‘The flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music’ — Pierre Boulez
Debussy’s masterpiece provoked a revolution in music, but one brought about by subtlety and intimacy, dwelling on the sheer beauty of musical timbre.
The following text supports the album Debussy: Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’ and La Mer in the 1000 Years of Classical Music series. Listen on Apple Music, on iTunes, on CD, and on Spotify:
When was Debussy's Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’ composed?
In 1894, Claude Debussy’s quietly revolutionary Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune premiered in Paris, ushering in a new era in music. Meanwhile:
- Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time; up until now, it has only been available in glasses, from soda fountains.
- The International Olympic Committee is founded at the Sorbonne in Paris; it is decided that the modern games will be held every four years.
- Married women in Britain are allowed to vote in municipal (but not national) elections; single and widowed women have had this right since 1869. South Australia becomes the first Australian colony to give women the vote and allow them to be elected to parliament.
- In France, a young French Jewish army captain called Alfred Dreyfus is convicted on trumped-up charges of treason; twelve years later he will be exonerated but meanwhile the ‘Dreyfus Affair’ will divide the nation and expose a deep vein of anti-semitism.
Debussy Facts
- Claude Debussy was one of the most influential composers of the modern age, introducing a new musical language which focused on the beauty of each moment of music, rather than seeing music as a journey towards a goal. This allowed him to use dissonances — notes which don’t ‘belong’ to a chord — as colouring or shading of the harmony, not as a clash which had to be resolved. One of the formative influences on his musical thinking was the experience of hearing a Javanese gamelan ensemble performing at the Universal Exposition of 1889: music which was structured in cycles rather than lines, with multiple layers of rhythm and melody superimposed in ‘infinite arabesques’ and ‘inexhaustible combinations of ethereal, flashing timbres’.
- His music is often called ‘Impressionist’, by analogy with the Impressionist school of painting (Monet, Pissarro, Renoir…) in which light and colour take precedence over form and line in an attempt to capture the experience of seeing the subject, rather than depicting its outer form. Debussy himself hated the label — he saw his art as creating a kind of reality, rather than giving impressions — and his aesthetic was more closely aligned with the Symbolist movement in poetry.
- It was a work by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (a friend of Debussy’s) which inspired one of the most revolutionary musical works of the age, the ‘Prelude to [Mallarmé’s poem] “The Afternoon of a Faun”’. Its subject is the desires and dreams of a faun (a mythological man-goat creature) in the heat of the afternoon; aroused by the beauty of passing nymphs, he tries to catch them but fails, then falls into an ecstatic sleep, in which he can finally realise his dreams of possession. Debussy’s music, with no sense of a regular beat, and no home key to which it is striving to return, has a langourous freedom which perfectly matches the sensuality of Mallarmé’s poem.
- With La Mer (The Sea), Debussy expands his musical language into a full-scale symphonic work, drawing on his own childhood memories of the sea.
Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’
Pierre Boulez once said that modern music awoke with the premiere of Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’. On 22 December 1894, in the Salle d’Harcourt, Paris, the faun’s flute ushered in a new world of structure, rhythm, harmonic relations and colour, and perhaps, more than any other single work, reoriented the development of music in the succeeding century.
Debussy’s tone-poem is based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist poem L’Aprés-midi d’un faune of 1876. Though Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was able to extract a storyline from Mallarmé’s atmospheric verse, it was Mallarmé’s deliberately blurred descriptions which appealed most to Debussy in the first place.
Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them.
So bright,
Their light rosy flesh, that it flutters in the air
Drowsy with tangled slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, hoard of ancient night, draws to a close
In many a subtle branch, which, themselves remaining true
wood, prove, alas! that all alone I offered
Myself as a triumph the perfect sin of roses.
The elusiveness of Mallarmé’s text inspired Debussy in his attempt to escape the emphatic and assertive music of the German Romantic masters, and uncover new means of musical narrative.
Debussy’s desire to avoid the ‘polychromatic putty’ of some of the scores of 19th-century giants such as Wagner can be heard in the exposure of individual instrumental sonorities. The opening bars for example are left to the solo flute. A single sustained discord on clarinets and oboes followed by a weaker discord on muted lower strings underlies a mere hint of movement from French horns and a fleeting wash of colour from the harp. Bold declamatory assertions are gone. After the opening ‘action’ there is a bar of silence. Then the minimal gestures simply resume. No concrete sense of a beat has been established. Within four bars Debussy has circumvented the periodically recurring downbeat, and escaped the ‘tyranny of the barline’.
It is easy to see why Debussy allowed his music to be considered pointillistic (though this was mainly to counter the label of Impressionism): dabs of colour piece the opening together; there is no opening rhetorical statement. This music is not going to be argumentative, like symphonic music. More obvious overall form does become apparent later in the piece – the work could be considered to be in a broad ternary form, with the accompanied repetition of the Faun melody after the more ‘passionate’ middle section – but it is important to note that this form is not enunciated, as of old, by the sculptured relationship of clear-cut tonalities.
It has been claimed that Debussy alone among the musicians of his time heard the music of the Javanese and Annamese musicians at the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 as speaking intimately to him. Perhaps this was because he, uniquely among his European peers, was ready to conceive of a music that was free from the conventions of the symphonic tradition.
Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 1997
String Quartet, Op. 10
The 1890s in Europe was a vibrant creative period, as artists responded to economic collapse and
fin-de-siècle anxiety. In theatre and the visual arts, Expressionism was taking audiences into dreamworlds and distorted landscapes peopled by ghosts and chimeras. Writers were embracing Decadence as an aesthetic, and in Germany and Austria, Mahler and Strauss were exploding the classical forms of music, as humanity reasserted itself against the economic and political oppression that would grind it down. In France, though, Debussy took a gentler, more nuanced approach to his own musical revolution. Recognised as one of the 20th century’s first musical innovators, he was also the first such composer to achieve widespread acceptance.
Unlike his Classical predecessors, Debussy felt no need to explore the medium of the string quartet through composing series of such works at strategic points throughout his career. The String Quartet in G minor, dedicated to the famous Ysaÿe String Quartet, is Debussy’s only work in this form, and he is reported to have declared that in it he expressed all that he had to say in this medium. But such is its impact, at once powerful, brilliantly coloured and emotional, that it remains one of the most revered such works in the chamber music repertoire.
Debussy composed it in 1893, when he was 31, and it is one of the first works to show the composer in increasing command of his very personal, highly organised style. And yet, masterpiece though it clearly was, the young Debussy then turned away from composing for small ensembles – it was not until the very end of his life that he returned to chamber music at all, planning a series of six ‘Sonatas for various instruments’, of which only three were written by the time he died in 1918.
Coming as it does at the beginning and end of his career, Debussy’s chamber music tellingly illustrates the revolution which its composer effected in music. For all its innovation, the String Quartet is still in part aligned with the earlier cyclic forms of César Franck and his followers, albeit applied with greater freedom. By the final chamber works, however, the traits of Debussian Impressionism – the whole-tone scales, the piquant, exotic harmonies, the jazz rhythms and the consummate command of instrumental colouring – are all fully in evidence.
The String Quartet has four movements which adhere to the Classical order, although with the scherzo preceding the slow movement. All four are linked, in ‘cyclic form’, with most of the thematic material being developed out of one cell or idea. The principal subjects of the first and second movements are thus essentially the same thematically, though entirely different in rhythm and mood. An augmentation in long notes of the same theme dominates the middle part of the finale, while other reminiscences, some of a more remote character (most remote in the Andantino), occur frequently throughout the work.
The opening movement has as its first subject a melody which often approaches the Phrygian mode. This theme is repeated twice by the first violin and then the cello accompanies it with a series of double-stops. The dreamy second subject is then introduced by the first violin and viola. If the exotic musical atmosphere owes something to the Russian compositional school – and even something to Wagner – there can be no doubting that Debussy uses the techniques to achieve a remarkably personal effect, graceful, melodic and frequently elegant. The movement ends with the strings in unison restating part of the principal theme.
In the second movement, which serves as a kind of scherzo and begins with a throbbing pizzicato
call-to-arms, Debussy extends the timbral range of the four stringed instruments. To do this, he employs a vast array of rhythmic and colouristic devices which not only extend the harmonic palette of the movement, but also point the way for subsequent developments in so-called Impressionist techniques.
The beautiful melody which pervades the slow movement is one of Debussy’s most sublime creations. It has only a tenuous relationship with the cyclic theme of the Quartet as a whole – technique is transcended by sheer inspiration. In the middle of the movement, the second violin and cello in octaves lead to a climactic, vaguely dissonant section, before the glorious return of the opening melody.
In the finale, all the themes of the earlier movements are recalled, now transformed with vigorous rhythms and new harmonies. Beginning with the cyclic main theme and leading through a fugato section, the movement presents the major thematic material in all its guises before leading into a quite conventional coda.
Martin Buzacott
La Mer – Three Symphonic Sketches
Never before had that marvellous music La Mer appeared so seductive and yet mysterious at the same time, so imbued with the enigmatic life of the Cosmos, than on that evening when her great creator, with a gentle hand, was ruling over her waves.
So wrote a young Russian composer, Lazare Saminsky, on hearing Debussy conduct La Mer in
St Petersburg in 1913. But the work’s greatness had by no means seemed self-evident when it first appeared in 1905. Debussy himself was weathering a personal scandal, having left his wife, and part of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Parisian public may have stemmed from its disapproval. The first performance, too, was by all accounts under-rehearsed and the conductor, Camille Chevillard, unsympathetic to Debussy’s style. Fellow composer (and conductor) Édouard Lalo complained that he could neither hear, see nor feel the sea, and a reviewer in Boston wrote that ‘we clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck, a bit of theme here, a comprehensible figure there, but finally this muted-horn sea overwhelmed us.’
The point missed by the authors of such remarks, however, is that Debussy’s music (both generally speaking and in regard to this work) is not intended as visual imagery, or the soundtrack to some imaginary film. (This is what Debussy’s colleague Satie was burlesquing when he praised the first movement, From Dawn to Midday on the Sea, by saying he particularly liked the bit ‘around a quarter to eleven’.) The composer may have invited such misinterpretations: in subtitling the work ‘Three Symphonic Sketches’ he of course evokes the media of visual art; moreover, he often used terms like ‘colour’ and ‘shading’ when discussing his music. But in 1903, when he began work on La Mer, Debussy wrote to a friend from the Burgundian countryside:
You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life, and that only chance led me in another direction…You will say that the ocean does not exactly bathe the hills of Burgundy, and my seascapes may be studio landscapes, but I have an endless store of memories, and in my mind they are worth more than reality, whose beauty often weighs heavily on the imagination.
The work, then, is about the idea of the sea rather than being a representation of it.
Debussy’s genius for orchestration and subtle rhythmic organisation certainly make for an evocative work where it is possible to imagine the crash of waves, the call of seagulls and the protean movement of light on water. The final climactic moments of the first movement, for instance, somehow create a sense of emerging from the deep into the light. Other masterly touches abound: the unusual timbre of cellos divided into four parts; the use of muted horns (which Debussy admitted to taking from the music of Weber) to evoke space; the soloistic use of wind instruments and harp.
But La Mer is as much ‘symphonic’ as it is ‘sketch’. Its three movements are by no means simply rhapsodic, but rather show Debussy’s subtle and attentive approach to form. In the first movement his careful development of short motifs is perfectly symphonic; the second movement, Play of Waves, is, among other things, a symphonic scherzo; and the third movement – which has one of the rare ‘big finishes’ of any work by this composer – is a symphonic finale. (This movement, with its references back to the first, also shows Debussy’s adherence to the notion of cyclical form that he learned from César Franck.)
The pianist and Debussy expert Roy Howat has also shown how Debussy’s structure corresponds to the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Section, where a line is divided so that the ratio of the shorter portion to the longer portion forms the same ratio as the longer portion does to the whole length. (The façade of many a Classical temple is built such that the ratio between its height and width corresponds to these divisions.) By applying this formula to time, a composer can plot where significant events (changes of speed, colour, moods or metre) will have the greatest dramatic effect. Howat has argued persuasively that the moment in the last movement of La Mer where the violins play a soft, impossibly high harmonic represents the Golden Section of the piece.
By a nice paradox, Debussy’s marvellous musical reflection on the constant flux of the sea is achieved by the most painstaking and careful calculation. Not for nothing did the published score carry the intricately designed woodcut The Hollow Wave by the Japanese artist Hokusai.
Gordon Kerry