Ravel wrote his Tombeau de Couperin between 1914 and 1917, when he was in uniform as a soldier in the Great War. Forty-two years of age by the time he was mustered out, he had felt passionately about the war, and, on the title page of the original version of Tombeau de Couperin for piano solo he drew a funerary urn and dedicated each of its several movements to a soldier friend who had fallen in battle. Ravel obviously intended to leave the listener with little doubt that the work carried a potent set of subtexts for a nation then at war.

Thus, Ravel's seemingly benign Tombeau de Couperin was in truth a muted ritual in its opening classical dances but nonetheless telling for those who understood or bothered to contemplate the drawings and the dedications. Ravel in his own way had submitted his version of a classical funeral oration, a model endorsed by members of the Academie Francaise that found expression not only in the work of professional writers but also in the prefaces to published anthologies of correspondence from the trenches and in countless public addresses. Such commemorative addresses were invariably dual-edged, signalling not only the valor of the dead but the guilt of the living for having survived. Yet unlike war narratives that explicitly attempted to tell it "like it was" and to create an illusion of the horrors at the front, Ravel's oration was composed of two distinct parts. Like the commemorative cemeteries which imposed a serene formality through neatly placed crosses, Ravel's opening prelude, fugue, forlane, rigaudon, and menuet reviewed and celebrated the classical heritage of his native country. By way of conclusion in the original piano version, however, he offered not the originally projected and classically acceptable gigue but a "Toccata," which may be read as a homily regarding the new technology of aviation that seemed to transcend the war itself and point to a new and brilliant future for the human spirit.

The first performance of Ravel's suite took place in Paris on I I April 1919, five months after the signing of the Armistice. It was Ravel's first appearance in public after the war, and he received an extraordinarily warm ovation. The composer made a transcription of the work for orchestra, minus the "Fugue" and the "Toccata," later that same year. While on the surface the Great War seems to be out of view, in its ordered surfaces Ravel sounded his own "call to order" for a nation in tandem with a review of France's glories in the Age of Couperin.