M emory and M elancholy in the É pilogue of R avel ' s V alses nobles et sentimentales

Abstract

ABSTRACT When conceived as the presence of the past, memory can be said to pervade the music of Maurice Ravel. The number and range of these acts of musical memory – including pieces modelled on the medievalballade, the Renaissancechanson, the Baroquetombeau, the Classicalsonatineand the Romanticpoème, among others – seem at first glance to testify to a uncomplicated relation between past and present which, upon closer review, is revealed to be problematic. One of the most complex and captivating artistic testaments to what Andreas Huyssen has called ‘twilight memory’– not only in Ravel's music, but in Western modernism as a whole – is the eighth and final waltz of his piano suiteValses nobles et sentimentales(1911). In this waltz, which Ravel entitled ‘Épilogue’, the hope of making the past present is reborn with each of its numerous thematic recollections, only to be dashed repeatedly by the melancholy knowledge of its impossibility. In the present study, affinities between the Épilogue's musical behaviours and philosophical accounts of memory by Bergson, Jankélévitch and Nora are explored, along with the compositional precedents established by Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy and others.

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