Musical ‘Magic Words’: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse

Abstract

Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 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’ of Frontispiece and 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's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse are 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.