Claude Debussy achieved his musical maturity in the final decade of the 19th century, a magical moment in France when composers struggled with the pluses and minuses of Wagner, and the City of Light blazed even more brightly than usual, inflamed with the pleasures of the Belle Époque. Several early Debussy masterpieces of the 1890s have lodged in the repertoire, including, most strikingly, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
Debussy was hardly a youngster when he composed it. He had begun studying at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, when he was only 10; had served as resident pianist for Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s mysterious patron, in Russia and on her travels during the summers of 1880–1882; had received the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to spend the next two years in Italy; had inhaled the Wagnerian breezes of Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889; had grown enamored of the sounds of the Javanese gamelan at the Paris International Exposition of 1889; and had composed a great many songs and piano pieces, some of which are ensconced in the repertoire today.
While it defined the composer’s distinctive voice, this 10-minute piece baffled many listeners. Debussy’s fellow composer Alfred Bruneau wrote that it “is one of the most exquisite instrumental fantasies which the young French school has produced. This work is too exquisite, alas! It is too exquisite.” Even at the distance of a century, listeners can appreciate Bruneau’s concern. The Debussy of the 1890s sometimes seemed so obsessed with minute details of timbre that other musical concerns appeared to be overlooked; everything threatened to implode into a mass of sensual loveliness. Of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, composer Ferruccio Busoni said, “It is like a beautiful sunset; it fades as one looks at it.”
Debussy’s eventual style was not to display the sort of firm, unmistakable architecture that most composers until that time had cherished. His method would evolve into something more intuitive, with themes that invite little development, and harmonies inspiring momentary excitement rather than underscoring long trajectory. Although he is sometimes called a musical Impressionist, Debussy’s aesthetic affinities would seem to be more allied to the Symbolists, those poets and artists of the late–19th century who disdained the purely expository or representational and sought instead to evoke a specific, fleeting emotional illumination in the reader or viewer through mysterious metaphors.
One of the high points of Symbolist poetry was L’après-midi d’un faune, by Stéphane Mallarmé. The poem first appeared in 1865 under the title Monologue d’un faune and then kept evolving until it reached a definitive version in 1876. At that point, Mallarmé published it, under its new title, in a slim volume embellished with a drawing by Édouard Manet. Vintage Symbolism it is: A faun (a rural deity that is half man and half goat) spends a languorous afternoon observing, recalling, or fantasizing about—it’s not always clear which—some alluring nymphs who clearly affect him in an erotic way. The poem became iconic in its time (although it was merely a point of departure for Mallarmé’s even more revolutionary poetry), and Debussy fell under its spell by the early 1890s, when he seems to have discussed with Mallarmé the idea of creating a musical parallel.
Debussy appears to have embarked on the project sometime in 1891. The score was complete by October 23, 1894, and the piece was premiered two months later, to such acclaim that it was immediately encored on the same program. It was certainly radical in its unremitting sensuality, but the work’s harmonic implications were also profound. In retrospect, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune may be taken as a harbinger of the musical century that lay ahead.
Nico Muhly sang in an Episcopal choir from an early age. He wrote:
Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tye were like the dinner guests on whom you had crushes as a child, not because of any particular story they told, but because of the way they told those stories—the turns of phrase, the little obsessive details, the localized, rather than structural, repetitions.
Pre-existing music would inspire Muhly as his career progressed: His recent composition Tambourin, for example, is a short “response” to J. S. Bach’s Fourth Orchestral Suite. The French Baroque musical ideas of Jean-Philippe Rameau served as a point of departure for In Certain Circles.
Muhly earned degrees from Columbia University (in English literature) and The Juilliard School, where his composition teachers included Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. Minimalists would influence Muhly’s music, although he did not end up echoing their celebrated repetitions and gradual unrollings so much as he mixes their processes into his own broader stylistic palette. Indeed, he is all but impossible to pigeonhole as a composer. His music seems to be born of some specific inspiration and then develops organically along its own path.
Muhly has composed for the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among many others. He has served as composer-in-residence for the Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, SongStudio, and the American Academy in Rome, and he is currently a collaborative partner at the San Francisco Symphony. Two of his operas have been produced by the Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (premiered in 2010) and Marnie (which English National Opera premiered in 2017 and the Met offered the following year). His other projects for stage and screen include collaborations for the Paris Opéra Ballet and New York City Opera, the 2013 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, and the films Kill Your Darlings, Margaret, and The Reader. He has worked with artists not much associated with the classical scene, including Björk, Sufjan Stevens, The National, and the Icelandic music collective / record label Bedroom Community.
The “score behind the score” of In Certain Circles, the composer explains, is L’Enharmonique, a movement from Rameau’s Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin. In it Rameau “re-spelled” notes when repeated in close succession—G-sharp becomes A-flat, for example—propelling the harmony in an unexpected direction. In Muhly’s double-piano concerto, Rameau’s phrases hover in the background and occasionally peep through the texture. Muhly has written the following about the work:
In Certain Circles is in three movements. The first contains a little fragment of a piece by Rameau, L’Enharmonique. The movement is about uncovering it through various disguises and lifting those disguises. From time to time, the tune from the Rameau appears and quickly vanishes; while it’s not always meant to be fully audible, there should be a sense of “hauntology” here, in which the simple intervals of the Rameau permeate the texture in oblique and sometimes obscure, ghostly ways. A very simple gesture permeates all three movements: a rising second, forcefully declared by the brass in the very first bar; the brass often insists on these intervals even when they antagonize the pianos.
The second movement is a pair of dance-suite movements: a sarabande and a gigue. I tried to call on my knowledge of French Baroque music to make something I’ve never done before—which is to say, music that more or less obeys the rhythmic rules of a received form. Here, the pianos go in and out of rhythmic unison with one another—a little mechanical, a little expressive. While the sarabande is quite supple, the gigue is explicitly mechanical and a bit unstable. The normal sets of six and 12 beats are often interrupted with unwelcome little hiccoughs of four or five beats, creating a sense of anxiety despite the explicitly diatonic harmonies.
The third movement begins with the pianos in completely different rhythmic worlds from one another. “Disconnection” is the guiding musical principle here; the music shifts quickly from very dark to very bright, from jagged rhythms to simple ones, and from delicate to quite violent. Every playful moment is offset by something severe and mechanical. After a relatively joyful, pulse-based episode, we perceive a final specter of L’Enharmonique, and the movement ends abruptly.
Richard Wagner is one of the most discussed figures of music history. He has been decried as the end of the musical tradition as it was known and loved, and he has been revered as the wellspring of the modern and a visionary whose conceptions continue to fuel the avant-garde.
It is marvelous to think that such strong opinions—and so many of them—swirl around a composer who is known almost exclusively through 10 compositions: Der fliegende Holländer (premiered in 1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried (1876), Götterdämmerung (1876), and Parsifal (1882). It would not do to refer to this list as a “mere 10 compositions”; they stand among the longest and, in some ways, the most imposing pieces in the active operatic repertoire. Yet they do not represent the entirety of Wagner’s creative output. Apart from these operas, he wrote three others (early works that are rarely visited today) and about 100 other pieces, not all of them complete or extant, for various vocal and/or orchestral forces (the Siegfried Idyll being the best-known), not to mention a numbingly extensive outpouring of prose works on a variety of topics that in published form take up several feet of library shelf space.
Wagner’s earliest operas amalgamated more-or-less standard traditions of German Romantic opera (as codified in the works of Weber, Marschner, and others) and French Grand Opera (a large-scale enterprise typified by Meyerbeer and his contemporaries in Paris). As Wagner’s career progressed, he moved increasingly toward realizing his ideal of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of artistic expression synthesized from disparate artistic disciplines, including music, literature, the visual arts, ballet, and architecture. The operas of Wagner’s maturity are so distinct in this way that they are often referred to not as operas but “music dramas” in an attempt to underscore the singularity of his aesthetic goals. Nonetheless, Wagner himself was not averse to extracting sections from these closely woven works to present apart from their operatic context, conducting orchestral extracts from his operas as standalone concert works on numerous occasions.
With Tristan und Isolde, one finds Wagner in his full maturity, already immersed in plotting his tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (comprising Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung), which would not reach its completion until after Tristan und Isolde had been unveiled. Tristan und Isolde digs deep back into the period of the Middle Ages, which was an ongoing Wagnerian fascination. In this tale much-retold through the ages, King Marke has sent his nephew Tristan from Cornwall, where they live, to Ireland to fetch Isolde, who is to become the king’s bride through an enforced arrangement. In the course of the journey, Tristan and Isolde fall in love and, later, get “carnally involved,” encouraged by a potion prepared by Isolde’s maid. They are discovered, and Tristan is attacked by one of the king’s soldiers. He dies with Isolde at his side, after which she, too, expires in an ecstatic combination of love and grief. The first and last passages of the opera, fused into a single span, have become famous as the Prelude and Liebestod (Love-Death), sometimes with a soprano singing Isolde’s final scene, sometimes in a purely orchestral transcription, as presented here.
“You are perhaps unaware that I was intended for the noble career of a sailor and have only deviated from that path thanks to the quirk of fate.”
So wrote Claude Debussy to his friend and fellow composer André Messager on September 12, 1903, by which time he had been at work for about a month on the piece that would grow into La mer. His father, an ex-Navy man who ran a china shop, had thought that the Navy, or perhaps merchant seamanship, would be a splendid goal for his firstborn son. But then the china shop went out of business, and Debussy père got into trouble fighting for the Paris Commune and was sentenced to four years in prison. The term was suspended after he served a year, but as part of the deal he relinquished his civil rights. Under the circumstances, it was generally agreed that young Claude should be moved to a less-traumatized home, and he was taken in by a friend of the family who happened to be the mother-in-law of poet Paul Verlaine. She had no interest in sending her charge off to maritime pursuits, and instead steered him toward the Paris Conservatoire. Debussy continued in his letter to Messager:
Even so, I’ve retained a sincere devotion to the sea. To which you’ll reply that the Atlantic doesn’t exactly wash the foothills of Burgundy! … And that the result could be one of those hack landscapes done in the studio! But I have innumerable memories, and those, in my view, are worth more than a reality which, charming as it may be, tends to weigh too heavily on the imagination.
He was ensconced just then at his in-laws’ house in the town of Bichain, on the western fringe of Burgundy. And the piece he was writing comprised, as he wrote in the same letter, “three symphonic sketches: 1. ‘mer belle aux îles Sanguinaires’ (‘Beautiful Sea at the Sanguinaire Islands’); 2. ‘jeux de vagues’ (‘The Play of the Waves’); 3. ‘le vent fait danser la mer’ (‘The Wind Makes the Sea Dance’); the whole to be called La mer (The Sea).” Only the second of the movement titles would stick as Debussy worked on his symphonic sketches over the next two years.
A famous sea image from the world of art also stimulated Debussy: the Hokusai woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, widely known as simply The Wave. Recalling the composer’s house on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne in Paris, the publisher Jacques Durand wrote that in the study one found
a certain colored engraving by Hokusai, representing the curl of a giant wave. Debussy was particularly enamored of this wave. It inspired him while he was composing La mer, and he asked us to reproduce it on the cover of the printed score.
Which Durand did. When the composer titled the first movement “From Dawn till Noon on the Sea,” he was leaving the door open to all manner of clever ripostes. Boston critic Louis Elson, encountering the piece in 1907, jumped into the breach, exclaiming that he “feared we were to have a movement seven hours long. It was not so long, but it was terrible while it lasted.” The wry but beneficent Erik Satie was wittier still in his assessment; after the premiere, he exclaimed to Debussy, “Ah, my dear friend, there’s one particular moment that I found stunning, between half past ten and a quarter to eleven!”
—James M. Keller
Former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair