Musical ‘Magic Words’: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel'sLe Tombeau de Couperin, FrontispiceandLa Valse

Jillian C Rogers

doi:10.1017/s1479409821000306

Abstract

Upon hearing Ravel'sLe Tombeau de Couperinin 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ ofFrontispieceand La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an especially emotionally trying period of Ravel's life – lead to questions concerning relationships between Ravel's music and traumatic expression. Although Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel's trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France.In this article I suggest that Ravel'sLe Tombeau de Couperin, FrontispiceandLa Valseare musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and his mother's death. I place primary and archival sources such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Abraham and Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, I read Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their trauma. By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, I suggest that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.

Highlights

Historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother’s death in 1917
Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel’s trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France
Numerous late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychologists such as David Aberbach and Christopher Bollas have observed that many people who survive traumatic experiences either consciously or unconsciously repeat and work through their

Summary

Musicalized Traumatic Memory in Frontispice

Like Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s Frontispice can be read as commentary on the repression that was part and parcel of trauma in interwar France. Ravel embeds one-armedness – a condition experienced by many soldiers and civilians wounded during World War I to which many French men and women bore witness in the years during and after the war – into his composition.[76] It is Frontispice’s music that provides listeners with the clearest indications of this piece’s connection to wartime trauma. Throughout Frontispice each of these musical ideas maintains its profile as Ravel layers them one on top of another, creating an overpowering and inescapable sound-world suggestive of an unstoppable influx of sonic memories This layering of voices, along with an increasing diminution of note values throughout the piece, creates a steady crescendo, which becomes overwhelming in Frontispice’s tenth bar. Soldiers who would have otherwise been unable to play the piece – especially if they had only mediocre piano skills or could not find two other performers to join them – to perform a musicalized version of their traumatic experiences or symptoms that acknowledged their situations, and was perhaps just removed enough from the reality of traumatic experience to help them process their trauma.[88]

Memory and the Cryptonymy of Irreversible Loss in La Valse

Conclusion