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In Search of a Consolatory Past Grief and Embodied Musical Memory

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In Search of a Consolatory Past Grief and Embodied Musical Memory 4 In Search of a Consolatory Past Grief and Embodied Musical Memory The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that ma- terial object will give us) of which we have no inkling. — Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913) In September 1919, Maurice Ravel wrote to Manuel de Falla to offer his condolences on the death of de Falla’s mother. He confided that, because he was still mourning his own mother’s death, he remained unable to get back to com- posing, even while feeling that “doing so would in any case be the best consola- tion, rather than forgetting.”1 When he began working again two months later, Ravel returned to a piece he had begun in 1906 while living with his mother: La Valse. Just before New Year’s Eve of 1919, Ravel wrote to Ida Godebska, “I’m thinking about it even more, since I have resumed work, that I no longer have this dear silent presence enveloping me with her infinite tenderness.”2 While in instances like this one working on La Valse forced Ravel to realize his mother’s absence, at other times he chose to return to La Valse in order to console him- self with memories of his mother revived specifically through musical creation. He wrote to Hélène Kahn- Casella in January 1920, “I think of her every day, in every minute. Above all now that I’ve begun working again, which takes me back to the happy moments when I left her.”3 For Ravel there was something in the feeling of working on La Valse— whether hearing its familiar melodies as he ed- ited the score, sensing its well- known rhythms in his fingers as he played it on the piano, or experiencing the familiar ways that his throat vibrated as he hummed its tunes— that allowed him to recall more vividly his mother’s presence during the years of mourning that followed her passing. 1 Ravel to Manuel de Falla, September 19, 1919, in A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, ed. Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 193. 2 Ravel to Ida Godebska, December 27, 1919, in ibid., 195. 3 Ravel to Hélène Kahn- Casella, January 15, 1920, in “Soixante-deux lettres de Maurice Ravel à Hélène et Alfredo Casella,” ed. Jean Roy, Cahiers Maurice Ravel 1 (1985): 59–111; 79. Resonant Recoveries. Jillian C. Rogers, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190658298.003.0005 In Search of a Consolatory Past 199 This musical- memorial encounter that Ravel created through working on La Valse offers an evocative starting point for investigating relationships between memory, mourning, music, and consolation for civilians and soldier-musicians in interwar France. Ravel was one of many musicians who adopted a style of mourning during and after World War I centered on the preservation of vivid memories of lost loved ones. Some of the most well- known musicians in in- terwar France, from Nadia Boulanger, Emma Debussy, and Francis Poulenc, to cellist Maurice Maréchal and pianist Marguerite Long, expressed the impor- tance of continuing to viscerally remember and mourn for extended periods of time friends and family members who had died. Their responses to loss reflect a broader cultural, psychological phenomenon that I term here, after the psychol- ogist Vamik Volkan, “perennial” mourning— a kind of prolonged mourning that was prevalent in France after 1914.4 Freud’s work on trauma, mourning, and melancholia is significant to understanding the history of psychological conceptions of these phenomena, and I will briefly address his work on these topics in what follows. However, in line with my ground-up approach to un- derstanding trauma in interwar French contexts, I have chosen in this chapter to focus on theoretical conceptions of grief and trauma that would have been socioculturally relevant to my historical subjects, theories that resonate best with what I have observed in the letters, diaries, music, and memoirs, as well as other objects and practices belonging to, written by, or enacted by the French musicians I discuss here. To this end, the work of psychologists and theorists Volkan, Christopher Bollas, and David Aberbach provide the theoretical frame for my analysis in this chapter. My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate the ways in which music held im- portance as a memory- focused corporeal technology of consolation for many in- terwar French musicians who became perennial mourners in the wake of World War I. French musicians’ archival collections, memoirs, letters, diaries, concert programs, and musical compositions demonstrate that music played a crucial role in how they expressed, coped with, and found consolation amidst grief. For many who lived through World War I, music was especially evocative because of its presumed ability— as evinced in popular works by contemporary authors such as Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust— to recapture the feeling of the past. Musicologists of French musical modernism such as Jeanice Brooks, Kimberly Francis, Tamara Levitz, Deborah Mawer, Rachel Moore, Jann Pasler, and 4 Vamik Volkan, “Not Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies,” in On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” eds. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz (London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007), 90– 109; Volkan and Elizabeth Zintl, Life after Loss: The Lessons of Grief (London: Karnac, 2015); Volkan, Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice, and Border Psychology (London: Karnac, 2017). 200 Resonant Recoveries Michael Puri have addressed some of the ways in which French musicians mean- ingfully engaged with memory in their compositions and musical practices, sometimes as a means of mourning dead loved ones, former homelands, or times past.5 Throughout this chapter, I build on this scholarship not only by articu- lating the broad range of musical activities that functioned as memorial practices and the wide scope of people who used music in this way, but also by empha- sizing how musical- memorial practices offer yet another way— in addition to sonic vibrations and rhythmically regular bodily movement—in which interwar musicians understood music making as an embodied means of processing trauma in interwar France. Although immersing oneself in an ultimately unreachable past could be painful, French musicians were able to find consolation in creating music that permitted them to recall and re-enact previous instances of music making with loved ones. Embodied musical remembering provided opportunities not only to pay tribute to the dead, but also to transform emotional and psychic states in ways that were comforting, even if only temporarily. As I show, French interwar musicians’ understandings of music making as a corporeal-memorial practice are evident not only in their writings, but also in the musical activities in which they chose to participate after the deaths of loved ones. In this chapter, I con- centrate on the wartime and interwar musical activities of Marguerite Long, Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, and Darius Milhaud in particular, which re- veal that music making of all kinds— from composing and performing to prac- ticing, score reading, editing, and transcribing— provided these musicians with access to memories not only of the past, but also of the loved ones who had lived with them in their remembered pasts. In this context, mourning, espe- cially as manifested in embodied memory, emerges as a paramount organizing principle in how French interwar musicians approached making music in their everyday lives. 5 Jeanice Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kimberly Francis, Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Deborah Mawer, “Balanchine’s La Valse: Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies,” The Opera Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2007): 90–116; Rachel Moore, “The Legacy of War: Conceptualising Wartime Musical Life in the Post- War Musical Press, 1919– 1920,” in Music Criticism in France, 1918– 1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy, eds. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2018), 245– 266; Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 493– 546, 595– 642, 695– 700; Michael Puri, “Memory, Pastiche, and Aestheticism in Ravel and Proust,” in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56–73; Puri, Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). In Search of a Consolatory Past 201 World War I, Perennial Mourning, and the Memorial Potential of Linking Objects Interwar French musicians lived at a time when memory was a significant focus in psychological discourse. From the 1890s through World War I and until today, psychologists have understood the psychic processing of trauma as intimately intertwined with memory. In 1889 the Parisian psychologist Pierre Janet argued that trauma often manifested in disturbances in memory processing, noting the persistence of “subconscious fixed ideas”— memories that have been split off from consciousness, producing the recurrence of painful and often inexplicable emotions.6 Janet’s contemporary
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