Claude Debussy

Born: August 2, 1862, St. Germain-en-Laye, France, near Paris
Died: March 25, 1918, Paris

Images

• Composed: 1905-12
  
• Premiere: Gigues was premiered in Paris January 26, 1913, Gabriel Pierné conducting; Ibéria was premiered in Paris February 20, 1910, Pierné conducting; Rondes de Printemps was premiered in Paris March 2, 1910 with the composer conducting.
  
• CSO Notable Performances: 
  • First: November 1981, Bernard Rubenstein conducting
  • Most Recent: April 2019, Matthias Pintscher conducting
• Instrumentation: 3 flutes (incl. piccolo), piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, Oboe d’amore, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, castanets, chimes, crash cymbals, snare drum, tambour de Basque, tambourin Provençal, triangle, xylophone, 2 harps, celeste, strings
• Duration: approx. 36 minutes

The year 1908 was a difficult one for Debussy—one of a succession of difficult years that comprised the last decade and a half of his life. The success of his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande of 1902, had catapulted him into the public consciousness as an important musical personality, but the effect of that notoriety on Debussy was not so salutary as might be expected. It meant that he could no longer play the reclusive bohemian, composing what he liked, when he liked. Fame increased the demand for both his music and his personal appearances, and, to fulfill the former, he undertook an ambitious agreement with the publisher Jacques Durand that imposed heavy creative obligations on him. Although Debussy frequently found Durand’s demands difficult to meet, the works he produced during the succeeding years were among his greatest—La Mer, Jeux, Images and most of the important piano compositions. He satisfied the calls for his personal appearances with several strenuous European concert tours in which he conducted his own works. Concerning these trips, he wrote in a letter to his wife, “Everything annoys me. My nerves are on edge and I find that a composer of music is required to excel in those qualities of toughness possessed by a traveling salesman.”

The reason Debussy gave so much time to these wearing activities was, of course, money. He had abandoned his first wife, Lilly, in 1904, and her subsequent suicide attempt prompted a good deal of animosity toward him among the Parisian public. The judgment at their divorce hearing went against him, with the result that he was harassed by lawsuits regarding his first wife for the rest of his life. During the time he left Lilly, Debussy had taken up with Emma Bardac; they were married in 1908. She had expected a large inheritance from a wealthy uncle on his death in 1907, but it turned out that she had been disinherited, probably because of her liaison with this musician who could barely support himself. The financial burden of two marriages plus the birth of a daughter to his second wife made seeking all available work mandatory for Debussy. 

In addition to his familial and financial problems, those years also saw a severe decline in Debussy’s health. In January 1909, his plans for several concerts in England were cancelled because of the first signs of an illness that was diagnosed later in the year as cancer. Morphine and cocaine to ease the pain helped him to continue—after a fashion. Following a February concert in London, he wrote to Durand, “Arrived here Thursday, have been ill all the time. The concert today went off admirably. It only depended on me to secure an encore for l’après-midi d’un faune, but I could hardly stand up—a very bad posture for conducting anything.”

That brilliant music such as the Images could arise out of such difficult circumstances is a tribute to Debussy’s artistic spirit and creative diligence. The first of this set of three tone poems to be composed was the popular Ibéria, written between 1906 and 1908. This score and the two that followed (Rondes de Printemps and Gigues) were originally intended as four-hand piano works inspired by the success of the keyboard Images of 1905 and 1907, but they grew to orchestral proportions as Debussy sought to extend the range of instrumental colors in his music. Work went slowly on the project. Debussy was preoccupied at that time with two opera librettos on stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry, and Rondes de Printemps was completed only in 1909 and Gigues three years later. (Debussy’s aborted Poe operas excite the imagination as much as Verdi’s unfinished King Lear, whose sketches Verdi ordered destroyed after his death, and Wagner’s proposed music drama on the life of Jesus Christ.) Except for Jeux of 1913, Gigues was Debussy’s last major work for orchestra.

Although it was the last to be completed, Debussy placed Gigues as the first of the Images in the published edition, followed by Ibéria and Rondes de Printemps. Edward Downes noted that its original title, Gigues tristes (“Sad Jig”), was “a typically Debussian paradox, for the gigue (the French form of the English-Scottish-Irish jig) was traditionally a high-spirited, often wild dance in triple meter. This is an untraditional, low-spirited, slow non-dance in duple meter.” The music’s immediate inspiration seems to have been a poem given the English title Streets that Paul Verlaine wrote on a visit to London in 1890 and in which he ironically juxtaposed the merriment of the jig with a soured love affair: “She had a way about her/To torture a poor lover,/A really charming way!/Let’s dance a jig!” Debussy’s friend Charles Boredes set Verlaine’s verses to the traditional Scottish tune of The Keel Row, in which form the poem was known to the composer. Debussy included wisps of that traditional melody in Gigues, but not its ebullient mood. André Caplet, who completed the orchestration of the score under Debussy’s direction, wrote, “Gigues...sad Gigues...tragic Gigues... A portrait of a soul in pain, a soul that borrows the shawm of an oboe d’amore to breathe out its indolent, languorous plaint!...the spirit of sadness, infinite sadness.”

Rondes de Printemps (“Spring Rounds”), dedicated to the composer’s second wife, Emma, is headed with the legend, “Welcome to the May, with its sylvan banner,” a verse Debussy found in a 1908 book on Dante by the French author Pierre Gauthiez. The original poem was by the 15th-century Tuscan humanist and poet Angelo Poliziano (whose Orfeo was one of the earliest plays in the Italian language) and was used by Gauthiez to preface his description of a medieval May Day festival: “On the first of May, the whole countryside wakens and rejoices. The women and girls, their heads covered with garlands of flowers, form processions and pair off with happy dancers or musicians.” Debussy wove into his evocation of spring three French children’s songs: "Nous n’irons plus au bois" (“No More to the Woods We’ll Go,” which he also used in the piano piece "Jardins sous la pluie" [“Gardens in the Rain”]), "La belle au bois dormant" (“The Sleeping Beauty of the Woods”) and "Dodo, l’enfant, do" (“Sleep, Child, Sleep”). Rondes de Printemps, however, is not child-like and festive, but complex, ambiguous and constantly changing in mood, made up of thematic fragments and unsettled harmonies placed in an iridescent orchestral setting. Composer and musicologist Charles Malherbe wrote, “This is musical Impressionism of particular nuance and rare quality.”

Ibéria is a remarkable evocation of the land across the Pyrenees, considering that Debussy spent only a single afternoon in Spain during his entire life—to attend a bull fight in San Sebastian. Manuel de Falla, Spain’s great composer, wrote admiringly of Ibéria, “The entire piece down to the smallest detail makes one feel the character of Spain.” Ibéria is in three movements. The first, Par les rues et par les chemins (“Through Streets and Lanes”), establishes the Spanish inspiration of the work with a rhythm dominated by tambourine and castanets. The opening melody suggested to Falla “village songs heard in the bright, scintillating light.” A martial middle section dominated by the horns follows, leading to the return of the opening melody. The second movement, evocatively titled Les parfums de la nuit (“The Fragrances of the Night”), is a dreamy nocturne, but one presented with detailed precision. The final movement, Le matin d’un jour de fête (“Morning of a Feast-Day”), celebrates a festival day amid the sounds of strumming guitars (represented by pizzicato strings) and church bells. The movement represents, Debussy wrote, “the whole rising feeling, the awakening of people and of nature.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda