Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Piano Works, Vol. 3
Images, Series 1 (1901-05) and 2 (1907)
Estampes (1903)
Images oubliees (1894)
La plus que lente (1910)
L'Isle joyeuse (1904)
Claude Debussy was born in 1862, the
son of a shop-keeper who was later to turn his hand to other activities, with
varying success. He started piano lessons at the age of seven and continued
two years later, improbably enough, with Verlaine's mother-in-law, who claimed
to have been a pupil of Chopin. In 1872 he entered the Conservatoire, where
he abandoned the plan of becoming a virtuoso pianist, turning his principal
attention to composition. In 1880, at the age of eighteen, and in the following
two summers, he was employed by Tchaikovsky's patroness Nadezhda von Meck as
tutor to her children and house-musician. On his return to the Conservatoire
from the first of these visits abroad, he entered the class of Bizet's friend
Ernest Guiraud and in 1884 won the Prix de Rome, the following year reluctantly
taking up obligatory residence, according to the terms of the prize, at the
Villa Medici in Rome, where he met Liszt. By 1887 he was back in Paris, winning
his first significant success in 1900 with Nocturnes for orchestra and
going on, two years later, to a succès de scandale with his opera Pelléas
et Melisande, based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, a work that established
his position as a composer of importance.
Debussy's personal life brought some unhappiness in his first marriage in
1899 to a mannequin, Lily Texier, after an intermittent liaison of some ten
years with Gabrielle Dupont. His association from 1903 with Emma Bardac, the
wife of a banker and an amateur singer, led to their eventual marriage in 1908.
In the summer of 1904 he had abandoned his wife, moving into an apartment with
Emma Bardac, and the subsequent attempt at suicide by his wife, who had shared
with him the difficulties of his early career, alienated a number of the composer's
friends. His final years were darkened by the war and by cancer, the cause of
his death in March 1918, when he left unfinished a planned series of chamber
music works, describing himself patriotically as musicien français, only
three of which had been completed.
As a composer Debussy must be regarded as one of the most important and influential
figures of the earlier twentieth century. His musical language suggested new
paths to be further explored while his poetic and sensitive use of the orchestra
and of keyboard textures opened still more possibilities. His opera Pelléas
et Melisande and his songs demonstrated a deep understanding of poetic language,
revealed by his music, expressed in terms that never overstated or exaggerated.
Keith Anderson
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A casual glance at the works of Debussy reveals a penchant on the composer's
part for the triptych. The three sets of Images on this recording, as
well as Estampes (Engravings) offer evidence, and then, of course,
there are the orchestral works, La Mer, the three Nocturnes, the
orchestral images. It is more than a mere coincidence, however, if you
consider Debussy's use of the Golden Section in some of his pieces, and his
fondness for architectural proportions, balance and an almost classical sense
of structure. Small wonder too, that he was so attracted to the works of Rameau,
whose spirit he invokes in the second of Images I, 'Hommage a Rameau'
or correspondingly, the second of Images oubliées (Forgotten Images):
both are sarabandes. Here, as in the last of the Images oubliées - 'Ouelques
aspects de "Nous n'irons plus au bois" parce qu'il fait un temps insupportable'
(Several aspects of "We go no more to the woods" because the weather
is so unbearable) -where he interweaves a favourite French nursery rhyme into
the texture, Debussy's homage to his spiritual masters on the one hand, and
his tradition on the other, is completely devoid of pastiche. Paul Valery said
of tradition that it is not doing again what others have done before you, but
finding the spirit that lies behind those great achievements, and one could
apply much the same principle to Debussy's harnessing of tradition in his music.
Debussy wrote the Images oubliées towards the end of 1894 and called
them simply Images. They formed part of the collection of Alfred Cortot,
and were, in the years between their composition and eventual publication in
1976, largely overshadowed by the two 'books' of Images; hence the title
of this triptych - Images oubliées (Forgotten Images). The autograph
of this set is prefaced with a recommendation which could largely govern all
the music on this disc, and indeed a large proportion of the output of Debussy:
These pieces would fare poorly in les salons brillament illuminés
where people who don't like music usually congregate. They are rather conversations
between the piano and one's self; it is not forbidden furthermore to apply
one's small sensibility to them on nice rainy days.
And indeed, speaking of rainy days, Debussy was to reuse material from the
last of the Images oubliées in the corresponding piece of another triptych,
Estampes, now entitled 'Jardins sous la pluie' (Gardens in the
Rain). The set opens with an un-subtitled piece, like the first of Preludes,
Book I, inviting the listener to share its own private, gentle world. The
second was reworked as the sarabande from Pour le piano, its arguably
clumsy-sounding (or forward-looking?) dissonances now smoothed out.
Images I came eleven years later, and was both written and published
in 1905. Debussy was justifiably proud of them, inquiring of his publisher Durand
if he had played them, for 'without false vanity, I think these three pieces
work well and will take their place in piano literature […] to the left of Schumann
or to the right of Chopin … as you like it'. The first, 'Reflets dans l'eau'
(Reflections in the water) is one of the composer's many water pieces and
the composer himself pictured the opening as dropping a pebble into the water
and seeing the ripples make concentric circles' (note, again, the penchant for
balance, proportion, symmetry). The central sarabande, as mentioned, a homage
to Rameau, uses not only the entire range of the keyboard, but a vast dynamic
range, from pppp to ff, and in the final 'Mouvement' we
see yet again the evocation of symmetry. It is a perpetuum mobile, with
its busy activity dispersed like some centrifugal force.
If the physical appearance of a composer's manuscript perhaps reveals more
about how he wanted the music approached than is often credited, the layering
of Images II composed in 1906-07 and published in 1908, assigned three
staves instead of two, further reinforces the individual tone-colours, and the
subtlety of both metrical and harmonic rhythm.
Debussy's conception of his piano music to be played on an instrument 'without
hammers' is something of an anomaly when one considers it in the light of the
first of Images II, 'Cloches à travers les feuilles' (Bells through
the leaves) with its redolence of the composer's beloved Gamelan, and its evocation
of what are essentially percussion instruments, bells. It has been suggested
that this Image was inspired by a letter to the composer from Louis Laloy
in which the latter describes 'the stirring use of the passing bell which tolls
from Vespers on All Saints' Eve until the Mass for the dead, crossing, from
village to village, the golden forests in the silence of the evening.' 'Et la
lune descend sur le temple qui fût' (And the moon descends on the ruins
of the temple) seems to stretch even further the atmosphere of mystery that
hovers around the first piece - 'the sleep of an endless landscape, caressed
and consoled by the fitful moonlight …' (Marc Pincherle). 'Poissons d'or'
(Goldfish) parallels the last piece in Images I with its rapid gyration,
motion that cancels motion. The composer's glee in depicting flashing fins and
glints of sunlight has the extraversion of his L'isle joyeuse (Joyous
Island), and again, as in 'Mouvement' all is silent in the end, 'a calm
at once visionary and voluptuous' (Bryce Morrison). The piece was inspired,
we are told, by two goldfish depicted on a Japanese lacquered panel which adorned
Debussy's office. His delight in bringing them to life is at once elusive and
palpable, a dichotomy he would have so enjoyed.
Estampes predates both sets of Images. It was written and published
in 1903 and first performed in January of the next year by Ricardo Viñes. Ever
witty, Debussy writing to André Messager (of among other things, Les deux
pigeons fame) in 1903 said that he had written a set of three pieces
whose titles he particularly liked. Given that the first two evoke exotic landscapes
– 'Pagodes' evoking Debussy's beloved gamelan, and of course,
'La soirée dans Grenade' (Evening in Granada), he added, 'When you don't
have any money to go on holiday, you must make do by using your imagination'!
Of the triptychs on this disc, none is perhaps more contrastingly characterised
than Estampes, with its still yet flowing 'Pagodes' (No. 1), its
incisive sketch of Spain (No. 3), and the drizzly evocations of 'Jardins sous
la pluie' (Gardens in the Rain) (No. 3). As mentioned above, the third
of these was a reworking of 'Nous n'irons plus au bois' (We go no more
to the woods) from Images oubliées and it is very likely that Debussy
intended to orchestrate it, for in his notes on the original piece he indicated
'here the harps give a lifelike imitation of strutting peacocks'.
La plus que lente (A slower than slow waltz), dating from 1910, carries
the unusual indication Molto rubato con morbidezza. It highlights Debussy's
parodic intentions in a piece to which he never attached any particular seriousness,
and its 'brasserie' style has led to a multiplicity of transcriptions, all of
which dilute Debussy's sharp yet veiled sense of humour, of his implication
of brevity (and economy) being the soul of wit.
There is no trace of parody in one of Debussy's, and indeed the piano literature's,
greatest accomplishments, L'Isle Joyeuse, composed in the summer of 1904.
With its intoxicating mix of dance rhythms and surging melody, it provides a
richly evocative cameo of Jersey, where Debussy eloped with Emma Bardac. Jacques
Durand, obviously impressed by the accomplishment, wrote to Debussy expressing
his thrill at having received the piece but adding 'Heavens! how difficult it
is to play … I think this piece combines every possible way of treating the
piano, as it combines strength with grace …'
'Strength with grace', 'Force in Gentleness … Gentleness in Force' (Debussy
to the pianist Marguerite Long) are largely the attributes of his music and
its performance. The writer Victor Segalen, in conversation with Debussy, asked
him what his inspiration was for this piece 'overflowing with joy'. 'Imagination,
sheer imagination' came the reply, and it was in the realms of imagination,
of escapism with the mind, his feet largely held firmly to the ground, that
so much of the world of Debussy resided. The intangible beauty of his music
sometimes hides his more esoteric attributes. As mentioned above, the exact
proportion of the 'golden section' used by Greek architects, and since, long
regarded in esoteric circles as having divine properties and also prominent
in nature, was one of them. Yet it is a tribute to his skill that the structural
techniques he might have incorporated never allowed his music to sound anything
less than spontaneous. He expresses this suffusion of imagination and logic
most eloquently in an article he wrote for the journal Musica in May
1903: 'Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements share something
of the nature of Infinity. It is allied to the movement of the waters, to the
play of curves described by the changing breezes. Nothing is more musical than
a sunset! For, anyone who can be moved by what they see can learn the greatest
lessons in development here. That is to say, they can read them in Nature's
book - a book not well enough known among musicians, who tend to read nothing
but their own books about what the Masters have said, respectfully stirring
the dust on their works. All very well, but perhaps Art goes deeper than this.'
Perhaps the very roots of Debussy's genius lay in his ability to hear music
in all he saw or read. As the pianist and scholar Roy Howat points out 'for
him the clairaudient perceptions from between the poetic lines, from the painting,
the sunset or the storm, were more of a reality than was an everyday world with
which he never quite came to terms.'
© 1997 Cyrus Meher-Homji