70805 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics
70805 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics
70805 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics
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Claude Debussy (1862-1918)<br />
n4 Reflets dans l’eau (“Reflections in the<br />
Water”) from Images, Set I<br />
n9 Les collines d’Anacapri (“Hills of<br />
Anacapri”) from Préludes, Book I<br />
n<strong>11</strong> Clair de lune (“Moonlight”) from Suite<br />
bergamasque<br />
n13 Poissons d’or (“Goldfish”) from Images,<br />
Set II<br />
To Debussy music was always a mystery,<br />
something intimate and personal to<br />
be offered and accepted with delicacy.<br />
“The soul of another is a dim <strong>for</strong>est where<br />
one should walk with cautious steps,” he<br />
once remarked, sounding the keynote of<br />
his own intense love of freedom. It was<br />
not a flaunting freedom nor physical isolation<br />
he craved, but a sort of soul privacy<br />
which gave him his “ivory tower” in<br />
the midst of busy streets. He would have<br />
Claude Debussy<br />
been the last man in the world to have<br />
<strong>for</strong>ced his music on unwilling ears or<br />
spread his dream pictures be<strong>for</strong>e eyes that could see only posters!<br />
Historians usually classify Debussy as an Impressionist. Debussy himself argued<br />
that the term could be rightly applied only to the art of painting, where it originated.<br />
Quibbling over a word, however, cannot alter the fact of the striking resemblance<br />
in subject, purpose, and method of Debussy’s music and the work of the<br />
Impressionist painters and Symbolist poets whose philosophies he shared.<br />
When Debussy published his first set of Images in 19<strong>05</strong>, he wrote to the publisher:<br />
“I think I may say without undue pride, that I believe these three pieces will<br />
live and will take their place in piano literature… either to the left of Schubert… or<br />
the right of Chopin…” According to biographer Oscar Thompson, Reflets dans<br />
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