Le Tombeau de Vuillard

Stravinsky and Ravel were my two first true musical loves—and remain so today. The first scores I ever purchased, all the way back in middle school, were the Dover paperback editions of The Rite of Spring and Ravel’s Four Orchestral Works, which I have long cherished.

Not long after, I acquired Dover’s edition of Ravel’s piano music, and was struck as intensely by the cover as by the music within: a mysterious composition of a woman seated before a shadowy piano, overwhelmed by an intricately patterned backdrop of brilliant yellow wallpaper. It was by the painter Edmond Vuillard, Misia at the Piano, and I fell in love with his work immediately, just as I had Ravel’s, with which it seemed to have so much in common: colorful, complex textures, somehow simultaneously precise and indistinct, yet never abstract.

Le Tombeau de Vuillard pays tribute to these Frenchmen. Using the orchestra fashioned by Ravel for his extraordinary orchestration of his earlier piano masterpiece Le Tombeau de Couperin, I have composed my own elegy, whose music points toward Ravel, while its subject is Vuillard’s work.

As in Ravel’s original, there are four movements comprising a kind of miniature symphony. We begin with Les Nabis, the name given the loose group of painters including Bonnard, Denis, Vallotton, and Vuillard, who worked to revitalize art by reminding the viewer that “a painting is a colored surface,” believing that lines and colors were sufficient to explain and justify themselves.

This brightly colored opening, marked Joyeuse, leads into Figures dans un intérieur, figures in an interior. Blurry personages glide through an obscure space in this gentle pavane. Vuillard delighted in painting landscapes, which represent some of his largest and most extravagantly patterned inspirations; Les Jardins publiques is our scherzo, a riot of greenery erupting in the public gardens as couples promenade and children play.

Finally, Peinture à la colle sur toile brings this elaborate tombeau to a close. Later in his career Vuillard focused on portraits, for which he often used the ancient technique of distemper, in which color is dissolved in glue or chalk, creating a bright yet very delicate surface. With this gently dancing, sometimes hieratic music, my love letter to the twin artistry of two of my great inspirations—Maurice Ravel and Edmond Vuillard—draws to a ghostly conclusion.