Composed 1894; Duration: 11 minutes
First BPO Performance: February 20, 1936 (Lajos Shuk, conductor)
Last BPO Performance: October 1-2, 1999 (JoAnn Falletta, conductor)
Describing Claude Debussy as an Impressionist is not wrong, but it provides an incomplete picture. The artistic dialogue in late 19th-century Paris that held sway over the composer’s music was diverse. Modern audiences are comfortable with the Impressionism label because the dancing brushstrokes of Monet’s famous canvases are easily heard in the hazy harmonies and dreamy orchestrations found in works like Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Artists were obsessed with the sensible but completely detached from the realism of the previous generation, which resulted in two distinct paths: while the Impressionists sought to present mundane scenes of Parisian life with ecstatic colors and whimsical strokes, another group, known as the Symbolists, created dramatically realistic scenes of imagined mythologies.
A response to both innovative Impressionism and the elitist realism of academia, artistic Symbolism was fostered by a literary movement of the same name; with an emphasis on idyllic rural settings and metaphorical subject matter, this lesser-known movement transcended art forms and appeared in many nations, making it difficult to describe, define, or pin down. Debussy more generally associated with these literary Symbolists than with the Impressionists, and a deeper dive into the philosophy of the movement reveals the composer’s true intentions, as Stéphane Mallarmé once said, “to depict not the thing but the effect it produces.”
Mallarmé’s influence on French literature was enormous, and his L'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) encompassed the ideals of Symbolist poetry and inspired Debussy’s famous prelude. Published in 1876, the poem depicts a faun who, after waking from a nap, flirtatiously chases nymphs, only to fall back asleep. The poet’s wordplay is clever and ethereal with idiomatic French that is impossible to translate without losing its inherently musical quality. However, for the non-French speaker, the dreamy linguistics are captured by Debussy’s 1894 score.
After a slinking flute depicts the faun stretching and yawning as he wakes from his nap, the orchestration continues to blossom vividly as the faun frolics and flirts, and clouds of sound freely undulate with evocative eroticism. While melodies are recounted throughout the work, the structure remains free, emanating a dreamlike atmosphere rather than relying on structure to dictate narrative. In tribute to the Symbolist vanguard, Debussy grafts into the score Mallarmé’s story as well as his artistic philosophy of freely expressing effects.