NINETY-FOURTH SEASON
Sunday, January 19, 2025, at 3:00
Piano Series
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
MUSIC BY CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Preludes, Book 1
Danseuses de Delphes
Voiles
Le vent dans la plaine
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir
Les collines d’Anacapri
Des pas sur la neige
Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest
La fille aux cheveux de lin
La sérénade interrompue
La cathédrale engloutie
La danse de Puck
Minstrels
INTERMISSION
Preludes, Book 2
Brouillards
Feuilles mortes
La puerta del vino
Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses
Bruyères
General Lavine—eccentric
La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune
Ondine
Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.
Canope
Les tierces alternées
Feux d’artifice
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born August 2, 1862; St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, France
Died March 25, 1918; Paris, France
Preludes, Book 1
COMPOSED 1909–10
“The sound of the sea, the curve of the horizon, the wind in the leaves, the cry of a bird enregister complex impressions within us,” Debussy told an interviewer when he was at work on his preludes. “Then suddenly, without any deliberate consent on our part, one of those memories issues forth to express itself in the language of music.”
Debussy distilled in these words the essence of musical impressionism—the embodiment of a specific but evanescent experience in tone. With only a few exceptions (most notably the string quartet of 1893 and the etudes and three sonatas from the end of his life), his compositions are referential in both their titles and their contents, deriving inspiration and subjects from poetry, art, and nature (or nature, at least, as filtered through Monet’s opulently chromatic palette). Though their generic appellation, which recalls the music of Chopin and Bach, suggests abstraction rather than tone painting, Debussy’s twenty-four preludes are quintessential examples of his ability to evoke
moods, memories, and images that are, at once, too specific and too vague for mere words. “The impressionists’ objective was that music should appear directly to the senses without obtruding upon the intellect,” wrote Christopher Palmer in his book Impressionism in Music. “Debussy’s preludes develop this technique of seizing upon the salient details of a scene and fusing them deftly into a quick overall impression to a rare degree of perfection.” Book 1, composed in 1909–10 and published by Durand in May 1910, consists of twelve such poetic paintings in tone.
The chaste austerity of Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi), perhaps inspired by Greek vases in the Louvre, evokes the solemn rites at the Temple of Apollo in the hallowed ancient city of oracles.
Voiles (Sails), a study in whole-tone scales and augmented chords, suggests the gentle lapping of the tide against boats at anchor in a misty harbor.
Not just a breeze that rises to a cutting gale but also a sense of light, space, and fragrance are captured in the iridescent Le vent dans la plaine (Wind over the plains).
above: Debussy, 1895, photographed by Paul Nadar (1856–1939)
The title and voluptuous mood of Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (Sounds and perfumes waft in the evening air) derive from a line of Baudelaire’s poem “Harmonies du soir” of which Debussy made a song in 1889.
Les collines d’Anacapri (The hills of Anacapri) evokes the sunny Italian island in the Bay of Naples through the impressionistic treatment of fragments of a Neapolitan folk song.
Debussy indicated in the score that the rhythm of the weary, stepwise repeated figure that shuffles incessantly through Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the snow) should have “the sonorous value of a melancholy, ice-bound landscape.” With a few deft strokes—the recurring ostinato motto, some resonant, widely spaced chords in the left hand, the halting fragments of a nearly forgotten melody in the right—Debussy captured a vast, gray, frozen scene, perhaps the pianistic equivalent of the rejected lover’s desolate wandering in Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey). “Those solitary footsteps marked out in the bleak snowscape of Des pas sur la neige,” asked Edward Lockspeiser in his study of the composer, “where do they lead?”
Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the west wind saw) was the sea, and its mood here is painted as tempestuous and angry in a virtual hurricane of figurations and surges of color.
La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with the flaxen hair), the simplest and perhaps best-known prelude, traces its title and atmosphere to a verse from the Poèmes Antiques: Chansons Ecossaises
by the French writer Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), which Debussy had set for voice during his student years, sometime between 1880 and 1884. (The song and the piano piece are unrelated musically.) Though its pentatonic melody recalls the Javanese gamelan music that so intrigued French musicians at the Paris Exposition of 1889, Debussy’s luminous music captures well the spirit of de Lisle’s poem, which tells of a young Scottish girl singing in the morning sunshine of her simple, unaffected love.
“A master work,” said Manuel de Falla of La sérénade interrompue (The interrupted serenade) in the way that it captures a “quite Andalusian grace.”
The imitation of a twanging guitar, the suggestive harmonies, the melodic arabesques of traditional Roma song, and the undulant rhythms of Iberian dance evoke the Spain of imagination that inspired some of Debussy’s most colorful works. There is wry humor here as well, as the lover is frustrated in delivering his song undisturbed. E. Robert Schmitz wrote in his study of Debussy’s piano music,
Our hero is persistent and loath to forego his serenade despite the multiple interruptions that beset him and test his temper. Having tuned his guitar and preluded on it, he begins, but there is a violent interruption. (A window slamming shut? Water tossed on the nocturnal visitor?) The serenade is resumed but again broken off (a night watchman with a wooden
leg—or a group of revelers?), and our hero’s temper flares, the first time to no avail but finally bringing results, though it takes a few seconds for the serenader to recover his serenading mood. But perhaps his heart is no longer in it, for the serenade recedes more and more and is finally lost in the distance.
La cathédrale engloutie (The sunken cathedral) was inspired by an ancient Breton legend of a cathedral in the submerged city of Ys that rises briefly above the waves on clear mornings, bells tolling, and priests chanting. (Lalo’s opera Le Roi d’Ys is based on the same tale.) Debussy evoked this miraculous phenomenon by suggesting the parallel harmonies of medieval organum and the smooth melodic leadings of Gregorian chant in this miniature tone poem.
Though Debussy disliked his prescribed two-year residence in the Eternal City as winner of the 1885 Prix de Rome, he did take advantage of his enforced absence from Paris to become more familiar with the
Preludes, Book 2
COMPOSED
1910–13
Brouillards (Fog or mists) may be a musical evocation of Monet’s painting of the Thames shrouded in mist or, at a further remove, of the works of the English painter Turner, whom Debussy
writings of Shakespeare, reading the plays aloud (in French translation) with Paul Vidal and Xavier Leroux. When he was first casting about for an opera libretto before settling on Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy considered Hamlet as a subject and rejected it but seriously thought about using As You Like It. He drafted a libretto with poet Paul-Jean Toulet and toyed with composing it until the last year of his life, but nothing ever came of the plan. The only Shakespeare-inspired works in Debussy’s catalog are the two fragments of incidental music that he composed for a production of King Lear in 1904 and La danse de Puck, whose gossamer strains capture the mercurial sprite from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Among the more exotic entertainments of Debussy’s day were the American minstrel shows that began appearing at European fairs and seaside resorts around 1900. He evoked their humor, their banjos, and their strutting dances in Minstrels.
once called “the finest creator of mystery in art.” Brouillards is among Debussy’s most harmonically advanced creations, superimposing ribbons of gliding figurations ranging freely through a complex of keys upon the diatonic progressions of the left hand.
The mood of Feuilles mortes (Dead leaves) is explained by an excuse Debussy once gave to an editor about why he had failed to review a certain Sunday afternoon concert:
I had lingered in autumn-filled landscapes, bound by the spell of ancient forests. The golden leaves, as they fell from the agonized trees, and the shrill Angelus bell, bidding the fields take their sleep, sent up a sweet, persuasive voice that counseled complete forgetfulness.
E. Robert Schmitz, in his detailed study of Debussy’s piano music, wrote,
This is the Rite of Autumn [Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913, just as book 2 was being published], in which falling leaves are a signal of the suspension of life, creating a static expectancy, intense regrets of a past now so far gone, of great sadness, and the poignant melancholy of fall.
La puerta del vino (The wine gate) is thought to have been Debussy’s response to a picture postcard that he received from Manuel de Falla showing one of the gateways in the thirteenth-century Alhambra in Granada. Like Soirée dans Grenade (second of the three estampes for piano) and Ibéria (from the orchestral Images), La puerta del vino, with its habanera rhythms and its cante hondo inflections, is a remarkable evocation of Spain from Debussy,
who spent only a single afternoon in that country during his entire life—to attend a bullfight in San Sebastian.
Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses (Fairies are exquisite dancers) has as its source Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of the fantastic beings in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the book that shares its subject with Barrie’s famous and apparently immortal play of 1904. A tiny hint of the horn call from the fantasy opera Oberon by Carl Maria von Weber, a composer Debussy greatly admired, closes the movement.
The heathlands named in the title of Bruyères may be the moors of the Scottish highlands, or the severe coast of Brittany, or some other stark landscape. The meandering melody line, often outlining a folkish pentatonicism, suggests both the openness of the countryside and the loneliness of a wanderer upon the land.
General Lavine–eccentric was inspired by one Edward la Vine, an American comic acrobat and juggler who first played the Parisian music halls in 1910 and appeared in the city again two years later. Alfred Cortot described him as having “a coat several sizes too large and a mouth like a gaping scar, cleft by the set beatific smile. And above all, the ungainly skip of his walk, punctuated by all the careful stage-managed mishaps, which suddenly ended, like a released spring, with an amazing pirouette.” The management of the Marigny Theater approached Debussy to write some music for la Vine’s 1912 engagement, but nothing came of the proposal except for
this delightfully insouciant cakewalk-inflected prelude.
The title and nature of La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune (The terrace for moonlit audiences) seem to have been derived from either Pierre Loti’s novel L’Inde sous les Anglais (India under the English) or a letter of René Puaux that appeared in the newspaper Le Temps. Both writings are imbued with the exoticism of Asia, which found a musical equivalent in Debussy’s prelude. The movement opens with a sinuous snake-charmer strain and closes with gamelan-like bell chords, between which, according to Frank Dawes, Debussy “is concerned to create a soporific effect with drowsily moving chromatic counterpoint over fixed pedal points.”
An Ondine is a mythological water nymph of Nordic folklore who lives in a crystal palace at the bottom of a lake or river to which she lures unwary sailors and fishermen. Debussy’s prelude is undulant and mercurial, depicting both the play of light on water and the sleek movements of the fantastic sprite through her native element.
Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq.
P.P.M.P.C. is Debussy’s tribute to the title character of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. Cortot believed that
It is quite impossible to conceive of a wittier musical expression than this, not only of Dickens’s hero but also of Dickens’s own style. It is his own ironic good humor, his genial wit; every bar of this piece finds its mark, from the comic use of God
Save the King to the snatches of whistling in the last page, passing through all the variations of absentminded seriousness, diffidence, and complacency that make up the humorous figure which is Samuel Pickwick Esq.
Canope is Debussy’s response to two funerary urns from Canopus, the ancient Nile city that promoted the practice of burying the major organs of the deceased in so-called canopic jars with the mummified body. The prelude’s texture is chaste, almost pointillistic, to represent the perceived purity of an ancient world reminiscent of the one Erik Satie had conjured up a quartercentury earlier with his gymnopédies.
Les tierces alternées (Alternating thirds) is the only one of the twentyfour preludes that does not trace its inspiration to some external image, a characteristic that presages the etudes of 1915. The title has a double meaning, as the intervals alternate between major and minor thirds and between being sounded by the left and right hand.
The spectacular Feux d’artifice (Fireworks) that closes book 2 of the preludes is a virtuosic depiction of Bastille Day, which ends, in Debussy’s version, with a quiet reminiscence of a fragment of La Marseillaise
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
