from the 18th Ordre

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

from Le Tombeau de Couperin

Prélude (orchestra)

Fugue (piano)

Forlane (orchestra)

François Couperin (1668–1733)

from the 18th Ordre

Le Tic-toc-choc ou les Maillotons

Maurice Ravel

from Le Tombeau de Couperin

Rigaudon (orchestra)

François Couperin

from the 6th Ordre

Les barricades mistérieuses

Maurice Ravel

from Le Tombeau de Couperin

Menuet – Musette    – Menuet (orchestra)

Toccata (piano)

François Couperin has lived twice in French musical history – in his own day as the most important composer between Lully and Rameau and, after a long period of neglect,    when he was rediscovered in the early part of the 20th century as the embodiment of all the French musical virtues. It is true that he was strongly influenced by Corelli but Italian values had long been absorbed into French music anyway. The essential quality about Couperin, when the two leading French composers of the day turned to him for inspiration during the First World War, was that he represented a period when German influence on French musicians was minimal. Between 1915 and 1917, pointedly signing himself “musicien français,” Debussy completed three sonatas that clearly owe more to French baroque than Viennese classical precedent. At much the same time Ravel wrote his piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, which was to achieve even greater popularity when, in 1919, he    arranged four of the six movements for orchestra.

Ravel’s revival of the the term “tombeau” (literally “tomb”), which was customarily used by baroque composers for their tributes to late colleagues, was particularly appropriate to a work presented not only as a tribute to his favourite French harpsichord composer but also as a memorial to friends killed in the war. Even so, the memorial aspect is not prominent here, in spite of the dedication attached to each piece, and there is little deliberate allusion to the keyboard style of François Couperin. It would be difficult, for example, to trace a direct connection between the opening Prélude – particulary in the orchestral version to be performed on this occasion – and any specific piece by Couperin. While it delights in decorative melody rich in mordents and the occasional pre-classical harmony, it is a reminder of Ravel’s contention that Le Tombeau is a “tribute directed not so much to the individual figure of Couperin as the whole of French music of the 18th century.”

The Fugue, an essentially keyboard invention in its consistently three-part contrapuntal texture, Ravel did not consider suitable for orchestral treatment. Owing perhaps more to Bach than to Couperin, it is nevertheless a very personal inspiration, as poignant in its syncopated melodic line as it is academically authentic in construction. The Forlane does, on the other hand, relate directly to Couperin. Fascinated and amused by the Pope’s decree that the tango was immoral and that the forlane, a Venetian folk dance, should take its place, Ravel found an example by Couperin in his fourth Concert royal and adapted it to his own purpose. Retaining its rondeau structure he applied harmonies as sexy as any to be heard in a tango. The Forlane was the first item he wrote for what in 1914 he thought of as a “Suite française” and which became Le Tombeau de couperin on its completion in 1917.

One of the most famous of Couperin’s well over 200 harpsichord pieces is Le Tic-toc-choc ou les Maillotons from his 18th Ordre (a term he preferred to suite) published in his third collection of such works in 1722. Like so many of his programmatic pieces, it is adorned by a less than totally comprehensible title. The regular rhythms, quavers in the left hand and semi-quavers in the right, seem to explain the “tic-toc” part of it. But who were “les Maillotons”? The name suggests that they wielded mallets (maillets), which is not incompatible with the acoustic impression of a busy workshop. A pièce croisée brilliantly written for a two-manual harpsichord with the two hands deployed in the same octave at the same time, it is impossible to play on the piano without transposing either the left hand down or the right hand up an octave.

The fourth movement of the piano version of Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Rigaudon, was selected by Ravel as the closing item of the orchestral suite – a function to which it is well fitted by virtue of the robust rhythms and harmonies of outer sections effectively offset by a more poetic middle section. The rigaudon was a dance Couperin enjoyed as much as his French and English contemporaries. There is no trace of dance rhythms, however, in the fifth piece of Couperin’s 6th Ordre. Here, in the enigmatically entitled Les Barricades mistérieuses, four voices are “barricaded,” so to speak, in an arpeggiated texture (style brisé) in the lower half of the keyboard, the top line carrying a syncopated melodic line which mysteriously seems to grow out of the harmonies below it.

Long interested in the minuet – until, that is, the waltz replaced it in his affections –Ravel incorporated the last of his keyboard examples of the form in Le Tombeau de Couperin. The fifth movement of the piano version and the third of the orchestral suite, the Menuet is another tribute not so much to Couperin as to 18th-century French music in general. The central Musette in Dorian mode, which replaces the    trio section of the conventional minuet, is the one episode in the whole work which, as tension accumulates over a long-held pedal point, reflects something of the war-time stress under which it was written. As for the closing Toccata, like the Fugue an essentially piano inspiration, it has more to do with Liszt than with Couperin. Having devised this frankly virtuoso piece as a finale to the piano version of Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel himself never ventured to play it in public.

Gerald Larner © 2009