3 Preludes from Book I (1907-1910)

Des pas sur la neige

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest

La fille aux cheveux de lin

When Debussy published his 24 piano Preludes – 12 of them in a first Book in 1910 and 12 more in a second Book three years later ­ – he was following a tradition initiated by J.S. Bach, who twice compiled sets of preludes and fugues in all of the 24 major and minor keys. Among those who followed him before Debussy’s intervention, all of them allocating a prelude to each of the 24 key, were Chopin, Busoni, and Scriabin. Debussy, however, had no interest in covering the whole range of keys. While he chose to complete the traditional total of 24, his aim was to persuade the piano to express visual images, poetic thoughts, literary, theatrical and real-life caricatures.

Some of the Preludes are more difficult to interpret than others. Of the 6th, 7th and 8th in Book I, Des pas sur la neige is the most mysterious, although it is easier to understand if the French title is translated not as “Footsteps in the snow” but literally as “Steps on the snow” since the dragging rhythms seem to suggest the difficulty of walking through deep drifts. The turbulent Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest (What the west wind saw) was inspired by a passage describing the havoc caused by the west wind, “a really wild boy,” in Hans Christian Andersen story The Garden of Paradise. La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with flasxen hair), Debussy’s portrait of a naive country girl, her simplicity reflected in the unaffected falling and rising of the penatonic main theme, takes its title from a favourite poem by Leconte de Lisle.