World Premiere: June 1905 (first publication)
Most Recent HSO Performance: February 1996

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, harp, celeste, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 5'

The title that Debussy chose for himself — musicien français — points directly to the heart of his music and the center of his philosophy of art. His entire career as composer and critic was dedicated to finding a uniquely French musical language, free of the Germanic influence he believed had dominated Gallic composers since the late 18th century. He therefore sought to revive the old, long-dormant traditions of French Renaissance and Baroque music, though more for their spirit than for their techniques and forms. “French music is all clearness, elegance; simple, natural declamation,” he wrote. “The aim of French music is, before all, to please. The musical genius of France may be described as a fantasy of the senses.” He viewed the two greatest masters of French Baroque music — Jean Philippe Rameau and François Couperin — as the lodestars guiding his quest. The evaluation he gave in 1912 of Rameau might very well have been written about himself: “Rameau’s major contribution to music was that he knew how to find ‘sensibility’ within harmony; and that he succeeded in capturing effects of color and certain nuances that, before his time, musicians had not clearly understood.”

During his early years, Debussy turned to the refined style of Couperin and Rameau for inspiration in his instrumental music, and several of his works from that time are modeled on the Baroque dance suite, including the Suite Bergamasque. The composition’s title derives from the generic term for the dances of the district of Bergamo, in northern Italy, which found many realizations in the instrumental music of the 17th and 18th centuries. The rustic inhabitants of Bergamo were said to have been the model for the character of Harlequin, the buffoon of the Italian commedia dell’arte, which became the most popular theatrical genre in France during the time of Couperin and Rameau. Several of Watteau’s best-known paintings take the commedia dell’arte as their subject. The poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) evoked the bittersweet, pastel world of Watteau and the commedia dell’arte with his atmospheric, evanescent verses, which Debussy began setting as early as 1880. In 1882, he wrapped the words of Verlaine’s Clair de Lune (“Moonlight”) with music, and made another setting of it a decade later as the third song of his first series of Fêtes galantes:

Your soul is a rare landscape
with charming maskers and mummers [‘masques et bergamasques’]
playing the lute and dancing, almost
sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

While singing in minor mode
of victorious love and life in its season,
they do not seem to believe in their happiness,
and their song mingles with the moonlight.

With the calm moonlight, sad and lovely,
that sets the birds in the trees to dreaming,
and the fountains to sobbing in ecstasy,
the great fountains, svelte among the marbles.

Debussy best captured the nocturnal essence of Verlaine’s poem not in his two vocal settings, however, but in the famous (and musically unrelated) Clair de Lune that serves as the third movement of his Suite Bergamasque, composed in 1890 and revised for publication in 1905.

The orchestral arrangement of Clair de Lune is by Lucien Cailliet (1891-1985), who studied at the Conservatory of Dijon in his native France before coming to America in 1918 to play clarinet in the Philadelphia Orchestra. He arranged many pieces for concert band and orchestra during his two decades with that ensemble, and continued his work as one of the country’s leading arrangers and orchestrators after leaving Philadelphia in 1937 while also teaching at Interlochen and the University of Southern California, conducting the orchestra of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Kenosha Symphony Orchestra, and scoring several movies.

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda