“This master composer presents to his audience in all seriousness the harmonies that a cat walking on the keyboard would have created. Truly, he is pulling our leg.” Such was the decidedly ambivalent response of Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, a grande dame of Parisian society, upon hearing one of Debussy’s Images for solo piano in 1908. Today, more than a century after the composer’s death on March 25, 1918, it can be easy to forget how startlingly revolutionary his music sounded to his contemporaries. Indeed, much of 20th-century music would be unthinkable without Debussy’s innovations in harmony, form, tone color, and texture. In the words of the arch modernist Pierre Boulez, “Varèse and Webern were the first to learn the lesson of Debussy’s last works and to ‘think forms,’ not—in Debussy’s words—as ‘sonata boxes,’ but as arising from a process that is primarily spatial and rhythmic, linking ‘a succession of alternative, contrasting, or correlated states’—that is to say, intrinsic to its object but at the same time in complete control of it.”
Although Debussy relished being a thorn in the side of France’s hidebound musical establishment, there was a pronounced streak of traditionalism in his artistic temperament. The composer—who in later years patriotically signed himself “musicien français”—had long advocated for a revival of the “pure French tradition” as epitomized, in his view, by Baroque master Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy burst on the scene in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional yet quintessentially Gallic works, including the String Quartet, La damoiselle élue, and, above all, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. By the time he published his first book of Images in 1905, the composer and his aesthetic principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric “Debussyism”—were the object of both lavish praise and censure. Together with his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s great piano and orchestral pieces came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind. Although critics often linked him with painters like Manet, he steadfastly maintained that his music depicted not superficial “impressions,” but essential “realities.” Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.”
It was at least partly to counteract the distasteful impressionist label that Debussy called his later piano works “preludes” and “etudes,” eschewing titles like Images and Estampes that evoked the visual arts. In a further effort to discourage such associations, he insisted on relegating programmatic titles to the end of the pieces—to no discernible effect, as the listening public remained stubbornly wedded to them. In any case, Books I and II of the Préludes (published in 1910 and 1913, respectively) are programmatic only in the most general sense of arising in response to extramusical stimuli; and those stimuli were as likely to be literary, natural, or even theatrical as visual. The five Préludes that Debussy recorded on piano rolls in 1913 testify to the novel sounds he heard in his head. According to composer Alfredo Casella, “No words can give an idea of the way in which he played certain of his own Préludes. Not that he had actual virtuosity, but his sensibility of touch was incomparable; he made the impression of playing directly on the strings of the instrument with no intermediate mechanism; the effect was a miracle of poetry.” Debussy himself was more circumspect about his abilities. “I am not a great pianist,” he confessed. “It’s true that I can adequately perform some of the Préludes, the easiest ones. But the others … make me tremble.”
Book I of the Préludes instantly immerses the listener in Debussy’s unmistakable sound world, an enchanted fantasyland of shimmering harmonies, sinuous roulades, and richly embroidered melodies. The gracefully arching phrases of “Danseuses de Delphes” (“Dancers of Delphi”) mirror the poses of the ancient Greek Bacchantes that Debussy observed in a plaster reproduction at the Louvre. In “Voiles” (“Sails”), languidly fluttering figures, like sails billowing in the breeze, are tethered by repeated B-flats in the bass. The lightly rippling passagework of “Le vent dans la plaine” (“The Wind on the Plain”) likewise rests on a B-flat foundation, while the richly colored harmonies of “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” (“Sounds and Scents Turn in the Evening Air”) finally converge on series of A-major chords that Debussy marks “like a distant horn call.” Natural imagery comes to the fore in “Les collines d’Anacapri” (“The Hills of Anacapri”), with its shifting melodic contours and mercurial tempo changes; in the trudging ostinato rhythm of “Des pas sur la neige” (“Footsteps in the Snow”); and in the gusty arpeggios and tremolos of “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” (“What the West Wind Saw”).
The perennially popular “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with Flaxen Hair”) is all folk-like simplicity and tenderness, leading to an equally unaffected evocation of a Spanish guitar in “La sérénade interrompue” (“The Interrupted Serenade”). To underscore the allusion, Debussy quotes a snatch from his symphonic snapshot Iberia in the middle of the piece. “La cathédrale engloutie” (“The Sunken Cathedral”)—inspired by a Breton legend of a city submerged in the ocean—is a mélange of muffled chords and bright, bell-like peals; for a performance at the Salle Érard in Paris, Debussy insisted on lowering the piano lid, the better to “drown the sound.” The first book of Préludes ends on a whimsical note with the skittishly capricious “La danse de Puck” (“Puck’s Dance”) and the clownish antics of “Minstrels,” inspired by a real-life minstrel show that Debussy attended in England in 1905.
Of the dozen Préludes in Book II, “Brouillards” (“Mists”) encapsulates the essence of Debussy’s pianism, with its rippling arpeggios, ringing octaves, and luminous overlay of tonal and chromatic harmonies. His interest in exoticism is reflected in the habanera rhythm of “La puerta del vino” (the title refers to the Moorish Wine Gate in the Alhambra of Granada, Spain) and the pervasive parallel motion of “Canope” (“Canopic jar,” an ancient Egyptian burial urn). In “Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses” (“Fairies Are Exquisite Dancers”)—inspired, like “Feuilles mortes” (“Dead Leaves”), by Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens—the pianist is called upon to execute nimble pinpoint arabesques, while “General Lavine—eccentric” mimics the comically jerky movements of an American clown popular in turn-of-the century music halls. “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune” (“The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences”) is notable for its spacious luminosity, “Ondine” (a water nymph) for its swirling, harp-like figuration and resonances. The last of the 24 Préludes, “Feux d’artifice” (“Fireworks”), is a tour de force of kaleidoscopic colors, the individual notes practically dissolving in a glowing haze that is pierced, just before the end, by the far-off clarion call of “La Marseillaise.”
—Harry Haskell