3 Mélodies

Mandoline (1882)

Les Cloches (1885)

Harmonie du soir (1889)

Asked to name his favourite poet in a questionnaire in 1889, Debussy rather surprisingly nominated Charles Baudelaire. Important to him though Baudelaire was at that time, the poet Debussy set more often than any other was Paul Verlaine, to whose verse he turned again and again between 1882 and 1904. One of the first Verlaine settings, Mandoline was included in the specially bound volume of more than twenty songs he presented to Mme Blanche Vasnier – amateur singer and the “older-woman “figure in the young man’s development – before he left Paris for Rome in 1885. A discreet sort of tarantella, its mixture of modal and diatonic harmonies matching the poet’s delicately ironic view of the Watteau-esque scene before him, it is the most prophetic of his early songs.

Another source of inspiration in the Vasnier period, but one that lasted no more than a couple of years, was the poetry of Paul Bourget. Les Cloches, published as one of Deux Romances in 1891 but written at least in a first draft in 1885, is particularly imaginative. The piano part sustains bell-like figuration in the right hand and a rising three-note ostinato in the left but only until the end of the second stanza: the transfer of the ostinato in an expressively augmented version to high in the right hand in the third stanza focuses attention on the emotions evoked by the bells rather than their sound.

Debussy’s keen interest in Baudelaire was not to last very long but while it did, combined with a similarly brief but equally intense enthusiasm for Wagner, it was a potent inspiration. The immediate result was the Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire, some of which are scarcely recognisable as being by the Debussy who had only recently completed the Ariettes to texts by Verlaine. The Baudelaire settings are Wagnerian in proportion - the full cycle of five songs lasts more than twenty-five minutes - and, to a varying extent, they are Wagnerian in technique. The repeated lines which are such a prominent feature of Baudelaire’s Le Balcon, Harmonie du soir and Le jet d’eau lend themselves naturally to a kind of leitmotif technique of repeated musical material. Harmonie du soir is a conscious study in structural repetition. Based on the Malayan pantoum, it presents the second and fourth lines of one stanza as the first and third of the next, creating an intricate web of thematic recurrences and close variants in the vocal line while the piano develops its own material.