CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born in St Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918
Préludes, Book One, L. 117 (1909-10); 39 minutes
Préludes, Book Two, L. 123 (1911-13); 42 minutes
Like Chopin, Debussy wrote 24 Préludes, dividing them into two books, published in 1910 and 1913. Chronologically, they come late in his piano music, just before the challenging Études of 1915. The familiarity of some préludes – and the unfamiliarity of others – represents Debussy’s last offering for the gifted amateur and his farewell to the descriptive character piece that dominated 19th century music-making. Many of the Préludes carry a fin-de-siècle feeling. They are evocative tone paintings in the subtlest manner, inviting a theater of the mind.
Sme préludes blend the elusive and intangible with the more recognizable. In the First Book, for example, there is Neapolitan song and tarantella rhythms in Les collines d’Anacapri, a Spanish guitar in La sérénade interrompue, and even music-hall song in Minstrels. But the dreamlike world predominates. This is a landscape of half colors, mist, exotic perfumes, distant bells, twilight, and partly recalled love – intoxicating music that delights the senses. Each of the two dozen pieces is, of course, a ‘prelude,’ a short piece designed to precede an unwritten sequel. Debussy is ambivalent about titles. Strictly speaking, the Préludes are untitled: he merely suggests titles at the end of each piece, preceded by three ellipsis points – half wanting to help the listener form mental images, half afraid the titles would be taken too literally.
The first prélude, Danseuses de Delphes, turns to antiquity, to the dancers at the Temple of Apollo, god of oracles, poetry, and the arts, at Delphi – perhaps inspired by a fragment of sculpture seen in the Louvre. The second prélude, Voiles, creates a suspended, motionless atmosphere through whole-tone writing, with a pentatonic central section, suggesting veils drifting gently in the breeze, or sails without wind, barely stirring through the mist. The third prélude, Le vent dans la plaine, depicts wind sweeping across open land, largely in toccata style, punctuated by sudden, threatening gusts.
The sounds and perfumes of Baudelaire’s line, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, find their musical counterpart in the intoxicating fourth prélude. Debussy had already set Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir as a song in 1899, from which the title is drawn; the distant horn calls at the close suggest that this music exists more in space than in time. In Les collines d’Anacapri, lively tarantella rhythms and popular Neapolitan song animate the hills of Capri. In complete contrast to the vibrant Bay of Naples, the footsteps of Des pas sur la neige lead to a chilling, frozen landscape, suggesting a melancholy glimpse of the void.
In the seventh prélude, Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest, the west wind passes over a cruel sea. Its jagged, fragmented music, illustrating destructive power, is even more violent than Debussy’s tone poem La mer. Then comes La fille aux cheveux de lin, the most familiar of all the Préludes. The flaxen-haired girl singing in morning sunlight in Leconte de Lisle’s poem is, in fact, Scottish – a reminder that Scotland was as distant and exotic for the Romantics and Impressionists as were Italy, Spain, the Far East, or ancient Greece. Spain returns in La sérénade interrompue, where an elusive love song is persistently strummed in Andalusian guitar style, despite interruptions. Another archetypal image appears in La cathédrale engloutie. The submerged cathedral of Ys, off the Brittany coast, slowly rises from legend as Debussy creates a musical sfumato. Bells with resonant overtones emerge gradually, and the organum-like writing evokes centuries past. The imagery is powerful and the textures so orchestral that the piece has inspired several transcriptions. Puck’s fleeting antics lead into Minstrels, with its fast-changing glimpses of early 20th century music-hall. Travelling entertainers in top hats and white tails – or perhaps red-jacketed musicians outside the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, where Debussy stayed in 1905 – go through their routine in music recalling the composer’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.”
Book Two of Debussy’s 24 Préludes opens with Brouillards (Mists), which seems to take off where Voiles leaves off. Fog obscures everything, while the music is elusive, understated, with uncertain tonality. Feuilles mortes is usually translated as ‘Autumn Leaves’, but the music conveys deeper sadness, melancholy, and even a sense of death. La puerta del vino refers to one of the gates of the Alhambra in Granada, known to Debussy from a postcard sent by Manuel de Falla. Rather than depicting the quiet within, Debussy evokes the exuberant life outside its walls. Bitonality permeates the piece, and Debussy instructs the performer to play “with brusque oppositions of extreme violence and impassioned sweetness.”
Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses (The Fairies are Exquisite Dancers) takes its title from an Arthur Rackham illustration for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The writing is gossamer-light, darting and flickering like a firefly, alternating with fleeting hints of a more robust melody. Bruyères – Heather or Heaths – likely carried Scottish associations for Debussy. Its music is diatonic, grounded, and song-like. The cakewalk General Lavine – eccentric was inspired by a puppet show featuring the American performer Ed Lavine, “the man who soldiered all his life.” Debussy saw him at the Marigny Theater and wrote that he “hid with humor and with pirouettes a too-sensitive heart.”
The poetic title La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune (The terrace where the moon holds court) inspired one of Debussy’s most fantastical préludes, possibly stemming from Pierre Loti’s writings about moonlit terraces in India. Marked scherzando, the water nymph Ondine inhabits a shimmering, iridescent world, far removed from the malevolent water spirits of Nordic legend. Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C. enters the realm of caricature, complete with a fragment of the British national anthem and whistling from the Dickens character of Samuel Pickwick, “Perpetual President Member of the Pickwick Club.”
Canope brings a cool, detached melancholy reminiscent of Satie’s Gymnopédies. A canope is an Egyptian funerary urn – two stood in Debussy’s study – plain vessels topped with a likeness of the deceased. Les tierces alternées is the only prélude without a poetic title. Built entirely from alternating thirds in both hands, it looks ahead to the 12 Études Debussy was to write two years later. Finally, Feux d’artifice offers pianistic fireworks at their most dazzling. The quotation of the Marseillaise near the end suggests that Debussy had the fireworks of Bastille Day in mind.
— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khornernotes@gmail.com