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 Struggle.
The seventeenth century phrase, tombeau, refers to “a chunk written as a memorial.” Ravel devoted every of the suite’s actions to the reminiscence of a pal who was misplaced within the struggle. The title references the French Baroque composer, François Couperin (1668-1733), but based on Ravel, “the homage is directed much less the truth is 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 by no means existed. They unfold with the grace and class of fleeting ghosts. When listeners complained that they weren’t appropriately somber and elegiac, Ravel replied, “The lifeless are unhappy sufficient, of their everlasting silence.”
If there may be an underlying sense of melancholy in Le Tombeau de Couperin, it’s the type of disappointment which comes from the belief of the fleeting nature of magnificence. The 1919 orchestral suite provides a magical kaleidoscope of sentimental, sensuous colours. The oboe, with its pastoral connotations, is outstanding.
2025 marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Ravel’s delivery. This February 2, 2018 efficiency options Spanish conductor Jaime Martín and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony:
