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This chapter addresses three questions: What is a tombeau? Who is speaking? Why is there no punctuation other than commas, throughout the single sentence that makes up each stanza and that ends with a period (sometimes a question mark)?

In 1920 Henry Prunières dedicated an issue of La Revue Musicale to the achievements of Debussy. This publication is significant because it documents the beginnings of the composer's posthumous reputation and offers an early appraisal of the late works. Particularly striking about the issue is how little mention is made of the last four years of the composer's life. Debussy's efforts to affiliate his music with the French eighteenth century in these years are refuted or treated with ambivalence by the contributors. What is most noticeable about the volume as a whole is the disparity between the composer's desired legacy and the one afforded him by La Revue Musicale. Debussy's efforts in the final years of his life to associate himself with certain musical traditions appear to have been in vain, and La Revue Musicale would contribute, albeit unwittingly, to the negative evaluation of Debussy's late music in the decades following his death.

Aside from Claude Debussy and Vincent d'Indy, another French composer to confront the prospect of war in highly personal terms was Maurice Ravel. It was at this time that Ravel began work on the Piano Trio. But it is in the central “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis” that Ravel made his most unambiguous reference to the Great War. Birds, especially swallows and nightingales, had long been symbols of hope, but never more so than in the period between the Franco-Prussian conflict and World War I, during which few songs were more popular than “L'oiseau qui vient de France.” All pianists who have played Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin know that from a performer's perspective the concluding “Toccata” makes the greatest technical demands of the entire suite. In a more generalized discussion of Tombeau that nowhere touches on the issue of aviation, Carolyn Abbate has tellingly addressed this very issue.

The slightly critical treatment of the Duineser Elegien makes way for a reading of the Sonette an Orpheus as Rilke’s major work, though the intention is not simply to depose one in favour of the other. Rather it is to suggest how each enabled the other. This chapter examines the circumstances of the Sonette’s composition and its relationship to the genesis of the Elegien, and then goes on to read the Sonette as a tombeau or ‘tomb-poem’, with reference to Rilke’s translation of Mallarmé’s tombeau for Verlaine. The question the poems address is how to make a memorial for someone whose form of expression, dance, leaves no traces. Rilke’s return to the sonnet is also looked at in the light of the attempt to write a memorial. As against the Neue Gedichte, it is now the fluid living body, dance, that provides a model for poetry, rather than sculpture.