal musicians and musicologists. Nonetheless, he continued to write, very soon establishing himself as a major composer, earning international laurel by the time, he was in his early thirties. A slow but meticulous composer, he wrote less than most of his contemporaries, earning critical success with each of them. To take his work to the wider public, he also had several of his works recorded.