A poignant homage to both Baroque French music and friends of the composer who died in WW1, it is a suite of 6 baroque-inspired dances for piano, each dedicated to a fallen soldier friend of Ravel. The composer also wrote orchestral versions of four the dances.
Ravel at first planned to write a suite of French dances for piano, as an homage to 18th French composers (especially Francois Couperin), but the WW1 broke out in 1914, and people he knew started dying in the struggle. So Ravel added dedications to his dead friends. The suite now had a dual purpose. Ravel was eager to join the fighting when the war started. But he was 39 years old, and frail, so he had to volunteer as an ambulance driver instead of becoming a pilot like he wanted to. He and his truck, named Adelaide, had lots of dangerous adventures. Under frequent heavy fire, he suffered from exhaustion and insomnia. Eventually his health broke down. so he went to stay at the family house of a woman he had been writing to about his war experiences (the stepmother of Jean Dreyfuss, the dedicatee of the fifth dance). He finished Le Tombeau de Couperin in this tranquil rural setting - a huge change from the adrenaline and explosions of the front lines!
The suite premiered in 1919 after the end of the war.
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