In my last diary I said I would begin an exploration of French impressionism in music with a diary on something by Claude Debussy. Well, this will be about Debussy, but it won't be about impressionism so much, as he detested the term, although he admitted to having been influenced by the literature and the paintings of the period. As it happens, this makes sense if we look at the milieu in which he began composing. Tonight, we'll investigate his earliest orchestral works, composed before 1900: Prélude de l’Après-Midi d'un Faune and Trois Nocturnes: Nuages, Fêtes, Sirènes.
(Felix Najar, 1908; Wikimedia Commons)
Impressionism. We think of this, I think.
(Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), Claude Monet, 1894; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Especially when we're listening to something like this, because this isn't really a photographic image, it gives us a general impression of what the front portal of the Cathedral looks like. Somehow, I wasn't going to contextualize this in my original conception of that this would be about, but I think you all know me better than that. "This" is Prélude de l’Après-Midi d'un Faune --the work that made Debussy (1862-1918) famous. It's based on a poem, Églogue, by Stéphane Mallarmé, which was published in 1876. Debussy began to compose the piece in 1892, published it in October 1894, and it was premiered at the concerts of the Société Nationale December 22 and 23, 1894.
First, about the poem. Here are the first few lines:
These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.
So bright
Their crimson flesh that hovers there, light
In the air drowsy with dense slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends extreme
In many a subtle branch, that remaining the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I too
Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the false ideal of roses.
Let’s see….
or if those women you note
Reflect your fabulous senses’ desire!
Faun, illusion escapes from the blue eye,
Cold, like a fount of tears, of the most chaste:
I think you can see where he's going, and here is how closely he was identified with the poem.
(Stéphane Mallarmé as Pan. Published in Les hommes d'aujourd'hui, 1887; Wikimedia Commons)
Literary influence? Debussy was a regular attendee at Mallarmé's literary salon, and he had, before composing L’Après-Midi d'un Faune produced settings of poems by Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. He was also in close contact with the composers Ernest Chausson and Paul Dukas, and we have records of their correspondence that show that they discussed each others' work. Creativity very rarely happens in a vacuum.
Mallarmé's reaction?
Your illustration of L’Après-Midi d'un Faune would present no dissonance with my text, unless to go further, indeed, into the nostalgia and the light, with finesse, with malaise, with richness.
The orchestra for this is the big orchestra
pioneered by Berlioz but with some crucial omissions: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets (one in A, one in B Flat), 2 bassoons, 4 French Horns in F, 2 harps, antique cymbals, first and second violins, violas, celli, Double basses. No trumpets, no trombones, no tubas. That already tips you off that we're going for light, airy and languorous. Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
That was the piece that showed the world that here was an important musician. I know we usually take you through each piece of music, but there's something about L’Après-Midi d'un Faune that tells me this is not how you listen to it William Austin, the editor of the Norton Critical Scores edition of L’Après-Midi d'un Faune , begins a 25 page "analytical appreciation" of the work by writing
Every part of this music clings to every other part so firmly, so naturally, that it is hard to identify parts when we want to talk about them. No part torn out of context makes sense. No part spontaneously breaks loose to lodge in our memory as a tune.
Well, all right then. Pierre Boulez, in
Notes of An Apprenticeship (1968) said that
modern music was awakened by L’Après-Midi d'un Faune
and particularly by Debussy's use of the flute, the horn and the harp. If you want to see how, go to
my Christmas diary and listen to the second video clip for
L'Enfance du Christ where Berlioz uses the flute and the harp in a very different way.
So we come to Nocturnes, Debussy's next major orchestral work. He had begun to compose the first section, Nuages in 1892; the work was published in full score in 1900. While Prelude had been based on a work of literature, Nocturnes was inspired by painting, as Debussy wondered
how a painter might make a study in grey.
One specific painter, in fact: James Abbott McNeil Whistler, the titles of whose paintings bear words like "Arrangement" and "Harmony" and "Nocturne." I have issues with Whistler being called an American artist but that's not for now, because here's
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1:
Yes, one of the
three most famous images in American painting. But I digress.
Here are a couple of Whistler's Nocturnes:
(Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, 1879-80, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
(Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875, Detroit Institute of the Arts)
You get the idea here too. These are, if you will, proto-impressionistic, but you get a sense of what the painter is looking at, perhaps truer than the one you'd get from a photograph. This could easily lurch off into a discussion of Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" but no, I'm not going there either. This is about MUSIC, and Debussy's desire to make a study in grey. But if you haven't already noticed, Whistler painted these while Mallarmé was writing about his faun, so here we have music interpreting creative art from a previous generation. Opera is based on the ability to do that, but it's not so evident in regular orchestral composition that this is what a composer is trying to do unless the composer is setting words to music.
Nocturnes. Clouds, Festivals and Sirens (the women "sweetly singing" in Cream's song, "Tales of Brave Ulysses"). Each of these sections suggest programmatic music, an attempt to evoke through sound images of certain things and events. Through a modern sensibility. In the musical language developed to depict the afternoon of a faun. Let's see how this works.
The orchestra for Nuages is much like the one used in Prelude: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 French Horns in F, timpani, harp, first and second violins, violas, celli, double basses. Again no trumpets or trombones. Thus, it should sound like Prelude, but the lower winds carry it whereas the flutes carried Prelude. Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic.
I listened through three times, and there's no more real reason to tell you about Nuages than there was to tell you what was happening during Prelude. Just that the solo instrument you keep hearing IS the English horn, and if it's answered it's answered by two of the French horns. At about 3:45 or so, you'll hear the flutes and the harp playing in unison for a few bars. Very evocative, I think, more of fog than of clouds unless these are the heavy late-fall early winter clouds you get back East.
BIG orchestra for Fêtes, and you'll see why: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 French Horns, 3 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, military drum, harp, first and second violins, violas, celli, double basses. This is celebratory. Vladimir Ashkenazy, Cleveland Orchestra.
And Fêtes also needs some elaboration. Roger Nichols, in The New Grove: Twentieth Century French Masters (1980/1986) finds this one of Debussy's most descriptive works:
The brass band of the Garde Républicaine moves through the festivities and its tune is just vulgar enough to set it apart from the surrounding music which has passed through the prism of Debussy's own insight.
The trumpets represent the brass band and the strings represent the festivities, but the way they are overlaid especially in the middle section definitely depict what Nichols says they do. Just magnificent stuff, and a challenge to the recording engineer.
The festival theme is introduced by the English horn and the clarinets, then by the flutes and oboes which are soon joined by the clarinets and the bassoons. They are interrupted by the brass instruments, and after a harp flourish, the English horn, clarinets and bassoons come back.
(2:50) There's an apparent break in the music to show the band approaching from a distance. Soon, you hear the trumpets playing what I guess is the band theme.
(3:20) The winds pick up the band theme, followed by the French horns.
(3:48) This is the recording engineer's challenge. The winds and the brasses, accompanied by percussion, play the band theme. Over that, you hear the string section playing the festival theme. This is the section that told me I had to write about Debussy, and this is the version in which the strings were the most distinct.
(4:18) The band has gone, and we're back to the flutes and oboes.
Program music of the best kind. You can almost see the banners fluttering in the breeze at some points
Finally, we come to Sirènes. The Sirènes orchestra is a compromise between the first two: 3 flutes, 1 oboe, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 French Horns, 3 Trumpets, 2 harps,, first and second violins, violas, celli, double basses, and a two-part female choir (sopranos and mezzo sopranos). No trombones, no tuba, no percussion. The choir vocalizes; no words. For effect. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
Like Nuages it feels organic enough that I don't have to identify any of the changes. Here's Roger Nichols again:
On a more serious level, the controlled monotony and regular phrase lengths may be taken as a symbol of the sirens' power, dependent as it was in an appearance of unsophisticated charm.
It sounds like he's damning it with faint praise, but then he continues to observe that Debussy didn't repeat any of these themes in his later work. Ah, critics.
Next week, the early twentieth century Sea!
SOURCES:
Jane Fulcher, ed. Debussy and His World, 2001.
Roger Nichols, "Claude Debussy," in The New Grove: Twentieth Century French Masters, 1980/1986.
Paul Roberts, Claude Debussy, 2008.
