Which French composer's work 'Le Tombeau de Couperin' is a neoclassical piece?

Maurice Ravel composed Le Tombeau de Couperin, a neoclassical work that looks back to French Baroque music.

Ravel wrote the original piano suite between 1914 and 1917, during and shortly after the First World War. Its title refers to the French Baroque composer François Couperin, while tombeau means a musical memorial. Each movement also commemorates friends of Ravel who died in the war, though the music is often elegant and buoyant rather than conventionally mournful.

The work is considered neoclassical because Ravel uses older forms and genres—including a prelude, fugue, forlane, rigaudon, and menuet—while filtering them through modern harmony, rhythm, and piano writing. He later orchestrated four of the six movements, and the orchestral version is widely performed.

It is sometimes mistaken for Impressionism because of Ravel’s coloristic textures and association with Debussy. Those qualities are present, but the suite’s deliberate engagement with eighteenth-century French models makes Ravel the canonical answer here, not Poulenc, Satie, or Debussy.