Claude Debussy started his professional life on a typical path for a French composer, studying at the Paris Conservatory and earning the ultimate seal of approval, the Rome Prize, which bankrolled a two-year Italian residency. He returned to Paris in 1886 without a steady job and with less faith in his musical direction, sending him into a short-lived phase as an acolyte of Richard Wagner. His aesthetic direction finally came into focus after he soaked up new sounds from around the world at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889 (especially Javanese gamelan), and when he entered the orbit of the Symbolist writers who valued the sounds of words as much as their meaning, showing him a way out of the straitjacket of tonal harmony with all its rules and expectations. 

In 1890, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé outlined a theatrical project based on his poem L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), and he invited Debussy to compose the music. The project fell through, but Debussy returned to his preliminary work on the piece to complete an orchestral prelude in 1894. He described the composition as “a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep.”

The flute solo at the beginning of Debussy’s score introduces the faun with a motive that traverses the unsettling interval of a tritone (or augmented fourth), shimmying up and down in smooth, chromatic slurs. Whole-tone scales and unresolved harmonies, all bathed in a supple and warm orchestration, reinforce the air of languid mystery.

Three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, percussion, two harps, strings