Composed in 1917, initially as a suite for solo piano, Le Tombeau de Couperin was Maurice Ravel’s musical response to the devastation of the First World War.
The 17th century word, tombeau, refers to “a piece written as a memorial.” Ravel dedicated each of the suite’s movements to the memory of a friend who was lost in the war. The title references the French Baroque composer, François Couperin (1668-1733), yet according to Ravel, “the homage is directed less in fact to Couperin himself than to French music of the eighteenth century.”
Le Tombeau de Couperin is music of dreamy escape. The Baroque dances which make up the four-movement orchestral suite (Prélude, Forlane, Menuet and Rigaudon) inhabit an idealized world which never existed. They unfold with the grace and elegance of fleeting ghosts. When listeners complained that they were not appropriately somber and elegiac, Ravel replied, “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.”
If there is an underlying sense of melancholy in Le Tombeau de Couperin, it is the kind of sadness which comes from the realization of the fleeting nature of beauty. The 1919 orchestral suite offers a magical kaleidoscope of soft, sensuous colors. The oboe, with its pastoral connotations, is prominent.
2025 marks the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth. This February 2, 2018 performance features Spanish conductor Jaime Martín and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony: