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Amazon.com with Classical 101: Claude Debussy
Editor, Ted Libbey
With Classical 101, our expert editors introduce
music fans to key composers and performers, important
stylistic movements, and milestone recordings in the history
of classical music. In this mailing, contributor Ted Libbey
introduces the tone poetry and painting of Claude Debussy
(1862-1918), perhaps the first great musical modernist.
And an audio tour and essay on Debussy's preludes and orchestral works at Visit the music library
Poet and Painter in Tones
Throughout his life, Claude Debussy was deeply influenced by art and literature. He had a remarkable ability to achieve in music the same richness of emotional sensation, and ambivalence, that poetic imagery can produce in a sensitive reader--a skill he showed not only in the opera "Pelleas et Melisande" but in the first of his orchestral masterpieces, the "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun." Indeed, Debussy's evocative genius was recognized by Stephane Mallarme himself, the author of the poem, "L'Apres-midi d'un faune," on which this extraordinary orchestral paraphrase is based. "I had not expected anything like that," the poet remarked. "The music prolongs the emotion of the poem and fixes the scene more vividly than colors could have done."
Debussy's orchestral palette is indeed more subtle and vivid than any painter's. The drowsy, suffocating warmth alluded to early in the poem is superbly rendered by a languorous flute solo as it unfolds against a dappled background of muted strings and feathery tremolos, and by the near absence of pulse through the early pages of the score. The feeling of passion barely suppressed, which marks the climax of the poem, finds an echo in the music's gradually intensifying lyricism, while the dreamy oblivion into which the faun sinks at the poem's end is suggested by the gradual fragmentation of overlapping of melodic motifs from earlier in the piece. The result is a score of haunting beauty in which, just as in Mallarme's poem, time seems to stand still and the senses take on an animation of their own.
"L'Apres-midi d'un faune," conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen
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"L'Apres-midi d'un faune," conducted by Jean Martinon
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"Pelleas et Melisande," conducted by Herbert von Karajan
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Love of the Sea
It's been called one of the most perfect symphonies ever written. Debussy's "La mer" is that and more, for like much of Debussy's music, "La mer" combines formal elegance and discipline with an extraordinarily vivid sense of imagery, verging at times on outright sensuality. Rarely has a composer been so at one with the orchestra as Debussy was, so adept at moving between pastel suggestiveness and raw displays of power. Thanks to that, "La mer," like the sea itself, is alive, complex, ever changing, and breathtakingly beautiful.
Debussy found the sea an attractive subject for a number of reasons. "You may not know that I was destined for a sailor's life," he told a friend in 1903, the year he started work on the piece. "It was only quite by chance that fate led me in another direction. But I have always held a passionate love for the sea."
Debussy's personal experiences of the sea--childhood visits to Cannes on the Mediterranean, and a perilous afternoon in the spring of 1889 when he and some friends were tossed around in a boat during a storm off the coast of Brittany-- undoubtedly played a part in the genesis of "La mer."
Artistic Stimulus
So did visual and emotional stimuli from the world of art. The paintings of J.M.W. Turner, which Debussy had seen in London just before beginning work on "La mer," had a profound effect on him--their mysterious, atmospheric depiction of the sea took hold in his imagination and certainly influenced his choice of palette. But the image that may have exercised the greatest influence on Debussy as he sought, in the third movement of "La mer," to convey the sheer, awesome power of the sea came from a contemporary of Turner, the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," from Hokusai's "The 36 Views of Mount Fuji," shows a wave that seems about to swallow up a boat and the men who are in it. The height of the wave dwarfs Mount Fuji itself, seen in the distance, and the wave's crest divides into numerous sprays of foam, each of which is rendered in the shape of a claw. Debussy was so captivated by this evocation of the life-threatening aspect of the sea that he had the design printed on the cover of the original score to "La mer."
Structure of "La mer"
Not surprisingly, for one so visually inclined, Debussy subtitled "La mer" "Three symphonic sketches." The titles of the three movements reveal those particular aspects of the sea on which Debussy chose to concentrate, and provide the listener with verbal suggestions to stimulate his or her own sense of imagery.
"From Dawn to Midday on the Sea," the first movement, explores the sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic changes of lighting and intensity that accompany the progress of day on the water. The music suggests a gradual coming to life, from calm grayness to almost blinding brilliance, ending in a blaze of brass and percussion breaking over the full sonority of the orchestra.
"Play of Waves," the second movement, draws the listener's imagination equally to the spheres of light and motion. One senses the rocking of the waves, the unexpected shifts of current, the dappled glint of sunlight on the surface of the water, and the mysterious depths half-lit and teeming with life.
The final movement is entitled "Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea." Here one feels close to the elemental aspect of the sea, and to danger, as the orchestra heaves and subsides in great washes of sound. A moment of suspenseful calm is reached, before a last great buildup shows the sea in triumph, dazzling and full of elemental force.
"La mer," conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen
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"La mer," conducted by Charles Munch
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"La mer," conducted by Herbert von Karajan
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Imagist
Imagery was such an essential part of Debussy's approach to composing that he gave the title "Images" to several of his works. He completed three sets of "Images" for the piano, and he named a collection of three descriptive orchestral pieces "Images pour orchestre." One of these, "Iberia" (in three movements like "La mer"), is a colorful portrait of Spain scored with castanets, flashing tambourines, bells, and violins strumming pizzicato chords as if they were guitars. It is flanked by "Gigues," a melancholy tribute to England, and "Rondes de printemps," which affectionately recalls the magical French countryside.
"Images," performed by Paul Jacobs, piano
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"Images," conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen
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"Images," conducted by Pierre Boulez
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"Images," conducted by Charles Dutoit
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Studies in Color
Like "La mer," Debussy's "Three Nocturnes" were inspired at least in part by the work of a great painter--in this case, the American artist James McNeill Whistler. Whistler painted a series of canvasses he called nocturnes, and it was these Debussy had in mind when he described his own set of three orchestral tone pictures as "an experiment in the different arrangements of a single color, like a study in gray in painting."
Certainly the first of the nocturnes, entitled "Nuages" ("Clouds"), fits with that description. Wispy chords in the strings oscillate without going anywhere, and fragments of a melancholy solo in the English horn are aimlessly repeated against the vague background. The music seems to float somewhere outside the realm of time--just as clouds at dusk seem to pass without moving, eventually vanishing into the darkness. Similarly, the music of the third nocturne, "Sirens," suggests a dream-like vision in which water and sky merge into nothingness. The wordless vocalizing of Debussy's sirens--a small, eight-part women's choir behind the scene--and the shimmering music that surrounds their calls are among the composer's most masterful examples of tone painting.
"Nocturnes," conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus
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