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

The publication of Michael J. Puri’s Ravel the Decadent represents a significant advance in the rapidly-changing field of Ravel scholarship. While numerous books on the composer have appeared in recent years—notably, Stephen Zank’s monograph on irony in Ravel (University of Rochester Press, 2009), edited volumes by Deborah Mawer (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Peter Kaminsky (University of Rochester Press, 2011), and a magisterial new biography by Roger Nichols (Yale University Press, 2011)—Puri’s study is the first detailed examination of the relationship between Ravel’s music and the French Decadence.

Commentators have most commonly associated Ravel with impressionism, Symbolism or (neo)classicism, but Puri contends that Decadence offers a more promising framework for understanding the composer’s oeuvre. Ravel came of age during the heyday of this cultural and aesthetic movement (c. 1880–1900), whose members and precursors included Mallarmé, Huysmans, Wilde, Baudelaire and Poe. From a variety of Decadent topics and stances, Puri focuses on all three of the book’s subtitles: memory, sublimation and desire. These themes, Puri suggests, are closely interrelated in Ravel’s work: “Memory and sublimation converge in the idealization of the past, sublimation transforms expressions of desire from crude to seemly, and nostalgic desire engages memory to relive the glory days” (4). At times, the book’s rhetoric seems needlessly deterministic—Puri claims that “Ravel could hardly do otherwise than to incorporate [Decadent ideas] into his music” (4) because he grew up at the fin de siècle—but this is a minor semantic quibble. By drawing on an impressive range of critical, historical and theoretical methodologies, Puri presents a compelling model for how to engage with this enigmatic composer’s work.

Puri is especially persuasive in his discussion of memory, which he defines as “either the past become present or the ability to make the past present” (15). He evokes the dichotomy of “voluntary” and “involuntary” memory outlined in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, wherein the latter is triggered by sensory experiences (such as the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea) rather than by intellect. Midway through the central movement of Ravel’s Sonatine, for instance, a serendipitous alignment between past and present material precipitates a shock of involuntary memory—“an unexpected, miraculous event” (41)—as the composer recalls the piece’s cyclic theme. Puri explores the phenomenology of memory in an array of works, including the String Quartet, the Introduction et allegro, Rapsodie espagnole and Ma mère l’oye. He uses his methodology of “mnemoanalysis” to propose novel interpretations of Ravel’s two waltz suites, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse. While these pieces have typically been understood as embodiments of “prewar hedonism” and the “catastrophic effects of the Great War,” respectively, Puri makes a convincing case that “it is the Valses nobles that mourns the irreversible loss of the past and La Valse that celebrates its miraculous recovery” (168).

At the heart of Ravel the Decadent is an extensive consideration of the composer’s magnum opus, Daphnis et Chloé, which Puri addresses in all but one of the book’s six chapters. The centerpiece of this analysis is the chapter “Dandy, Interrupted,” adapted from the article for which he received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society. Puri suggests that Ravel’s lifelong identification as a dandy, a Decadent figure obsessed with self-reflection, opens up the possibility of an autobiographical reading of his music. (In Baudelaire’s celebrated formulation, “the dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.”) Puri proposes that the title character of Daphnis might be understood as a surrogate for the composer, and that the sublimation of Daphnis’s libido into elevated displays of courtship may have an analogue in Ravel’s meticulous aesthetic façade. While Puri resists drawing conclusions about Ravel’s sexuality, he notes that...