CONDO CONCERT 28 April 2019

Arthur Wenk

Preludes, Book I (1912) Claude Debussy

• Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi)

• Voiles (Veils/Sails)

• Le vent dans la plaine (The Wind in the Plain)

• «Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir» ("The sounds and fragrances swirl

through the evening air")

• Les collines d'Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri)

• Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow)

• Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest (What the West Wind Has Seen)

• La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair)

• La sérénade interrompue (Interrupted Serenade)

• La cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral)

• La danse de Puck (Puck's Dance)

•

Unveiling Debussy’s Piano Preludes, Book I

“Music is a dream from which the veils have been lifted.” (Claude Debussy)

Claude Debussy, the most private of composers, avoided assigning titles to his piano preludes in the

usual fashion. Instead, he placed them at the end of each prelude, enclosed in parentheses and

preceded by an ellipsis. By presenting the titles as mere hints, Debussy aligns himself with Symbolist

poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said “Naming an object suppresses three quarters of the joy of the

poem which is intended to define little by little: suggest it, there’s the dream.”1

Debussy’s elaborate charade has the effect of announcing a mystery to be solved, thereby provoking a

search that might not even have been undertaken had the titles appeared in a more conventional

form. These program notes represent an attempt to penetrate that mystery. Debussy loved

ambiguity, as evidenced in his choice of the word Voiles (“veils” or “sails”) for the second prelude. I

have deliberately chosen “unveiling” to embrace my effort to get pass Debussy’s elliptical,

parenthetical clues. Given the nature of the project, my observations can be no more than

suggestions. In Debussy’s preludes, unlike an algebra text, the answers do not appear at the back of

the book. Those who prefer to leave the mystery undisturbed should read no further.

A word of warning: this kind of investigation, once begun, rarely has a well-defined endpoint. The

legend behind “The Sunken Cathedral” leads to a virtually endless chapter in Celtic literature. How

far should one pursue the history of minstrelsy in seeking to understand the twelfth prelude? When

Debussy’s title evokes a poem—and this happens a good deal more often than generally

acknowledged—I have included the entire poem and its translation, where necessary. But when the

poem in question constitutes an entire play, as in the case of “Puck’s Dance,” referencing

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a limit must be drawn somewhere.

Before introducing each of the twelve preludes from Book I, it might be a good idea to say a few words

about Debussy’s musical language. A master of color in music, Debussy enlarges the traditional

palette of major and minor scales. The whole-tone scale, usually confined to brief passages, upsets

our expectations by eliminating the tonal center, the traditional anchor for organizing harmony.

(“Voiles,” opening measures)

1 “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de définer peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve.” (Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubrey (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), p.869)

(Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest)

The pentatonic, or five-note, scale weakens tonality by eliminating the two steps in the major scale—4

and 7—which most strongly define it.

(Minstrels)

(La fille aux cheveux de lin)

The Dorian mode can most easily be illustrated by playing the white notes of the piano keyboard

beginning and ending with D.

(Le vent dans la plaine)

(Des pas sur la neige)

In music of the common practice period, roughly 1600 to 1900, each chord has a hierarchical,

functional relationship to the key of the piece, or tonic. When we hear a dominant seventh chord, we

commonly expect it to resolve to its tonic.

Debussy experiments with releasing chords from functional expectations, allowing them to color a

melody without “resolving.”

(La cathédrale engloutie)

(Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest)

Releasing chords from their traditional functions means having to find some other way to define a

tonal center. Debussy frequently defines the center through the use of pedal points, sometimes in the

form of sustained notes at the bottom of the musical texture but often in the form of repeated

patterns.

(Le vent dans la plaine)

(Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest)

(La serenade interrompue)

(La cathédrale engloutie)

(La danse de Puck)

Musical form, or structure, refers to the organization of individual musical ideas into a whole. Music

of the common practice period often employs traditional structures such as binary form, A B, or

ternary form, A B A. Some of the preludes in Book I display these forms, notably “Danseuses de

Delphes” and “La fille aux cheveux de lin.” Many of the preludes, however, reinvent the idea of form

for each new composition, a procedure that became the norm in twentieth-century music. In place of

discrete themes, Debussy commonly writes fragmentary, motivic melodies—the equivalent of phrases

instead of sentences—often allowing them to overlap instead of giving them well-defined boundaries.

With this brief introduction in place, let us now turn to the individual preludes.

Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi)

The ruins of the temple of Apollo at Delphi date from the 4th century BC.

This temple was the home of the so-called Delphic oracle, consulted to offer answers to weighty

questions. A priestess, sitting on a three-legged stool, would allow herself to become entranced by the

gases emanating from a hole in the floor. Her ambiguous or obscure responses to questions (whence

the adjective “Delphic”) would be interpreted by other priestesses.

In the spring of 1894 an excavation near the temple of Apollo uncovered a column nearly forty feet tall

topped by three female figures posed in such a way as to suggest dancers. Debussy saw the column,

now at the Delphi Archeological Museum, displayed at the Louvre and took it as the inspiration for

the opening movement of his preludes.

The piece, written for the most part as a stately waltz, has a ternary form (A B A’) whose structure

suggests the front of a Greek temple to Debussy scholar Roy Howat.2

The opening bars of the prelude move from the tonic to a slightly demented dominant chord that

evoke the hallucinatory vapors of the oracle.

The recapitulation of this material at the end of the piece strikes Siglind Bruhn as “the musical

equivalent of what, after some time of inhaling toxic vapors, would amount to a floating sensation

with a loss of any frame of reference to reality.”3

2 Roy Howat (2009). The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier. New Haven: Yale University Press, p.17 3 Bruhn, Siglind (1997). Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical

Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, p.8

4

Voiles (Veils/Sails)

So which is it to be—veils or sails? I had always assumed it referred to sails, knowing Debussy’s passion for the sea, but according to Siglind Bruhns, “Edgard Varèse, who knew Debussy quite well, said the piece was really about the American dancer Louise Fuller, famous in Paris for creating flowing waves in the air with long, semitransparent veils attached to her ankles and hands.”4 Catherine Kautsky concurs: “Debussy’s prelude Voiles (“Veils” or “Sails”), with its diaphanous whole-tone scales and pentatonic glissandos, is likely inspired by Fuller’s trademark accoutrements.”5

For me, this photograph helps to make sense of the swirling gestures in the middle of the prelude. As

noted, “Voiles,” which uses the whole-tone scale more fully than any other work in Debussy’s output,

untethers us from traditional tonality. Lacking a leading tone, the whole-tone scale implies no key

center. Yet, as Roy Howat has pointed out, there remains a deep undercurrent of tonal thinking. The

whole first section of the prelude has a pedal point on Bb.

4 Bruhns, p.74 5 Catherine Kautsky (2017). Debussy’s Paris: Piano Portraits of the Bell Époque. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, p.36.

At the same time we heard an intermittent pedal on D at the opposite end of the musical texture:

Debussy also makes frequent reference to G#=Ab, notably in the opening measure:

Those three pitches—Bb, D, Ab—suggest a dominant seventh anticipating the middle section of the

piece in Eb minor pentatonic.

The word “voiles” comes from the Latin “velum” meaning sail or veil. The Latin verb “velo” means to

cover, wrap or veil, or figuratively, to conceal or cover. Concealment aptly describes Debussy’s

approach both to tonality and to musical direction in this prelude.

Le vent dans la plaine (The Wind in the Plain)

The title comes from a couplet by Charles Favart quoted by Paul Verlaine as an epigram to his poem

“C’est l’extase.” The full epigram reads “Le vent dans la plaine/Suspend son haleine” (The wind in the

plain holds its breath). Taken by itself, the phrase resembles a paradoxical koan from Zen Buddhism,

like “the sound of one hand clapping.” After all, how can the wind hold its breath. And beyond that,

how could one possibly give musical expression to such a concept?

In music theory, a “suspended cadence” is an interruption of the normal progression from dominant

to tonic. “Le vent dans la plaine” opens with a playful Eb minor pentatonic melody over a dominant

pedal

which resolves a few measures later to the tonic.

But at the end of the prelude, the dominant pedal remains unresolved, the cadence remains

suspended, the harmony “holds its breath,” and Debussy’s directions to the pianist—“laissez vibrer”

(let it vibrate) means that the sound never really ends.

«Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir»

(“The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air”)

The title quotes a line from Baudelaire’s poem “Harmonie du soir” (Evening Harmony) that Debussy

also set to music as a song. The poem has the unusual form of a pantoum, in which the second and

fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the succeeding stanza, creating the effect

of a series of floating phrases that comment on each other as they “swirl through the evening air.”

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir; Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige, Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir! Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir, Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige! Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige... Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

Now is the time when trembling on its stem Each flower fades away like incense; Sounds and scents turn in the evening air; A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!

Each flower fades away like incense; The violin thrills like a tortured heart; A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness! The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.

The violin thrills like a tortured heart, A tender heart, hating the wide black void. The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place; The sun drowns itself in its own clotting blood.

A tender heart, boring the wide black void, Gathers all trace from the pellucid past. The sun drowns itself in clotting blood. Like the Host shines O your memory in me!

The image of the violin trembling like an afflicted heart is developed in its second appearance by

placing it before the image of a tender heart which hates the vast, black void: i.e., the emptiness of an

afflicted heart. The idea of the sky, sad and beautiful like a giant altar, is developed in its second

appearance by placing it before the idea of the sun drowned in its own congealed blood: i.e., the blood

of sacrifice upon the altar of the sky. This development take splace amid a succession of religious

symbols, both natural (encensoir, ostensoir, reposoir) and arbitrary (le ciel, le soleil, un coeur).

Debussy employs this same method of development in the prelude by juxtaposing melodic fragments,

either successively or simultaneously. We never hear full-blown themes but only suggestive phrases

which comment on each other as they combine in different ways.

Debussy impedes the forward impulse of the music with passages marked “tranquil and floating.”

The piece ends mysteriously with a passage marked “like the distant sound of horns.” No horns

appear in Baudelaire’s poem, but Baudelaire elsewhere quotes a passage from E.T.A. Hoffmann that

would have been known to Debussy: “The scene of crimson carnations has a strange mystic power

over me; unconsciously I sink into reveries as the deep notes of the basset-horn rise from afar in a

gradual crescendo and then die away.”6

6 Quoted in Paul Roberts (1996), Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, p.75.

“Les sons … tournent” describes the developmental technique of Debussy’s prelude as aptly as it does

that of the poem.

Les collines d’Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri)

Anacapri is one of two little towns on the island of Capri, an island in the Bay of Naples. In complete

contrast to the fragmentary motifs of the preceding prelude, here Debussy quotes an actual Italian

melody in full.

The piece adopts the rhythm of the tarantella, originally a dance thought to cure the bite of a tarantula.

The pentatonic scale on B, announced in the opening measures, appears in accompanimental motives

throughout the prelude and concludes it with a flourish marked “Luminous.”

Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow)

Debussy’s brief prelude overflows with expressive instructions hinting at an underlying program. In the space of two pages Debussy uses these words to describe his musical setting of “footsteps in the snow”: “sad and slow;” “this rhythm should have the sonic value of a background of a sad and icy landscape;” “expressive and painful;” “more lively especially in the expression;” “expressive and tender;” “like a tender and sad regret.” The words suggest emotion that goes well beyond a snowy landscape. I suggest that the words of Paul Verlaine’s poem Colloque sentimental (Sentimental colloquy) lie behind the music. Debussy knew this poem well—he even set it to music six years earlier. Verlaine’s evocative poetry furnishes a background for the “pain” and “regret” that Debussy writes into his score.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé. Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles, Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles. Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé. - Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne ? - Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne ? - Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom ? Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve ? - Non. Ah ! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible Où nous joignions nos bouches ! - C'est possible. - Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand, l'espoir ! - L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir. Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles, Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.

In the old park, empty and frozen, Two figures have just gone by. Their eyes are lifeless and their lips are limp, And once can scarcely hear their words. In the old park, empty and frozen, Two specters have evoked the past. --Do you remember our rapture of old? --Why do you wish me to remember it? --Does your heart still beat faster just at my name? Do you still see my soul in your dreams? –No. O, those beautiful days of unspeakable joy, When we used to join our lips! --It is possible. --How blue was the sky, how great our hopes! --Hope has fled, defeated, towards the black sky. So they trudged among the wild oats, And only the night heard their words.

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest What the West Wind Has Seen)

Edward Lockspeiser suggests that Debussy knew the works of Shelley from an early age and evoked

the poem “Ode to the West Wind” in this prelude.7

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II

7 Edward Lockspeiser (1962), Debussy: His Life and Mind. New York: Macmillan, vol. 1, p.84

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? The prelude represents a series of variations on two chords, one stated at the beginning of the piece, the other at the end.

Passages of whole-tone harmony occur frequently:

The overall harmonic structure looks like this:

In “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” Debussy has created a radical alternative to functional harmony.

La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair)

The title of the prelude comes from a poem by Leconte de Lisle.

Sur la luzerne en fleur assise, Qui chante dès le frais matin ? C'est la fille aux cheveux de lin, La belle aux lèvres de cerise. L'amour, au clair soleil d'été, Avec l'alouette a chanté. Ta bouche a des couleurs divines, Ma chère, et tente le baiser ! Sur l'herbe en fleur veux-tu causer, Fille aux cils longs, aux boucles fines ? L'amour, au clair soleil d'été, Avec l'alouette a chanté. Ne dis pas non, fille cruelle !

Who sits upon the blooming lucerne, Singing from the earliest morn? It is the girl with the flaxen hair, The beauty with cherry-red lips. Love, in the bright summer sun, Sang with the lark. Your mouth has divine colors, My dear, and is tempting to kiss! Do you wish to chat upon the blooming grasses, Girl with long lashes and delicate curls? Love, in the bright summer sun, Sang with the lark. Do not say no, cruel girl!

Ne dis pas oui ! J'entendrai mieux Le long regard de tes grands yeux Et ta lèvre rose, ô ma belle ! L'amour, au clair soleil d'été, Avec l'alouette a chanté. Adieu les daims, adieu les lièvres Et les rouges perdrix ! Je veux Baiser le lin de tes cheveux, Presser la pourpre de tes lèvres ! L'amour, au clair soleil d'été, Avec l'alouette a chanté.

Do not say yes! I shall better understand A long gaze from your large eyes And your pink lips, o my beauty! Love, in the bright summer sun, Sang with the lark. Farewell to the deer, farewell to the hares And the red partridges! I wish To kiss the flax of your hair, To press upon the crimson of your lips! Love, in the bright summer sun, Sang with the lark.

But the music of Debussy’s prelude expresses not the incipient eroticism of the poem but rather the

pale, long-haired pre-Raphaelite woman that Debussy captured in “The Blessed Damozel” or the

mysterious Mélisande of his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. One would love to be able to see the

“design in pastel of a woman with flowing hair, made by Debussy as a frontispiece for a novel by his

friend René Peter” in the 1890s.8 Debussy in was deeply attracted to the artists of the Art Nouveau

who admired, in Rossetti’s painting of the Blessed Damozel “the symbolism of line or arabesque.

They cherished, apart from the melancholy of her greenish-blue eyes, the peculiar curve of her sensual

protruding upper lip, her copper-colored locks and the curvature of her swan-like neck repeated in the

draperies of her celestial gown.”

8 Lockspeiser, Vol.1, p.119.

To my mind, Leconte de Lisle contributed only the color of the maiden’s hair; the rest comes from Rossetti. Debussy commented on the “divine arabesque” in art and in music, the deliberate delay in the forward movement of a melodic line, as we see in the opening the prelude.

Later, when we finally hear the approach to a perfect cadence, Debussy gives us another “suspended cadence”: the forward movement comes to a complete stop, leaving only the flowing curve of the arabesque.

La Serenade interrompue (The Interrupted Serenade)

Debussy employs the Mixolydian mode on Bb to evoke a Spanish serenade, specifically requesting that the pianist evoke a guitar (quasi guitarra) and play as if warming up (comme en préludant).

On the most literal level, the “interruptions” come in the form of a loud, dissonant chord that most commentators have identified as a slamming door, and then the distant strumming of a rival serenader, playing a passage from Debussy’s orchestral “Images.”

But the interruptions begin sooner than that. The first two measures of the prelude are followed by two measures of silence. And the pattern established in measures 5 to 10 is interrupted in measure 13 when the mezzoforte measures come in “too soon.” Later, when the guitarist soars in a theme marked “sweet and harmonious, the melody is interrupted by a return of the introductory plucking before it can reach the expected final pitch of F.

La cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral)

An ancient Breton legend tells of the coastline city of Ys, protected from flooding by a series of dikes tragically breached when the king’s daughter gives the key to the dikes to the devil. The city is inundated and its inhabitants drowned, but on occasion one can hear echoes of its cathedral bells. “Only the cathedral, symbol of the decent and devout people of Ys, enjoys any kind of afterlife, as it is said to rise up out of the watery depths on clear days at sunrise, the ringing bells and booming organ audible across the expanse of the bay, before sinking back into the sea by night.” “Debussy may have been drawing on more than an ancient Breton legend when writing the piece, that perhaps he was inspired by an actual flood—the inundation of Paris’s streets at the end of January 1910, when the Seine rose nearly three times its normal level, cresting at 20 feet. During the summer and autumn of 1909, rainfall had been persistent and heavy, swelling the Seine gradually. When winter hit, the weather worsened; Paris experienced far worse than its typical seasonal flooding. With the Seine at its highest point since the mid-17th century, 12 of the city’s 20 arrondissements were flooded. Some 200,000 Parisians were left homeless, and 20,000 buildings were ruined. Only one death was officially recorded, though some accounts put that figure as high as five—still an astonishingly low number given the calamity. The city’s sewers and tunnels, marvels of engineering, were no match for the rushing waters. Photographs of the period depict Paris as the second coming of Venice, with residents floating down the boulevards in boats or traversing the temporary wooden walkways built by French government engineers. Not until the middle of March did the Seine return to its normal depths. Was it this devastation that led Debussy to summon up the legend of Ys? I’d like to imagine that it was, and that he knew of this Breton proverb: Quand Paris sera englouti, resurgira la ville d’Ys. That is, only when Paris is engulfed will the city of Ys reappear.”9 Debussy uses parallel fourths and fifths to evoke medieval organum and specifies that the music be “profoundly calm, in a gently sonorous mist.”

9 Sudip Bose, “Our of the Watery Depths,” The American Scholar, June 8, 2017

He uses the church mode of E Lydian for the first main theme.

Debussy describes the cathedral “emerging little by little from the mist” in a passage of chords and pedal tones drawn from the B major pentatonic scale.

Listeners may well associate Debussy’s prelude with Monet’s series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. “It is impossible to say whether Debussy admired Monet’s series paintings of the 1890s, but he could not have failed to know them. ‘You do me a great honor by calling me a pupil of Claude Monet,’ Debussy wrote to the critic Émile Vuillermoz in 1916. … When Vuillermoz linked Monet and Debussy, it is likely that he had this prelude in mind.”10

10 Roberts, p.262

La danse de Puck (Puck's Dance)

The title refers to the impish elf from Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” that

Debussy knew in an edition with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

Mischievous Puck, servant of the fairy king Oberon, puts a donkey’s head on top of Nick Bottom so that Titania will end up falling in love with a beast. He also mixes up the love entanglements of the Athenian lovers and eventually straightens them out again. In short, Puck is the mover of the drama. Using his pen name Monsieur Croche, Debussy wrote in 1903, “These past foggy days have made me think of London and of that wonderful play A Summer Night’s Dream, whose real and more poetic title used to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream: that being the shortest night of the year. A sultry night, alight with stars! But fleeting, transitory: its charms encased between a twilight reluctant to fade and a dawn impatient to break.”11 Catherine Kautsky notes that Debussy’s frequent instructions “include the words ‘aérien’ (of the air) and ‘fuyant’ (vanishing); the sudden mischievous musical outbursts are surely designed to ‘mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm.’”12

The opening theme, marked “light and capricious,” is in the Dorian mode on F, and even includes that entire scale in measures 3 and 5.

11 François Lesure (1977). Debussy on Music: The critical writings of the great French composer Claude Debussy collected and introduced by François Lesure, translated and edited by Richard Langham Smith. New York: Alfred A Knopf, p.100 12 Kautsky, p.109

Commentators have frequently identified the motif at the end of this example as “Oberon’s horn call” without noticing that the horn, used in this way, comes not from Shakespeare but from Carl Maria von Weber’s opera “Oberon.” Debussy jokes with our expectations by delaying the putative tonic Eb as far as physically possible. The entire first page appears to be centered on F. When we finally get Eb in the bass, a Db in the highest register makes the harmony sound subdominant, not tonic.

This mischievous Db continues to three measures before the end, followed by runs, marked “rapid and fleeting” on Ab and E. The first unambiguous tonic Eb comes on the last note of the piece!

Minstrels

Roy Howat points out that the opening bars “are virtually a ragtime version of bars 1-2 of ‘Danseuses

de Delphes.’”13 And Victor Lederer writes that “one of Debussy’s marvelous tributes to the jerky

rhythms of ragtime and early jazz, and the black American minstrel shows that were immensely

popular in Paris around 1900.”14

13 Howat, p.23 14 Victor Lederer (2007). Debussy: The Quiet Revolutionary. New York: Amadeus Press, p.101.

Danseuses de Delphes Minstrels

The craze for rhythm in this era may make us think of sympathetic movement of listeners at a rock

concert. “Excessive or bizarre movements and unfamiliar rhythms excited the public, whether they

came from Africa, from American minstrels and cake-walk dancers, or from French epileptic singers.”

The “French epileptic singers” seem to have been an important feature in the craze. These chanteuses

were not, of course, epileptic themselves, but they deliberated evoked the spasmic movements of a

seizure. “At the slightest word or gesture, this nervous little slip of a woman … seemed to be set into

motion by a spring, comically shake her arms, her legs, her hair … bounding, pirouetting … It was her

facial expressions, her leaps and hopping around, and her high-pitched voice that made us laugh! …

She seemed to symbolize the café-concert at its most modern, most frenzied, most fanciful. … The

epileptic singer as racial hybrid evolved within a genre that was already a hybrid genre, combining

seductive, scantily-clothed women and silliness, vulgarity, contortions and grimaces.”

While Debussy did not speak English, speech was no barrier when it came to appreciating the

minstrel shows. “The appeal of these shows had little to do with spoken language, and everything to

do with body language.” Author Jean Cocteau reviewed a performance in 1902: “The room of

delirious spectators was on their feet stamping, and in the midst of this delirium M. and Mme Elks

danced. They danced: skinny, crooked, … their … knees higher than their thrust-out chins, …

wrenching their gestures from themselves. They reared, they kicked, they broke themselves in two,

three, four.” 15

A pentatonic passage serves as a refrain throughout the prelude, featuring an offbeat accent at the end

of the second measure.

Later Debussy incorporates a pentatonic melody in the “wrong” key, accompanied by parallel chords.

15 Rae Beth Gordon (2009). Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp.147, 43, 165, 243, 174.

A tambourine (Quasi Tambouro) accompanies the minstrels’ dance.

The prelude concludes with the pentatonic refrain followed by two loud chords.