12 Preludes

arranged for orchestra by Colin Matthews (born 1946)

Brouillards (Book II, No.1)

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (Book I, No.7)

Minstrels (Book I, No.12)

Canope (Book II, No.10)

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (Book I, No.4)

La Puerta del Vino (Book II, No.3)

Feuilles mortes (Book II, No.2)

Général Lavine – excentric (Book II, No.6)

La danse de Puck (Book I, No.11)

Les tierces alternées (Book II, No.11)

Le vent dans la plaine (Book I, No.3) –

La fille aux cheveux de lin (Book I, No.8)

‘The fact is,’ Debussy once remarked, ‘that the beauty of a work of art will always be a mystery, that is to say that one will never be able to work out “how it’s done”.’ There is no better illustration of the truth of that statement than Debussy’s own Preludes for piano – issued in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1912 respectively – which so magically and so beautifully evoke sights, sounds and even scents by means of nothing more than what the composer called ‘that box of hammers and strings.’

The distinction of Colin Matthews’s orchestral arrangements of the 24 Preludes – written over a period of five years following a commission from Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra in 2001 – is that he seems to have worked out exactly ‘how it’s done.’ Far from writing note-for note transcriptions, Matthews has discovered the secret of each piece and in most cases translated it faithfully, if not literally, into orchestral terms. “It has been fascinating,” Matthews has said, “to find ways of transcribing textures which are at first sight wholly pianistic into orchestral music which, I hope, would be just as difficult to translate back to the piano.”

One of the factors involved in converting piano music into authentic orchestral music is that the more varied palette sometimes requires a bigger canvas. Brouillards (Mists) is only a few bars longer in the orchestral version than in the original but the brief extension of the melody that passes from oboe to cor anglais over swirling celesta and harp arpeggios towards the end of the piece gives it the space it needs.   

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the West Wind Saw) was inspired by an account of the adventures of the West Wind, the “wild boy” who “smacks of the sea,” in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Garden of Paradise. It is a virtuoso piano piece featuring keyboard devices which would make little sense transferred literally to the orchestra. So, while the harmonies of the first five bars of the orchestral version (before the entry of the chorale theme on trombones and tuba) are implied by Debussy’s introductory arpeggios, the material is actually Matthews’s own. Another creative intervention is a series of horn calls in the central climax of the piece.

The protagonists of Minstrels are not medieval troubadors but thoroughly modern black-face entertainers of the kind Debussy is said to have encountered busking in the streets of Eastbourne when he was working on La Mer in 1905. Among the earliest exponents of jazz in Europe, they are celebrated here not so much for their musicianship as for their clowning, as Matthews’s wittily grotesqe scoring acknowledges.

In direct contrast, Canope is Debussy’s ode to an Egyptian urn: he was the proud owner of two of the much-prized head-shaped covers of these ancient funerary vessels. Apart from one extra bar where Debussy has a pause, the orchestral version - the chordal procession (recalling Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition) on woodwind, the incantatory muted trumpet, the invocations on solo woodwind - is very close to the original.

The title of “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” (The sounds and the scents dance in the evening air) comes from Baudelaire’s Harmonies du soir, which Debussy had set to music as a song in 1889. Less fragrantly but more helpfully, he might have chosen the next line, “Valse mélancholique et langoureux vertige” (“Melancholy waltz and dizzy languor”). While the change of key from A major to C major for the orchestral version is a purely practical strategy, the comparatively slow tempo applied by Matthews to this 5/4 waltz indulges the poetic languor.

La Puerta del vino (The Wine Gate) – inspired by a picture postcard of a gate in the Alhambra sent to the composer by his Spanish colleague Manuel de Falla - is also transposed into a different key. Whatever the tonality (D flat major for the piano, E flat for the orchestra), the habanera rhythm remains a persistent presence in the bass while the eventful material above it presents what Debussy described as “brusque contrasts between violence and impassioned sweetness.”

The title of Feuilles mortes (Dead Leaves) is thought to derive from a poem by the composer’s friend Gabriel Mourey beginning “Under the cold and melancholy autumn wind.” Its chilly sonorities lend themselves so readily to orchestral treatment that this is one case where the piano original might possibly be reconstructed from Matthews’s score, idiomatically written for strings though it is.

Général Lavine – excentric is the equivalent in Book II to Minstrels in Book I of the Preludes and another indication of Debussy’s amused interest in the jazz idiom. In this case it is a cake-walk as performed by the American clown Edward Lavine, “the main who has soldiered all his life,” at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs Elysées in 1910. With the military allusions presented by the trumpets (which are also entrusted with two brief references to “The Camptown Races”) and a little additional colour here and there, the orchestral version offers a particularly vivid caricature.   

Two bars longer than the original and richer in texture, Matthews’s version of La Danse de Puck amounts to a tiny tone poem featuring not only Shakespeare’s sprite but also Oberon, whose presence is signalled by a magical off-key horn calls just after the first entry of Puck’s little dance tune on pioutting flutes.

In that it is a technical study of the kind that Debussy was to collect in the piano Etudes three years later, Les tierces alternées (Alternating thirds) is an anomaly among the Preludes. Matthews converts it into a brilliant orchestral scherzo partly by sustaining on bassoons and cellos a melodic line hidden in the pianist’s left hand and partly by introducing subtle metrical variations into Debussy’s regular 2/4.

If Les tierces alternées is the most inspired of Matthews’s orchestral arrangements, Le vent dans la plaine (The wind on the plain) and La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with flaxen hair) are the most radical departures from the original. Le vent dans la plaine, a breezy piece suggested by a line from Charles-Simon Favart, is discreetly extended by a development absent from the original and is almost half as long again.. As for La fille aux cheveux de lin, ‘What to do with such familiar music?’ Matthews asked himself. ‘I made several failed attempts at it, before deciding to slow it to half speed and score it for strings and harps. This gives it a weight which is admittedly at odds with the simplicity of the original, but – played without a break after Le vent – it seemed to make an appropriate coda to the set.’

Gerald Larner ©

arranged for orchestra by Colin Matthews

Danseuses de Delphes (Book I, No.1)

La sérénade interrompue (Book I, No.9)

Des pas sur la neige (Book I, No.6)

‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ (Book II, No.4)

Voiles (Book I, No.2)

Hommage à S.Pickwick, Esq., P.P.M.P.C. (Book II, No.9)

La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune (Book II, No.7)

Bruyères (Book II, No.5)

Ondine (Book II, No.8)

Les collines d’Anacapri (Book I, No.5)

Feux d’artifice (Book II, No.12)

La cathédrale engloutie (Book I, No.10)

Colin Matthews (b. 1946)

Postlude: Monsieur Croche

‘The fact is,’ Debussy once remarked, ‘that the beauty of a work of art will always be a mystery, that is to say that one will never be able to work out “how it’s done”.’ There is no better illustration of the truth of that statement than Debussy’s own Preludes for piano – issued in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1912 respectively – which so magically and so beautifully evoke sights, sounds and even scents by means of nothing more than what the composer called ‘that box of hammers and strings.’

The distinction of Colin Matthews’s orchestral arrangements of the 24 Preludes – written over a period of five years following a commission from Mark Elder and the Hallé in 2001 – is that he seems to have worked out exactly ‘how it’s done.’ Far from writing note-for-note transcriptions, Matthews has discovered the secret of each piece and in most cases translated it faithfully, if not literally, into orchestral terms. ‘It has been fascinating,’ Matthews has said,’to find ways of transcribing textures which are at first sight wholly pianistic into orchestral music which, I hope, would be just as difficult to translate back to the piano.’

Anyone with an ambition to reconstruct the piano versions would have a better (though still very faint) chance with the present set of arrangements than with those recorded on the companion Hallé CD which includes, as it happens, the most radical of Matthews’s departures from the Debussy originals, Le vent dans la plaine and La fille aux cheveux de lin.

There is little in the orchestral arrangement of Danseuses de Delphes (Delphic Dancers) that is not in the piano material. The economically applied percussion colours, including four notes on crotales, are clearly implied in Debussy’s realizaton of the sounds he associated with the three bacchantes carved on an ancient Greek column in the Louvre. The guitar figuration implied by La Sérénade interrompue (The Interrupted Serenade), which is obviously set in southern Spain, is awarded not to a guitar, however, but to plucked strings and a discreetly comic pair of bassoons. Castanets are held in reserve for the second of two intrusions (this one of street musicians from Debussy’s Ibéria) which, to the serenader’s fury, interrupt his soulful flamenco song on woodwind.

Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps on the Snow) presents a desolate scene. The limping rhythm heard in the opening bars, Debussy tells the hapless pianist, ‘should have the sound value of the depths of a sad and icy landscape.’ Perhaps the orchestra has the advantage here in the pinched sound of muted horns and muted trumpet on a chilly background of muted solo violas. Whereas Debussy restricts the dynamic level to pianissimo or piano throughout, after the last rueful entry of the saxophone Matthews allows his muted violins and trumpet a brief forte climax.

The next prelude, set in a warmer season, begins before the icy landscape of Des pas sur la neige has quite faded away. Its title ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ (“The Fairies are Exquisite Dancers”) quotes the caption to an illustration by Arthur Rackham for J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The appropriately exquisite piano piece does not, however, translate readily into orchestral terms, mainly because of its often slender (one-line) textures. So Matthews’s slightly longer orchestral version begins in its own way, anticipating Debussy’s opening with idiomatically conceived woodwind figuration and a counterpoint on muted horns and trumpet. This section recurs, after an eventful flight of airborne dances, just before the three-note magic horn call from Weber’s Oberon is heard in the closing bars.

A study in floating whole tones, Voiles (either Sails or Veils, but probably the former), is extended by a bar at the end but is otherwise much the same in the orchestral version. Hommage à S.Pickwick, Esq., P.P.M.P.C., on the other hand, adds vivid colour to the Dickensian caricature, not least by making a feature of the side drum – ­to particularly witty effect in the very first bar, immediately before the solemn entry of the British national anthem on trombone and tuba.

La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, a nocturnal contemplation of the enchanting idea of a terrace for audiences of (rather than in) the moonlight, is as elusive as the Pickwick prelude is robust. Although the title is taken from a newspaper report from India, there is nothing exotic in the music which, indeed, features the French nursery tune, ‘Au clair de la lune.’ Heard here on four horns in the opening bars, it signals the beginning of a magically moonlit scene, the light trickling down in woodwind arabesques, one of which Matthews extends before the horns’ final allusion to ‘Au clair de la lune.’

Bruyères (Heather or Heath), the Book II equivalent to La fille au cheveux de lin in Book I, evokes from Matthews a similar though less remote reflection, at a not so drastically reduced tempo, on Debussy’s celtic folk-song material. Artfully (if curiously) hiding the opening theme in the scoring for harps at the beginning and for violins on its recall at the end, it luxuriates in a lyrical treatment, largely for solo strings, of the melodic interest that arises in the meantime.

Ondine is another Rackham inspiration, the aquatic equivalent of the aerial activity of ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses.’ A scherzo based on the central figure, a water nymph, of de la Motte-Fouqué’s Ondine, which was published with illustrations by Arthur Rackham in 1912, it is orchestrated here with such panache that it could almost be an arrangement by Ravel. Respighi, another master of orchestration, is called to mind by Matthews’s treatment (transposed from B to C major) of Debussy’s one Italian excursion, Les collines d’Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri). After a short pentatonic prelude, suggestive of distant church bells perhaps, it tries out a tarantella on woodwind, hums a popular song on bassoons and lower strings, and rocks languorously to a kind of habanera on flutes and violins. The exuberant ending, which recalls both the tarantella and the popular song – with recklessly uninhibited horns and trumpets, rumbling tuba, and glittering percussion ­– is a rethinking and extension of Debussy’s purely pianistic closing section.

As with ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ an orchstral version of Feux d’artifice (Fireworks) requires textural elaboration of what, particularly in its early stages, is often a single piano line. The last of the 24 Preludes as Debussy presented them, it is a display as much of keyboard fireworks as the kind of pyrotechnics seen in France on14th July. Such sensational features as the six-octave glissando at the end of the first section cannot be literally translated into orchestral terms. Much of the sparkling keyboard figuration is retained, however – even, thanks to a virtuoso celesta, in the cadenza that precedes the approach to the explosive climax of the piece. Closing echoes of phrases from ‘La Marseillaise,’ on oboe and horn here, confirm the connection with Bastille Day celebrations.

Appropriately, because of the sature it acquires in the orchestral version, the last Prelude as Matthews presents them is La cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) based on the legend of the submerged Breton city of Ys whose cathedral can be seen, at the lowest of low tides, to emerge from the mist before being engulfed again. Although Debussy’s mainly chordal material is treated here to a wide range of orchestral sonority, with simulated organ and actual bell sounds as it rises in its modal glory to the central climax, it is not so weighed down as to lose its illusory quality.

Postlude: Monsieur Croche

Colin Matthews had always intended to write a postlude to his arrangements of the Debussy Preludes but he waited until he had finished the last of them before he made a start on it. At that point, he says, ‘the only logical thing to do seemed to be to write a piano piece of my own and then transcribe it’. Conceived with a nice sense of authenticity though it was, however, the new piece ­– which takes its title from ‘Monsieur Croche,’ the nom de plume Debussy used when workng as a music critic in the 1900s – would be quite impossible to trace back to its keyboard origins. The ethereal passage for multi-divided strings about half-way through, for example, would make no sense in piano terms. That is just one of several vividly contrasted episodes which, held together by recurrences of the buzzing activity on trumpets and woodwind at the beginning, make up what Matthews describes as ‘part portrait of Debussy and part expression of exuberance and reflection on having completed the project.’ Clearly, he sees Debussy as a man of immense energy but also, as a congenial bassoon and cello melody indicates at an early stage, of immense likeability and, as the string episode seems to suggest, visionary inspiration. In the brilliantly written coda, which has the structural function of tying together the various thematic strands, the sense of exuberance is unmistakable. Closer to Debussy’s own style than Matthews had ‘intended or expected,’ he says, M.Croche ‘was written as a gift and a thank you to Mark Elder and the Hallé, and is respectfully dedicated …à la mémoire d’un musicien français.’

Gerald Larner © 2008