70805 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics

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Claude Debussy (1862-1918) n4 Reflets dans l’eau (“Reflections in the Water”) from Images, Set I n9 Les collines d’Anacapri (“Hills of Anacapri”) from Préludes, Book I n11 Clair de lune (“Moonlight”) from Suite bergamasque n13 Poissons d’or (“Goldfish”) from Images, Set II To Debussy music was always a mystery, something intimate and personal to be offered and accepted with delicacy. “The soul of another is a dim forest where one should walk with cautious steps,” he once remarked, sounding the keynote of his own intense love of freedom. It was not a flaunting freedom nor physical isolation he craved, but a sort of soul privacy which gave him his “ivory tower” in the midst of busy streets. He would have Claude Debussy been the last man in the world to have forced his music on unwilling ears or spread his dream pictures before eyes that could see only posters! Historians usually classify Debussy as an Impressionist. Debussy himself argued that the term could be rightly applied only to the art of painting, where it originated. Quibbling over a word, however, cannot alter the fact of the striking resemblance in subject, purpose, and method of Debussy’s music and the work of the Impressionist painters and Symbolist poets whose philosophies he shared. When Debussy published his first set of Images in 1905, he wrote to the publisher: “I think I may say without undue pride, that I believe these three pieces will live and will take their place in piano literature… either to the left of Schubert… or the right of Chopin…” According to biographer Oscar Thompson, Reflets dans – 6 –
l’eau (“Reflections in the Water”) is one of the most perfect examples of Impressionism in music. He writes: “The first floating chords establish a mood that is highly suggestive. Luminous chords and skimming arpeggios are used in successions that yield a drowsy, flickering effect, as of inverted images in a pool. The basic theme is a slow, trailing one, mirrored, in the course of its transformation, in what may be described as harmonic reflections.” Debussy referred to this music as embodying “the newest discoveries in harmonic chemistry.” Les Collines d’Anacapri (“Hills of Anacapri”) appears in Book I of Debussy’s Préludes, published in 1910. According to pianist Marguerite Long, “In this memory of an Italian journey, light and movement are in opposition to each other. A network of tarantellas surrounds the Bay of Naples, its villas and its grottoes. In the midst of frenzied dancing a disapproving note is heard from the convent bells. But a popular song, simple, indolent and amorous, supervenes. With an imperceptible gesture, with a single displacement of an acciaccatura (‘crushing-in’ of two notes, when the principal note retains its accent and practically all its time-value) all the ardor, tenderness and audacity of a Neapolitan gamin (‘street urchin’) is suggested.” Clair de lune (“Moonlight”) is spellbinding music. The composer, like a blissfully unconscious sleepwalker, follows his dream and takes the listener with him into an invisible world. Clair de lune is one of the four pieces which make up Suite bergamasque (1890-1905), written when Debussy was much intrigued by the Symbolist poets. Italian musicologist, Guido Gatti, writes: “What an airy flowering of arpeggios ascends the keyboard, to leap up again like a fountain jet which scatters its water on the air, then relapses into calm again in solid tonic and dominant undulations, on which the theme spreads out, ample, sonorous, expressive.” This is beautiful, emotional, pellucid music, where Debussy revels in the luscious, often “floating” tone. Debussy published his second set of Images in 1907. The final piece is Poissons d’or (“Goldfish”). According to biographer Léon Vallas, this music was inspired by the contemplation of a piece of oriental lacquer in Debussy’s possession. “Thus viewed,” writes Oscar Thompson, “the music is less a description of actual goldfish swimming in a pool than it is a reflection of Debussy’s love of Japanese objets d’art. But it has the flash of sunlight on water and the gleam of moving fins, rather than any suggestions of static contemplation of line and color.” – 7 –
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Page 16: Music by Albéniz, Debussy, Falla,

70805 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics

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