2023-06-08 11:15:04
It is a six-handed score composed by neurologists Bernard Lechevalier, Bernard Mercier and Fausto Viader with this scholarly biography of Maurice Ravel, where music and medicine intertwine. Retracing the evolution of a neurodegenerative disease that we did not know how to diagnose in the 1930s, these experts made the bet to examine the case “of a patient who is no longer there”. Thanks to the deciphering of archives, reports, letters, testimonies, the reader attends the appearance of the symptoms which will destroy the life and the career of the musician, who became an international star at the end of the First World War.
In 1932, at the age of 57, Ravel, at the height of his glory, but tired and depressed, rested in Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). A few months before, he stopped playing the piano in concert. The authors highlight the highlights of that summer: when he wants to show a friend how to ricochet, he throws the pebble in her face; an excellent swimmer, Ravel finds himself forced to plank while waiting for help, because he no longer knows how to swim. This “Apraxia of swimming is identified as the revealing symptom”, note the neurologists. The episode of the pebble would reflect a loss of control of the upper limb called “phenomenon of the foreign hand”…
Thus, over the pages, the brilliant, then complex and painful personality of the composer of Bolero – an artwork “void of music”, he said. The reader perceives his writing difficulties from the beginning until his slow plunge into solitude. “He had the appearance of a being who, from one moment to the next, risks dissolving”will testify the writer Colette.
The first part of the book focuses on the psychology of a brilliant, refined musician, close to a mother whose death will precipitate him into depression, and subject to the pangs of an incomprehensible evil. The second part deals with the disease itself: medical observation, diagnoses, portraits of doctors, up to the fatal neurosurgical intervention. Above all, it analyzes the “assumptions that we are entitled to formulate today on the etiology of this condition”.
Aphasia, apraxia and agraphia
The reader follows, step by step, the investigations carried out by the various specialists from 1935. When the composer consults Professor Théophile Alajouanine, a renowned neurologist, the latter studies the deterioration of his musical abilities and makes his diagnosis: Pick’s disease – a shape dementia syndrome –, including “the cause remained imprecise is, due to bilateral ventricular dilation, in the context of cerebral atrophy”. Rehabilitation is attempted. In vain.
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