CHAN 20228 – DEBUSSY

Debussy: Works for Piano Duet

Andante cantabile

The piano duet has a long history as one of the ideal vehicles for intimate musicmaking. Certainly it did no harm that Mozart and Schubert lavished some of their most beautiful music on the format, and there was also the fact that duetting was, together with dancing, one of the few sanctioned ways at that time for adolescents to engage in close contact. Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) made his first known appearance as duettist in 1880 when he was recommended by the Conservatoire authorities as a pianist to Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, both as part of a piano trio and to play duets with her. Needless to say, duet arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s first four symphonies were de rigueur, especially No. 4, which she described to the composer as ‘our symphony’. As well as writing his own Piano Trio, on his return visit over the New Year 1880 / 81 the nineteen-year-old Debussy composed for piano duet the first movement of a B minor symphony as well as this Andante cantabile, which may well have been intended as the slow movement. It is worth mentioning that, while the piano playing of the mature Debussy was noted for its smoothness and delicacy (Milhaud’s wife, Madeleine, who heard Debussy play during World War I, remarked that you would not have known the piano contained hammers), as a teenager he was accused of forcing his effects, together with a certain amount of puffing and blowing. So perhaps the epithet ‘cantabile’ was a memo to self to mind his manners. As Mme von Meck noted, the piece stays close to the style of Massenet.

Petite Suite

Spotting influences is a favourite game of music historians, and one of the first rules to be learnt is that influences often go underground, to emerge in almost unrecognisable transformations years later. So, whereas we might expect his first visit to Bayreuth, in the summer of 1888, to have turned Debussy entirely towards Wagner, for the moment he kept a corner of himself that was for ever French.

The Petite Suite, for piano duet, dates probably from the end of 1888. It was printed in February 1889 and Debussy and his future publisher, Jacques Durand, gave the first performance, at a private salon, on 1 March. It is ideal salon material – nothing too heavy or too long, easily grasped rhythms, and memorable tunes. At the same time, within the accepted framework, Debussy allows himself the occasional unexpected harmony which lifts the music on to a higher plane. If one has to find influences, then it is to Delibes we should look, together with Fauré and, in the boisterous last movement, Chabrier: at the first performance, Debussy got over-excited here and left poor Durand struggling... Elsewhere, there is a decorous, olde-worlde air about much of the music – its clear-cut phrases and modal inflections – as in the opening harmonies of ‘En bateau’.

The titles of this movement and the next (‘Cortège’) are to be found in Verlaine’s volume of poems Fêtes galantes, one of Debussy’s favourite quarries for song texts. It is conceivable therefore that ‘En bateau’ depicts the skiff in the moonlight as it ‘glides merrily over the dreaming water’, and ‘Cortège’

a monkey in a brocaded jacket

trotting and leaping in front of [his mistress],

as she waves a handkerchief

in her delicately gloved hand.

Our only certain identification is of the third movement, ‘Menuet’, which is a transcription of Debussy’s 1882 song Fête galante, to words by Théodore de Banville, described by the composer as ‘Louis XIV music with 1882 ideas’. The opening line, ‘Voilà Sylvandre et Lycas et Myrtil’, introduces characters from the commedia dell’arte. The duple rhythm of ‘Ballet’ first turns into a waltz before the two ideas are elegantly combined.

Ballade slave

There is nothing noticeably ‘slave’ about the Ballade which Debussy composed in 1890, and the epithet was dropped when the piece was reprinted, in 1903 (much to Debussy’s displeasure), to try and take advantage of the success of Pelléas et Mélisande the previous year. The repeated phrases that would become the hallmark of his writing (prompting one unkind critic to refer to his ‘style bègue’, or ‘stuttering style’) always contain just enough variation to take us on to the next idea. The final page is a harmonic gem: the tonic F major has become a distant E major, but the arrival of an E sharp bell tolling twenty times in the left hand promises change – of course to an F natural, and home.

Arabesque No. 1

The idea of ‘arabesque’ was, like the repeated phrases, central to Debussy’s style, shortly to appear, most memorably, in the opening of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Debussy specialised in combining lines and decoration so that the duality is never audible, and Pierre Boulez identified Arabesque No. 1 as his introduction to the genius of Debussy and to the idea of symbolism in music. Even so, we can still hear occasional touches of the latter’s favourite composers: Chopin, Schumann, and Grieg.

Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire

Whatever the delights offered by the symbolist movement, in 1890 Debussy, with no money behind him, now had to earn a living. The Marche écossaise for piano duet is based on a Scottish tune that belonged to the Counts of Ross, the family of General Meredith Read, who had been US Consul General in France, from 1868 to 1873, and who commissioned Debussy, in 1890, to write a piece based on it. The legend that the two men met in a Paris café and that a third party had to act as translator is therefore only half true, as Read played a part in the Franco-German negotiations after the war of 1870 and must have been fluent in French. The intimate nature of the piano duet was obviously ideal for a piece with such family resonance. The tune undergoes some Russian influence in the slow middle section before rising to a martial climax in the final bars.

La Mer

After the impact made by the production of the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, in 1902, the next orchestral work by Debussy was awaited with intense interest. Would he in some sense repeat Pelléas? Or would he strike out afresh? He himself had no doubts. If once he started repeating himself, he proclaimed, ‘I should immediately take to growing pineapples in my bedroom’. We may therefore take the sea as being, in part, a symbol of liberation. But it was a symbol also of mystery and danger. In 1914 Debussy wrote of how the sea fascinated him to the point of paralysing his creative faculties, and that he was unable to compose while looking at it. La Mer was entirely written in Paris.

He admitted the risk in this procedure that the piece might resemble what he called a ‘paysage d’atelier’ – a studio sketch without life or colour. But it was a risk that he was prepared to take, preferring, like Wordsworth, to recollect his emotion in tranquillity. One of the problems with writing a piece called La Mer was that everybody had his own idea of what the sea sounded like. Debussy answered one such critic rather sharply by saying, ‘you love and defend traditions which, for me, no longer exist’, and he might have gone on to say that he, Debussy, was inventing new traditions, especially in the superimposition of themes to give precisely the kind of multiplicity of experience which one gets from contemplating the ocean. Of the three movements, the central one is perhaps the most astonishing. Pierre Boulez has referred to its ‘bold and radical conception of timbre’ and its ‘elegant, condensed, and elliptical syntax’, and in these areas the movement has been crucial in its influence on twentieth-century music.

The outer movements, though, are innovatory in the context of Debussy’s own development. Whereas in Pelléas the more forceful passages tend to relate specifically to Golaud’s anger and jealousy and to stand out from the overall mood, here Debussy turns from these negative emotions to something more positive: strength, dignity, and solidity. These two outer movements are linked thematically, especially through the ‘chorale’ heard at the end of each – beginning somewhat hesitantly in the first movement but then sounding out with magisterial confidence and éclat at the end of the third.

This apotheosis naturally reminds us of César Franck and the whole Beethovenian, ‘struggle to victory’, ethos which he brought over into French music. In La Mer, we not only feel the wind and taste the salt spray, we undergo at the same time a journey the significance of which far outstrips the local action of such phenomena. Is the sea then a symbol of life itself? The composer would probably have pooh-poohed such philosophising. But it is hard not to find some common ground between the Debussy who, as a young man, had revelled in the danger of being out in a storm in a small boat, and the one who named his motto for living, and for composing, as ‘toujours plus haut’ – ever higher.

Although he himself published an arrangement of the work for piano duet in 1905, it would seem that Debussy came to feel that this did not do justice to the textural complexity of the work, and the two-piano version, of 1909, by his young friend André Caplet must have been made with his approval.

La Fille aux cheveux de lin

The publication of Debussy’s first book of Préludes, in 1910, was a landmark in French music, Ravel telling a friend

I’m orchestrating... and it’s not going quickly. I’ll console myself my replaying Debussy’s Préludes, which are admirable masterpieces.

But this is not to say that they were universally understood. In its original form, for piano solo, ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ is usually played with delicacy and restraint. The piano duet arrangement published by Durand in 1910 lends the piece rather more body, and reminds us that in the poem of the same name, by Leconte de Lisle, the poet wants ‘to kiss the blond of your hair and press the purple of your lips’.

Épigraphes antiques

After setting three of the 1894 prose poems Les Chansons de Bilitis by his friend Pierre Louÿs, in 1898, Debussy was asked by him to provide incidental music for a mimed recitation of another twelve poems, the composer choosing a delicate ensemble of two flutes, two harps, and celesta. A single performance was given, on 7 February 1901, after rehearsals of which Louÿs wrote, ‘I’m spending every afternoon this week with naked women. Well, that’s nice’. The poems were spoofs on those by Sappho, supposedly a friend of the non-existent Bilitis, and a review praised the music as a ‘delicate confection’. The score then remained tucked away among the composer’s papers until 1914 when, even more financially embarrassed than usual, Debussy thought of turning six of the episodes into pieces for piano duet. He asked for and received the sum of 3,000 francs, but a mooted orchestration never materialised.

As French composers of the time often did, Debussy conjured up a pastoral vision of Ancient Greece through modal melodies and harmonies: the first piece, with a key signature of one flat, is in a Dorian mode based on G, with no accidentals in its thirty-six bars. In contrast, ‘Pour un tombeau sans nom’ is severely coloured by the whole-tone scale and ends with a ‘distant plaint’ the chromaticisms of which belong more to the Middle East (which makes sense, as Bilitis was supposed to come from the Greek islands rather than the mainland). Monotony rules in the third piece and dancing in the fourth, while ‘Pour l’Égyptienne’ shows Debussy turning modern harmonies into the most natural things in the world. Finally, monotony returns with the rain, until the final, hesitant, enigmatic reference back to the opening bars of the suite. Was this a reference to real life? The publisher’s assistant would collect the score on 31 July 1914. The next day, France mobilised for war.