Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire by Michael J. Puri (review)

Michael Puri’s marvelous book follows a spate of recent scholarship on Maurice Ravel. Collections such as Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (ed. Peter Kaminsky [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011]) and Ravel Studies (ed. Deborah Mawer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]), as well as individual studies such as Stephan Zank’s Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009) and Roger Nichols’s recent biography Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012) have greatly enriched the field of Ravel studies over the past few years. Strikingly absent from these contributions, however, is any discussion of the relationship between Ravel’s music and the Decadence, a late nineteenth-century artistic and cultural phenomenon. Ravel came of age in the era of Decadent authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, and the composer frequently acknowledged their influence upon him. Puri’s is the first text to link Ravel’s music explicitly with the Decadent movement and to develop analytical techniques that examine it music in terms of Decadent aesthetics. Puri considers musical Decadence primarily in terms of time and memory, an approach that accords well with the analytical techniques he develops.

Ravel the Decadent’s 201 pages of text are structured into six concise chapters, in addition to an introduction on “Memory, Decadence, and Music” and a concluding section with the title “In the Footsteps of the Faun.” In his introduction, Puri provides a brief overview of the Decadent movement in France and explains the more general concept of lowercase-“d” decadence as a “style that emphasizes the detail at the expense of the whole, thereby reflecting in art the increasing isolation of the individual within modern society” (pp. 6–7). Puri follows Nietzsche in identifying the dialectical nature of D/decadence: its tendency towards simultaneous conflicting impulses, such as the transhistorical and the historically contingent, the real and the imaginary, or the natural and the artificial. Later in his book, Puri identifies this conflict in Ravel’s music: for example, in the dialectical relationship between the idyll and the bacchanal movements of his ballet Daphnis et Chloé.

Unsurprisingly, Puri’s writing is most evocative when he discusses Decadence’s relationship to memory and desire, defining memory as “either the past become present or the ability to make the past present” (p. 15). He contrasts “voluntary” and “involuntary” memory, describing the latter as unconscious and brought on by sensation rather than intellect. Evoking Baudelaire, Puri compares “involuntary memory” to “electric shocks, entering through the body and startling the rememberer out of the oblivion brought on by the dulling effect of the mundane and the quotidian” (p. 16). Thus, for Puri, “involuntary memory” is a decidedly Decadent experience. After a brief discussion of “involuntary” memory in Proust, Puri concludes his introduction with an analysis of Ravel’s Sonatina. He sees in the second movement’s Minuet, with its evocation of the Verlainian fête galante, a kind of self-conscious nostalgia for the past—a form of voluntary memory—that then sets the stage for a disruptive episode of involuntary memory.

The book’s first chapter explores the ways that Ravel’s finales wrangle with what Puri calls the “fundamental ambivalence” of thematic cyclicism, “its potential both to foster and to undermine a sense of formal coherence” (p. 32). For contextual and theoretical grounding, Puri draws upon both Proust’s notion of “intermittence” from his À la recherche du temps perdu and Vincent d’Indy’s idea of “synthetic unity” from the second book of his Cours de composition musicale. This study of musical intermittence illustrates both the “relative stasis and impermanence of memories” in music and the “felicitous moments” which such involuntary memories create (p. 48 and p. 33, respectively).

In chapter 2, Puri connects several seemingly disparate pieces: the Introduction et Allegro, a septet structured into an elegy to the...