Grieving through Music in Interwar France: Maurice Ravel and his Circle, 1914-1934

Jillian Rogers
Musicology
UC Los Angeles

Many scholars of French musical modernism have demonstrated music’s role in negotiating politics and national identity after World War I.  Jillian Roger’s dissertation contributes a new thread to these conversations by showing that Ravel’s post-World War I compositions were also sites for the emotional, physical, and political negotiation of grief. Ravel was deeply affected by the losses he sustained during World War I, and he wrote much of his postwar oeuvre for friends who had lost loved ones during the war’s tenure. His correspondence, diaries, photograph albums, and scrapbook are examined in order to determine what mourning meant for Ravel and his peers, and how music helped them cope with grief. Through a combination of music analysis, cultural history, and interpretive approaches drawn from psychoanalytic and affect theory, she reveals how Ravel engaged in a burgeoning discourse on the therapeutic benefits of musical performance in the music he wrote after 1914. She argues that in Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and Frontispice (1918) Ravel critiqued nationalistic prescriptions for public mourning, while in La Valse, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges(1926), and Boléro (1928), he participated in fin-de-siècle discourses on memory and the ability of objects to psychically and sensually “keep alive” dead loved ones. In other compositions, like the Piano Concerto in G Major (1932), and the Sonatas for Violin and Violincello (1920) and Violin and Piano (1927), Ravel provided his performers with opportunities to cope with grief through bodily movement.