Maurice Ravel Photo: Public Domain
- Prélude
- Forlane
- Menuet
- Rigaudon
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) began the suite that became 'Le Tombeau de Couperin' in 1914, as a tribute to the distinguished Baroque composer and keyboard player François Couperin. WWI intervened, Ravel enlisted as a truck and ambulance driver and the piece was put aside.
Following his discharge from a military hospital in 1917, Ravel completed the work in six movements based on 18th century dance forms. But the harrowing war scenes he had witnessed led him to dedicate each movement to a friend and fellow serviceman who had been killed in action. Three years later he orchestrated the work, omitting two of the movements.
But the music itself is not funereal in character. Ravel himself remarked, "the dead are sad enough in their eternal silence." Instead, according to one commentator, he evokes mankind's "eternal values of beauty and elegance ... the things we want to preserve ... in other words the opposite of war".
Recorded 22 September 2018, Wigram Airforce Museum, Christchurch by RNZ Concert
Sound engineer: Darryl Stack
