In 1914 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) made sketches for a suite of music for piano that would pay homage to the French Baroque keyboard suite from the time of François Couperin. Unfortunately the Great War intervened and Ravel set the project aside.

Ravel had been exempted from military service when he was 20 because of his general physical weakness, and he was 39 when the Great War began. Feeling an obligation to help with the war effort in some way, in 1915 he managed to enlist in an artillery unit as a truck and ambulance driver. It was a dangerous, exhausting, and stressful assignment, and as his health suffered he was discharged from the army in 1917. While recuperating at his godmother’s country house, Ravel returned to writing music, beginning with the French suite for piano.
The little homage to Couperin that Ravel had long envisioned now carried the horrible weight of tragedy. As he completed the work Ravel inscribed each of its six movements to the memory of those friends who had fallen in wartime service. The Prélude he dedicated to Jacques Charlot, the Fugue to Jean Gruppi, the Forlane to Gabriel Deluc, the Rigaudon to the brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, the Menuet to Jean Dreyfus, and the Toccata to the eminent musicologist Joseph de Marliave. The work is thus one of Ravel’s most personal creations.
The piano version of Le tombeau de Couperin was completed in 1917 and in 1919 Ravel orchestrated four of the six movements. The orchestral suite was first performed on February 28, 1920, in Paris.

June 8 1912 Premiere of Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. PIC Set design by Léon Bakst

MAR 7 1875 Joseph-Maurice Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, 18 kilometres from the Spanish border.