Hélène Jourdan-Morhange: The Great Violinist Who Ravel Loved

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 11th, 2026

The name Hélène Jourdan-Morhange may be obscure today, but she was the dedicatee of a handful of the most beloved violin works in the repertoire. She was also a muse, interpreter, and chronicler of a golden era of French music.

Today we’re looking at the life and career of Hélène Jourdan-Morhange: her early education, the tragedies that shattered her life, her profoundly influential friendships with Ravel and other composers, and her groundbreaking later work as a writer and radio producer.

Childhood and Early Music Studies

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

Hélène Morhange was born on 30 January 1888.

She began playing the violin as a young child. She was prodigiously gifted, entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1898 at the age of ten.

Among her fellow students was legendary pianist Alfred Cortot.

From the age of thirteen, her teacher was Édouard Nadaud, who taught at the Conservatoire between 1900 and 1924.

In 1906, she won the Conservatoire’s first prize in violin. She was just eighteen years old.

Performing in Parisian Salons

Left to right: Luc-Albert Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange, Madeleine Grey, Germaine Malançon, and Maurice Ravel (1925)

As a young woman, she played in some of Paris’s most famous salons.

These private performances advertised musicians’ abilities to fellow artists and wealthy patrons.

Eugènie Murat

One famous salon that Morhange played at belonged to Princess Eugènie Murat, an eccentric, wealthy woman whose sapphic tendencies during her widowhood were well-known.

Like many in her social set, Princess Murat delighted in using powerful drugs like hashish and cocaine. According to one legend, she rented a submarine so she could partake in private.

Winnaretta Singer

Morhange was also a regular at the salon of Princess Edmond de Polignac, an American heiress with the maiden name of Winnaretta Singer.

A lesbian herself, Princess Polignac entered into a friendly lavender marriage with the gay Prince Edmond de Polignac.

After their marriage, she used her money and her newfound social status to entertain – and seduce – the cream of musical Parisian society.

Thanks to these women, Morhange was on the front lines of Parisian art, literature, and music from an early age.

Marriage and War

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and her husband Jacques Jean Raoul Jourdan

In 1913, at the age of twenty-five, Morhange married painter Jacques Jean Raoul Jourdan. (Interestingly, she hyphenated her surname, instead of changing it entirely…a somewhat unusual choice in the 1910s.)

The summer of the following year, World War I began, and he left to fight.

He died in March 1916 at the Battle of Verdun, one of the longest battles of the war.

Jourdan-Morhange was devastated, and his violent loss would haunt her for years.

During the war, she partnered with pianist Juliette Meerowitch, a student of Cortot’s who was well-known for championing the work of Erik Satie.

Their friendship became deeply meaningful. She began processing the death of her husband and the trauma of the war by talking to Meerowitch and playing with her.

Befriending Ravel  

Another important new friend was Maurice Ravel. She met him after performing Ravel’s piano trio, a piece that he had rushed to finish before the war began, fearing he wouldn’t survive the conflict. (In fact, he was so convinced that he was about to die that he dryly referred to the trio as being “posthumous.”) He was deeply impressed by her playing and musicianship.

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (on the left) with Maurice Ravel

When he was working on his orchestral showpiece La Valse, he wrote her a letter asking a question about how he should orchestrate a particular part.

Tragically, in 1920, two years after the end of the war, Jourdan-Morhange’s recital partner, Juliette Meerowitch, died suddenly while touring in Brussels.

After this second great loss, coming so close on the heels of the loss of her husband, Jourdan-Morhange began spending more time with Ravel. At the time, Ravel was also in mourning after the death of his beloved mother, so he understood her grief. And of course, both musicians were grappling with the loss of many of their friends in the war.

It’s no surprise that they ended up becoming good friends and colleagues. There are rumours that Ravel thought about marrying her, but there’s no evidence they ever embarked on a romantic relationship.

Inspiring Ravel

Portrait of Hélène Jourdan-Morhange by her husband Jacques

Around this time, Ravel was asked to write a piece to honour Claude Debussy, who had died of cancer in the closing months of the war.

He began the work in 1920 but continued working on it over the following two years.

In 1922, Jourdan-Morhange premiered the resulting piece: Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, sometimes known as his Duo, with cellist Maurice Maréchal.

Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello   

He also began his G-major violin sonata.

Historian Jillian C. Rogers has an intriguing theory about these and other Ravel works in her 2021 book Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars. She believes that the repetitive, flowing rhythms that became integral to Ravel’s musical language originated, in part, from a desire to provide music to his friends that was soothing to practice. Those flowing, repetitive rhythms are in full evidence in the violin sonata.

The sonata took five years to finish, only finally coming to fruition in 1927.

Unfortunately, by that time, Jourdan-Morhange couldn’t premiere it. She was enduring yet another tragedy: chronic pain that no doctor could diagnose, which was keeping her from playing the violin.

It has been theorised that this pain might have originated from arthritis, rheumatism, or an overuse injury.

But whatever the cause, it was severe and long-lasting enough to permanently remove her from the concert stage.

She was forced to make do with accepting the work’s official dedication. Violinist Georges Enescu ended up premiering it, with Ravel on the piano.   

Ravel’s Death

After finishing the violin sonata, Ravel did not have many good years left in him.

In October 1932, he was in a taxi accident that appears to have caused or triggered neurological issues.

(Some historians have suggested that he had Pick’s disease, an incurable early-onset dementia similar to Alzheimer’s.)

By 1937, he could no longer compose. He complained bitterly to his friends and colleagues: he could hear music in his head, but could no longer write it down. He told Jourdan-Morhange that he was frustrated because he felt he had so much left to give the world musically.

Maurice Ravel

Although it was difficult to see her dear friend in such pain, Jourdan-Morhange spent as much time as she could with him in his final illness.

She later spoke about the long walks they took together in nature. He could identify birds with ease based on their songs, but hearing music at concerts became extremely difficult and even traumatic for him.

His condition worsened. After a failed exploratory brain surgery, Ravel died in December 1937.

A Second Marriage and a New Career

After twenty years of living with painter Luc-Albert Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange married him in 1946.

During the interwar period, while living with Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange had become very close to author Colette, who lived nearby.

Colette encouraged Jourdan-Morhange that even if she could no longer play the violin, she could at least write about music.

So in addition to teaching, Jourdan-Morhange began writing, submitting reviews and reminiscences to a variety of different French journals.

After World War II ended, she also began producing radio programs for RDF (Radiodiffusion française).

Partnership with Perlemuter

Vlado Perlemuter

In 1950, she produced and co-hosted a radio series with pianist Vlado Perlemuter, who had studied Ravel’s entire piano output with the composer in his early twenties.

During the radio shows, Perlemuter would play the works, and he and Jourdan-Morhange would both talk about what interpretive ideas Ravel had in mind.

Perlemuter playing Ravel’s Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin   

The transcriptions and translations of these programs were later published as Ravel According to Ravel. They serve as an important window into his famously exacting ideas.

In the late 1940s, Jourdan-Morhange became one of the founding members of the Maurice Ravel Foundation, which sought to memorialise his life and career.

She once wrote of Ravel, “His friends and those close to him looked for him in his work, sometimes remembering him in a rhythm, an unpredictable harmony, the fleeting memory of a look, a tender expression, where their lost friend was wholly revealed to them.”

Remembering Her Musical Colleagues

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

Her memories of Ravel and the other great composers whose works she inspired and championed contain valuable insights.

During the radio program with Perlemuter, she said:

“So Ravel used to say everything that had to be done, but above all…what was not to be done. No worldly kindness restrained him when he was giving his opinion… Having worked on the Sonata, the Duo and the Trio with Ravel when I was a violinist, I recognise in Perlemuter’s interpretations all the idiosyncrasies, all Ravel’s wishes: exaggerated swells, crescendi which explode in anger, turns which die on a clear note, the gentle friction of affectionate cats…and in all this fantasy, strict time in expression and rigour even in rubato.”

Of course, Ravel wasn’t the only composer she knew well. She wrote down a couple of evocative memories about composer Gabriel Fauré, too:

“It would be difficult for me to describe his special wishes in the way that I could with Ravel. Just one directive stands out, and very strongly so: play in time without slowing, without even taking time to ‘prepare’ those voluptuous harmonies that the slightest hesitation might underline for the audience’s ears… Fauré, completely kind as he was, could be terribly direct with those who struck him as snobbish – most usually fashionable ladies.”

However, when it came to the music of French composer Pierre Boulez, she was puzzled. In 1950, she wrote in a review:

“It’s difficult for me to follow Pierre Boulez, because I admit I was so bored by his 30-to-35-minute-long sonata that I forbid myself from talking about it… I don’t understand. I am one of those listeners who demand from music what the Greek philosophers called a ‘moral force.’ It was Aristotle who saw people’s faces relax and their expressions lighten when a performance was beautiful… Well, the audience the other evening didn’t radiate goodness; rather, it was boiling.”

Conclusion

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange died on 15 May 1961. She was 73 years old.

Much is still left to rediscover about her life and career, as well as the profound influence she had on Ravel and the other Parisian composers who surrounded them both.

But even with the sketchy biographical information we have about her today, it is clear that she was a major force in French classical music between the wars. She should be remembered and celebrated more often.

The Tragedy and Trauma of Ravel’s Military Service

 by Emily E. Hogstad  January 28th, 2026

Nowadays, when we think of Maurice Ravel, we usually picture the elegance of Boléro, not the mud and chaos of the Western Front. But World War I had a major impact on Maurice Ravel’s life and music.

The Franco-Prussian War, the rise of Germany, and the tangled web of European alliances all conspired to pull France into battle in 1914…and Ravel, then nearing forty, was determined to serve in the conflict despite his small stature and frail health.

Maurice Ravel in 1916

Today, we’re looking at what he experienced and how the horror of war manifested in four of his best-known pieces.

How European Politics Sent Maurice Ravel to War

During the nineteenth century, France and Germany were competing for power and influence in Central Europe.

The Franco-Prussian War, fought between 1870 and 1871, ended in a humiliating loss for France and unification for Germany. An arms race gained speed, along with the race for cultural supremacy.

By the time Maurice Ravel was born in the spring of 1875, the French government was requiring all twenty-year-old men to serve in the military for three years.

However, in 1895, Ravel was so physically small and weak that he was rejected for “frailty.”

Fast forward two decades. In June 1914, Serbian nationalists, furious over oppression by the Austrian Empire, assassinated both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

Franz Ferdinand was not minor royalty: he was the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his death was a direct shot at the empire’s stability and continuity.

A mini documentary about the causes of World War I   

At the time, European countries were bound by a number of criss-crossing alliances. Austria wanted to respond to the assassination by declaring war on Serbia, and Austria was allied with Germany.

Meanwhile, Germany’s enemy, France, reaffirmed its own alliance with Russia, agreeing to fight with Serbia against Austria.

So to sum up, one side consisted of Austria, Germany, and its allies; the other consisted of France, Russia, Serbia, and its allies.

In the aftermath of the assassination, Austria issued a draconian ultimatum to the Serbs, which was rejected. Austria responded by declaring war on Serbia, and Austria’s ally Germany dutifully followed suit.

From there, the dominos kept falling. Germany also declared war on Russia. Then, in an attempt to avoid a two-front war, Germany tried to knock its old enemy, France, out of the conflict early by invading it, so it could focus on fighting Russia instead.

The seeds of World War I were rapidly sprouting.

The Race to Finish the A-Minor Piano Trio

Maurice Ravel

Ravel spent much of 1914 working on his piano trio in A-minor.

As the international situation deteriorated that summer and disaster appeared increasingly inevitable, he was struck by a new sense of urgency. He wrote in early August 1914, “I am working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman.”

He told Stravinsky, “I have never worked with more insane, more heroic intensity.”

He intended to join the military to defend his homeland, and he was well aware he might not survive to see the piece’s premiere.

Working madly, he finished the trio – his potential musical epitaph – by the end of August. As a dark joke, he called it a “posthumous work.”   

The War Begins

Maurice Ravel in 1916

On 1 August 1914, an order for the mobilisation of French troops was issued, triggering the activation of three million French reservists between the ages of 24 and 38.

A quirk of the calendar meant that Maurice Ravel fell just outside that age limit (he had turned 39 in March).

He tried to enlist by joining the French Air Force, believing that his stature would prove handy in the small cockpits of early airplanes, but he was turned down due to his age, weight, and minor heart trouble.

It’s important to remember that aviation technology was in its infancy and deeply dangerous. According to one analysis, the average life expectancy of Canadian fighter pilots during the Great War was around eleven days. In effect, Ravel was volunteering for a suicide mission. Music lovers are lucky he was rejected for the job.

Instead of flying, Ravel decided to contribute to the war effort by volunteering on the home front, assisting wounded soldiers in Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Bay of Biscay, just across the river from his birthplace, Ciboure.

Ravel Becomes a Military Driver

However, Ravel quickly came up with another plan.

Maurice’s engineer brother Edouard was serving as a military driver, and Maurice – always interested in the inner workings of machinery – found himself attracted to the idea of following in his brother’s footsteps. Maurice began taking daily driving lessons.

Finally, in March 1915, the month of his fortieth birthday, he joined the Army as a truck driver with the 13th Artillery Regiment.

Stravinsky noted, “At his age and with his name, he could have had an easier place, or done nothing.”

For about a year, Ravel was stationed in Paris repairing military vehicles, writing that this was “time spent being busy not doing very much.”

But in March 1916, he was sent to the front lines during the eleven-month-long battle of Verdun, which claimed an average of 70,000 lives a month.

Ravel’s job was to deliver supplies to the front, especially petrol. His truck (which he nicknamed Adélaïde) would often be loaded down with twice the recommended amount of cargo.

Ravel usually drove at night to avoid being seen. During the winter months, he had to wear a fur coat to have a hope of staying warm.

Ravel: Blacklisted?

In between all this, he remained in contact with what remnants of musical Paris were still active.

In 1916, a group of musicians headed by Vincent d’Indy, Théodore Dubois, and Camille Saint-Saëns founded the Ligue Nationale pour la Défense de la Musique Française (National League for the Defense of French Music).

D’Indy wrote that he wanted French music to “liberate itself from the German musical domination.” The group of influential musicians proposed blacklisting German and Austrian composers from concert programs.

This idea sat poorly with Ravel. In June 1916, he wrote to the group:

“I do not believe that to safeguard our national artistic heritage we must forbid performing German and Austrian works… It would even be dangerous for French composers to ignore systematically the works of their foreign colleagues, and form a sort of national coterie: our musical art, so rich at present, would soon degenerate, locking itself into stale formulas.”

Due to this stance, his own music – arguably the most recognisably French of its generation – was briefly blacklisted in certain Parisian music circles.

Wartime Illness and Grief

Maurice Ravel in uniform

Understandably, Ravel’s physical and mental health deteriorated over the course of the year.

Six months into his time at the front, he developed dysentery. He was forced to go on medical leave between October 1916 and January 1917.

Tragedy compounded in January 1917 when his beloved mother passed away.

The loss shattered him, especially on the heels of the deaths of so many of his friends and acquaintances in the trenches.

Pianist Marguerite Long (who had lost her own husband in the war) observed that Ravel was “depressed, thin, and suffering from neurasthenia.”

Due to his age and poor health, Ravel was discharged in June 1917. His dream – or nightmare – of military service was over.   

In April 1914, Ravel had begun Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite for solo piano inspired by the work of French Baroque composer François Couperin.

Between 1915 and 1917, Ravel contributed bits and pieces to the score, but he only finished it after his discharge in 1917.

In the face of the losses of war, the work’s concept had taken on a deeper, more personal meaning.

Instead of celebrating French nationalism generally, Ravel dedicated each movement to specific dead friends. (The final movement was dedicated to Captain Joseph de Marliave, a musicologist and husband of pianist Marguerite Long, who gave the work’s premiere.)

Marguerite Long

These meditative pieces were light, airy, and beautifully constructed, with not a single extraneous note.

Ravel famously explained why he hadn’t written a more overtly tragic work: “The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence.”

The peerless elegance of the French tradition would serve as his friends’ musical epitaph.

The Lasting Impact of the War on Ravel

Maurice Ravel

Even after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, Ravel’s wartime experience continued to echo in his music.

Between 1919 and 1920, he wrote the dazzling ballet La Valse, which he described as “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz.”

What better way to process the destruction of the European order than by writing a waltz in which Austria’s national dance tears itself apart?

Ravel himself disavowed any connection between the war and La Valse, but many others read it differently.   

Later, in 1930, he wrote a Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who had lost his right arm in the war.

Put another way, just thirteen years after delivering munitions to the front, France’s leading composer wrote a piano concerto for a great Austrian pianist…who could have been hit by those same munitions.

It was a striking finale to Maurice Ravel’s tragic, traumatic, and deeply influential military service.

Eight of the Saddest Piano Concerto Slow Movements

by Emily E. Hogstad 

If you’re a classical music fan drawn to sad, slow movements in piano concertos, this is the list you’ve been looking for.

Whether it’s Chopin’s gentle melancholy, Ravel’s elegant wistfulness, or Rachmaninoff’s romantic despair, each of these slow movements paints a picture of a particular kind of sadness.

© chopinacademy.com

Although every ranking having to do with classical music is subjective, we numbered our picks anyway, from least sad to saddest. Find out which concerto we’ve dubbed the saddest at the end.

8. Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, Mov. 2  

Chopin wrote this concerto in 1830 when he was just twenty years old.

The inspiration behind this piece is unclear…but we know there was one.

Frédéric Chopin in 1849

In a letter, Chopin wrote a cryptic observation to his best friend (and potential crush or even lover) Tytus Woyciechowski:

“Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.”

It’s a mysterious confession. Some believe he’s referring to his other crush, singer Konstancja Gładkowska. Others wonder if he’s referring to Woyciechowski, with whom he exchanged a number of romantic letters as a young man.

Chopin wrote to Woyciechowski about the slow movement in particular:

“It is not meant to create a powerful effect; it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.”

The specific sadness of this music is a gentle, possibly flirtatious melancholy.

7. Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 3   

Brahms’s second piano concerto covers similar emotional territory to the Chopin Romance. Save for a brief stormy interlude in the centre of the movement, this is not overtly tragic music: it’s more brooding, repressed melancholy.

Johannes Brahms, ca 1875

The movement begins with a soulful cello solo (an idea that Brahms may have lifted from his dear friend Clara Wieck Schumann, who had included similar instrumentation in the piano concerto she’d written as a teenager decades earlier).

The final portion of the movement, where the cello returns again and moves with the piano through a number of keys together, is the absolute epitome of bittersweet regret.

6. Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3, Mov. 2   

Béla Bartók composed his third piano concerto in 1945 when he was 64 years old. He was terminally ill with leukaemia at the time.

That October, his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, was set to celebrate her 42nd birthday. He began working on a third piano concerto for her as a birthday present. He was hopeful that after his death, whenever it occurred, she could tour with it and make money.

Béla Bartók in the 1920s

Tragically, he died in late September, a month before her birthday. Fortunately, the piano concerto, save for the final seventeen measures, was completed.

The slow movement of this concerto feels like a hushed, tender, intimate goodbye. Regret and wistfulness are mixed in with profound gratitude.

5. Ravel: Piano Concerto, Mov. 2   

Ravel wrote of his piano concerto:

“My only wish…was to write a genuine concerto, that is, a brilliant work, clearly highlighting the soloist’s virtuosity, without seeking to show profundity. As a model, I took two musicians who, in my opinion, best illustrated this type of composition: Mozart and Saint-Saëns…”

Maurice Ravel

In particular, he looked to Mozart’s clarinet quintet for inspiration. That melody is an unusual twenty measures long. In his concerto, Ravel’s melody is an astonishing thirty-four.

“That flowing phrase!” he wrote later. “How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

This long melody calls to mind a long, wistful train of thought from the middle of the night, when nothing in the darkness interrupts the thought.

This music is sad in a restrained way. A listener can feel a great depth of sorrow hiding just beneath the surface.

4. Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Shostakovich wrote his second piano concerto for his pianist son Maxim’s nineteenth birthday in 1957. Maxim premiered it at his graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory that May.

Over the past few years, father and son had suffered a great deal together. In 1954, Maxim’s physicist mother, Nina, had died suddenly. Maxim was just sixteen. Shostakovich was forced to become a single father overnight: a role he was completely unprepared to play.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The slow movement of this concerto evokes emotions that a father and son might feel upon seeing a son graduate after the death of a beloved wife and mother: pride, yearning, and a sadness that is simultaneously quiet and deeply intimate.

3. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Mov. 2   

Mozart wrote his 23rd piano concerto in early 1786, two months before the premiere of one of his best-loved operas, The Marriage of Figaro.

A listener can immediately hear the influence of opera here. It’s especially dramatic because the piano is alone when it enters with its atmospheric, aria-like, minor-key melody.

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Starting the movement with a solo part creates a kind of sudden, intense intimacy between the soloist, composer, and audience.

2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Mov. 2   

The orchestral introduction to this slow movement is loud and brutally unforgiving. The piano answers with a sense of quiet despair.

That conflict and dialogue create the narrative that drives the entire movement.

Beethoven in 1803

Three movements into their unnerving conversation, the piano takes over for a solo turn. We discover that the piano still has fight in it, with a series of loud ringing trills, before sinking back down into a whisper again.

When the orchestra returns, it is also quiet, witnessing the piano’s unraveling.

1. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Here it is: the saddest slow movement of a piano concerto: the Adagio sostenuto from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto.

This movement begins with slow, hushed chords in the strings, followed by a mournful chain of arpeggios in the piano.

The winds contribute hushed fragments of a heartbreaking theme to the steady accompaniment of the piano.

When the soloist and the orchestra players begin interacting with one another, it feels like a confessional conversation. The music conveys all kinds of sadness: grief, regret, yearning, and more, appearing in all different types of musical colours and textures.

Kubey-Rembrandt Studios: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1921

Rachmaninoff wrote his second piano concerto while coming out of a severe period of depression. For a while, he was seeing a therapist daily. It seems that writing this concerto helped him to process what he needed to.

His composing career continued for decades afterwards, and this work became one of the most beloved piano concertos ever written. It’s sad music…but it had a happy ending.