Debussy and Impressionism

Debussy didn’t much like the term “impressionism.” One reason could be that the first time he saw it applied to his music was in a discouraging report from a panel of senior composers to whom he had submitted Printemps, his first orchestral work, in 1887. They reproached him with “an unfortunate tendency towards a vague impressionism of the most dangerous kind.” [Une tendance fâcheuse à l’impressionisme vague des plus dangereux] While the value judgement was obviously wrong, the observation was prescient: Printemps represents the green shoots of what was to blossom into the great works of orchestral impressionism (there is no other word for it) of Debussy’s maturity. The panel might have been more positive about Printemps, incidentally, if    the young    composer had been able to offer them an orchestra rather than a piano duet to go with the wordless choral part. The present orchestration, without chorus, was completed by Henri Busser under Debussy’s supervision in 1912.

It is not so very far from the pentatonic flute solo at the beginning of Printemps to the chromatic flute solo at the beginning of Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune completed seven years later. With the latter work, however, Debussy found such inspiration in Mallarmé’s poem that he created not only new orchestral colours but also a daringly liberated harmonic language that proved capable, over the next    two decades, of infinite development. In Nocturnes, seven years later again, he could extend it, with further refinement of his orchestration, to a magical impression of clouds reflected late at night on the surface of the Seine (Nuages) and to a brilliant evocation of a torchlight procession in the Bois de Boulogne (Fêtes). The mystic effect of the wordless chorus in the third movement, Sirènes, is a masterly realisation of what he had sought to achieve in Printemps.

If the composer’s    critics still found his impressionism “vague” – by which they meant formless – they should have been silenced by the first performance of La Mer in 1905. No less evocative than its predecessors, La Mer is as coherent and as sublime a construction as any symphony, its maritime scenario coinciding precisely with its cyclic formal strategy. The more conservative critics were not in fact silenced by La Mer or by Debussy’s next major orchestral work, Images, which occupied him for the following seven years. A series of poetic tributes to the three countries that meant most to him – England (or Scotland) in Gigues, Spain in the three perfectly integrated movement of Ibéria, France in Rondes de Printemps – Images is a work unparalleled in the vivacity of its visual detail, its unprecedentedly vivid imagery of time and place. It is not only music but also what the composer described as “reality.” [réalité]

Debussy’s last orchestral score, Jeux, a “poème dansé” commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes season in Paris in 1912, is the ultimate in “reality” impressionism. It is abundant in thematic ideas but few of even the most melodious of them are given much exposure or development, still less constrained in any pre-determined musical form. While one little theme recurs in an endless variety of transformations, the motivation is entirely spontaneous. The reality of Nijinsky’s story-line – the flirtatious games of two girls and a young man in tennis costume in a park at twilight – is reflected in erotically elusive harmonies, rhythms too complex for set-piece dances, and miraculously subtle orchestration.

Also recorded here are two occasional works outside the impressionist canon. The two dances, Danse sacrée et danse profane, were commissioned in 1904 by the instrument-manufacturer Pleyel to demonstrate the superiority of the recently    invented chromatic harp over Erard’s pedal harp. While they did not have the desired commercial effect, they did achieve a rare, chaste beauty. Another score with an aesthetic value far above its immediate purpose, the Première Rapsodie was written as a competition piece for the clarinet class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1910.

According to Mary Garden, the first Mélisande, Debussy told the cast rehearsing the original production of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902 to forget they were singers. His advice was an accurate reflection of his approach to writing the work. Here too his concern was for reality – not the reality of everyday speech but, far from it, the reality of the idiosyncratic dialogue of the play on which Debussy based his libretto. Neither recitative nor heightened speech, the vocal line is defined by the melodic implications of the natural pitch inflections and rhythms of Maurice Maeterlinck’s poetic prose. This meant avoiding not only the operatic arias, duets and other set-pieces already rejected by Wagner but also, he hoped, Wagnerism itself.

The fact that he was less than completely successful in these things is not, however, a matter for regret. The work would be poorer without the echoes of Parsifal in the orchestral interludes and Tristan in the scene where Mélisande lets down her hair from her room in the tower to the delighted Pelléas standing below. Without the elaborate system of leitmotifs, which when Wagner used them he derided as “visiting cards” [cartes de visite] the construction would collapse. Nor can we regret, after the breathtakingly unoperatic declaration of mutual love in the scene where Pelléas and Mélisande meet for the last time, the near-Massenet effusion of lyricism from the tragically enraptured Pelléas.

Even so, Pelléas et Mélisande is a rare case of equality between words and music. As the arch-Wagnerite Vincent d’Indy so perceptively and so surprisingly acknowledged, “Debussy is our Monteverdi!” [Debussy est notre Monteverdi]

Gerald Larner © 2009