Music Battle

http://www.youtube.com...I thank my opponent for the Khachaturian. It is a piece that explores the brief moment of reprieve before plunging into another deep war. My next piece was also written in the wake of a great war in which the country of the composer emerged victorious - and yet it was not a song of triumph, but an epitaph of the pain and suffering inflicted by the war.Le tombeau de Couperin was written by Maurice Ravel after the First World War. The second greatest Impressionist composer, Ravel's fame is dwarfed by his rival Debussy, who was the first to champion the genre. Ravel wrote four substantial works for piano solo, the other three being the Sonatine, Gaspard de la nuit and Miroirs. Yet Le tombeau de Couperin stands out among the four, not just in the solemness of the mood but also in the ostensible disparity between the tragic theme and the seemingly joyous notes on the piano - it commemorates the dead, and yet all its movements are marked by some variant of vif or allegro.Ravel was a patriot; when the country was in dire need, he felt duty bound to participate in her defence. Refused a position in the trenches, he applied to the hospital to take care of injured comrades, and later became a lorry driver. Although initially curious about adventure, this curiosity soon turned into anger towards the cruelties of war and commiseration for those affected by it. 'Oh le pessimisme stupide de ces imbéciles … cet égoïsme borné, ces opinions de taupes … de petits cris me dérangent : c’est une pauvre souris qui s’est prise au piège du rat.' (Oh the stupid pessimism of fools... This narrow egoism, these opinions of moles... Little cries bother me: It is a little mouse in a mousetrap.) After he was demobilised in 1917, he continued work on his compositions, particularly on Le tombeau of Couperin.The suite, both a homage to the French Baroque composers and a monument to commemorate seven fallen friends, comprises six movements, taking the form of a Baroque suite in the style of Rameau and Couperin. Although the modes and counterpoint featured were characteristic of seventeenth-century keyboard music, Ravel added many distinctly modern flavours to the pieces, which the listener can easily make out.The prélude is a beautifully-written perpetuum mobile dedicated to Jacques Charlot, who transcribed Ravel's famous duet Ma mère l'oye for piano solo. With its distinct falling and rising triplets played alternately by the two hands, the smooth melodic lines set the tone of the piece, with subtle melancholy embedded in the lively notes. The piece calms down with a carefully-crafted fugue which takes care of contrapunctual intricacies required by its genre and commemorates the son of Mme Cruppi, the dedicatee of Ravel's opera L'heure espagnole.The forlane, dedicated to a Basque painter, is a mysterious thing, with notes both legato and variously detached, painting a seemingly pastoral scene, as though rabbits were playing a game in the fields of a farm in the country. Yet as the movement progresses and the themes reappear, each time more solemnly than the last, we are forced to conclude that these imageries are but bitter reminiscences of the past. It cuts off with the direction sans ralentir, without slowing, which brings us to the assertive fortissimo introduction to the next movement. Here we can have a brief glimpse into Ravel's childhood as he presents his two childhood friends Pierre Pascal Gaudin. After the brilliant beginning, we can hear from the trio Ravel's sadness of their loss, which is reinforced by the introduction of the lively A-section.The menuet is dedicated Jean Dreyfus, at whose house Ravel stayed while recuperating and writing Le tombeau. With classical grace and elegance, the chordy, introspective movement displays his stronger emotions as the chords grow successively louder in the middle, revealing his anger at the cruelties of the war. Unlike its two predecessors, it ends very slowly, and readies the listener for the final, virtuosic movement: the toccata. The rapid, turbulent movement ends brilliantly, but this scarcely masks Ravel's pain, evident in the dark dissonance of the movement, at the loss of musicologist Joseph de Marliave. He was the husband of Marguerite Long, who premiered the piece.Inheriting the French tradition of subtletly, restraint and understatement from his teacher Gabriel Fauré, a close friend of Marliave's, Ravel grieves the deaths of his dear friends without the bomastics octaves or exceedingly sentimental passages of Liszt's Funérailles. When told that the piece was not sombre enough, he replied, 'Les morts sont assez tristes dans leur silence eternel' - the deceased are sad enough in their eternal silence. This is true. Le tombeau de Couperin does not need overly sentimental melodies to express sorrow. It only takes a thoughtful interpreter and an equally thoughtful listener for the atrocities of the Great War to be brought before our ears.