Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:
"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traueme!
Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"
Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great
ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show
us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.
And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer
than Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, with
his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there
is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's
music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet,
for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty
structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin,"
Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and
Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at
Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in
some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he
is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of
the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them
more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring.
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