Images

By Claude Debussy

BORN : August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye, France

DIED: March 25, 1918, in Paris

Ω COMPOSED : 1905–12

Ω WORLD PREMIERE : Ibéria was the first of the three pieces that comprise Debussy’s Images to premiere, on February 20, 1910, with Gabriel Pierné conducting. Rondes de printemps followed on March 2, under the direction of the composer. Gigues was first performed on January 26, 1913, under the baton of André Caplet, who helped orchestrate the work.

Ω CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PREMIERE : Each of the three parts of Images also debuted in Cleveland separately: Nikolai Sokoloff led the first performances of Ibéria in January 1921; Rondes de printemps came next, in 1937, with conductor Carlos Chavez; and Gigues entered the Orchestra’s repertoire in 1951, when Pierre Monteux led the Orchestra in the complete work for the first time.

Ω ORCHESTRATION : 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), piccolo, 2 oboes, english horn, oboe d’amore, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (castanets, xylophone, tambourine, snare drum, chimes, tambourin provençal), 2 harps, celeste, and strings

Ω DURATION : 35 minutes

THE ASSOCIATION OF MUSIC and images is a fundamental characteristic of Claude Debussy’s works. In addition to the many specific physical references on which he based compositions — from the ocean in La Mer to all kinds of landscapes and portraits in the two books of piano preludes — the word Images appeared in an early set of piano pieces (1894) and in two better-known sets for piano (1905–08), before this title was used again for the orchestral Images

It was natural for Debussy to think in musical images. He was a great lover of art and counted many painters among his friends. But his artistic vision went beyond mere musical representation of a subject. For Debussy, his images were seen or dreamed by the mind’s eye and then realized in his colorful soundworld.

In the case of the orchestral Images, the tableaux primarily capture motion combined with the senses of sight, hearing, and even smell — the middle section of Ibéria evokes nighttime aromas. As Charles Baudelaire, one of Debussy’s favorite poets, put it: “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent…” (“The fragrances, the colors, and the sounds answer one another…”).

Gigues

In the first section, Gigues, Debussy initially planned to append the adjective “triste,” or “sad,” to the title, according to a letter to his publisher Durand from 1905. No doubt, the idea of turning a cheerful dance into a melancholy melody was already present in his mind years before the composition was written.

The melody is derived from an English country dance or jig, related to but different from the Baroque gigue. Debussy had visited England on many occasions, and he may have come across this melody on one of his trips, or he may have borrowed it from the song

“Dansons la gigue” (“Let’s dance the jig”) by his contemporary Charles Bordes (1863–1909).

After a brief introduction with a typically Debussyan combination of harp, celeste, and woodwinds, the jig melody is played by unaccompanied oboe d’amore (a double-reed instrument whose pitch lies between the oboe and the english horn). The other woodwinds and the horns play a faster rhythmic variant of this tune while the oboe d’amore keeps repeating its own, more soulful version of it. The music gets more and more agitated as the rhythmic pattern of the faster-moving material is developed in a powerful orchestral crescendo that suddenly breaks off. The sad jig tune returns, the tempo gradually slows down, the music gets ever softer, and finally fades into silence.

André Caplet, who collaborated with Debussy on the score of Gigues, wrote about the work in 1923: “Gigues … Sad Gigues… tragic Gigues… The portrait of a soul… a soul in pain, uttering its slow, lingering lamentation on the reed of an oboe d’amore. … Underneath the convulsive shudderings, the sudden efforts at restraint, the pitiful grimaces, which serve as a kind of disguise, we recognize the very soul of our dear, great Claude Debussy. We find there the spirit of sadness, infinite sadness, lying stretched as in the bed of a river whose flow, constantly augmented from new sources, increases inevitably, mercilessly.”

French musicians had often been inspired by the rhythms of Spanish music — the greatest example being Bizet’s opera Carmen, which premiered in 1875. Two other composers in particular owed their fame to Spanishinfluenced compositions: Édouard

Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole (1875) and Emmanuel Chabrier’s España (1883). Both works must have been well known to the young Debussy, who wrote his own La soirée dans Grenade (“Evening in Grenada”) for solo piano in 1903.

Aside from one short trip across the border, Debussy never visited Spain. But he was familiar with works by composers on the other side of the Pyrenees such as Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. The latter composed a magnificent four-volume suite for piano titled Ibéria (1905–08), and Falla praised Debussy’s Ibéria, saying it had “a considerable and decisive influence on young Spanish composers.”

The first section of Ibéria, “Par les rues et par les chemins” (“In the Streets and Byways”), immediately creates a Spanish atmosphere with the sound of castanets. A whole town floods the streets on a warm summer evening. People walk, talk, sing, and dance. The clarinets play a dance marked by the composer as “elegant and rhythmic” and harmonized with parallel chords (one of Debussy’s recurrent techniques). Later, the horns and clarinets intone an equally cheerful second theme, soon combined with a third melody which, in contrast, is more lyrical and expressive in character. The first theme with the castanet accompaniment finally returns (now played by the oboes instead of the clarinets). At last, the noisy parade is over; the people go home and the section quiets down to a pianissimo.

The second section is called “Les parfums de la nuit” (“The Fragrances of the Night”). Falla perceived here “the intoxicating spell of Andalusian nights,” which he must have known having been born in that province of Spain. Several factors contribute to the magic of this movement, including a virtuosic orchestration that makes sophisticated use of divided strings. For example, at one point the first violins split into seven different groups, all playing with special techniques such as glissandos and harmonics. The celeste part is every bit as celestial as the instrument’s name. The chords are again parallel, with every part moving by the same interval regardless of keys; as a result, we get the so-called “whole-tone scale” (C, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp), where any note may serve as a temporary or permanent resting-point. As a result, the music seems to hover in the air, never touching the ground or reaching closure.

The third section of Ibéria, “Le matin d’un jour de fête” (“The Morning of a Festival Day”) follows without interruption. As the day begins to break, we hear the distant sound of a drum with some softly plucked string pizzicatos. The night music returns for a moment in the form of a three-measure flute solo. The violins and violas imitate guitars —  Debussy instructs half the players to hold their instruments like guitars. The clarinets are instructed to play “very cheerfully, exaggerating the accents,” the violin solo, full of double stops, must be “free and whimsical,” the oboe and english horn parts “merry and whimsical.”

Rondes De Printemps

The final section, translated as “Round Dances of Spring,” opens with an atmosphere of warmth and serenity, though at the 1910 premiere, according to Debussy biographer Léon Vallas, “the very high pitch of the violins, the sudden gusts of thirds in the wind instruments, the rough sonorities of certain passages, suggested to some people icy blasts rather than the gentle breezes of spring.”

Following the introduction, Debussy includes a rare quote of a French folksong in one of his works: “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (“We won’t go to the woods anymore”). This melody — which also appears in his piano piece Jardins sous la pluie (“Gardens in the Rain”), from the cycle Estampes — is transformed in various ways, some derived from the Baroque contrapuntal techniques known as stretto and augmentation. This is also the only movement of Images to bear a dedication, inscribed to Debussy’s second wife, Emma.

After undergoing various rhythmic transformations, the folksong is played in long and strongly accented notes by the clarinets and the english horn, only to crumble away to tiny motifs, suddenly cut short by a powerful glissando by the harp and celeste that brings the piece to a close.

According to the composer’s correspondence with his publisher, Debussy was torn between choosing from three potential endings. “Shall I toss up between them,” he wrote, “or try to find a fourth solution?” He finally opted for a big crescendo, “brisk and vigorous.”

The last word belongs to the trombones, which cap the piece with a stupendous three-part sliding glissando.

— Peter Laki