4 mélodies

Nuit d’étoiles (1880)

Deux Romances (1884): Les Cloches, Romance

Mandoline (1882)

Nuit d’étoiles was the first of Debussy’s works to appear in print. Written in 1880, it was published two years later with a dedication to

Mme Moreau-Sainti, a singing teacher who employed him as piano accompanist in her classes. Evidently preferring not to take up the precise musical assocations of La dernière Pensée de Weber, as Banville’s poem was actually entitled when it was first published in his Stalactites collection in 1846, Debussy changed its name and set it as a kind of serenade. The melodious refrain echoing Banville’s “triste lyre qui soupire” is accompanied by arpeggiated piano chords in a choice variety of rhythmic figurations.

While there is room for discussion about the chronology of Debussy’s early songs, it is difficult to agree with those authorities who allocate the composition of the two Bourget settings, Les Cloches and Romance, to a date as late as 1891. That would make them contemporary with the first set of Fêtes galantes, which are much more mature in style and technique. Les Cloches and Romance, which were published together as Deux Romances in 1891, are no less interesting for that, however. The piano part of Les Cloches is particularly imaginative in the way it 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. Romance follows a similarly strategy, reserving its most expressive moment to near the end where (on the words Faite d’espoir, d’amour fidèle) the voice at last takes up the melody introduced by the piano in the opening bars.

It was at Mme Moreau-Sainti’s singing classes the Debussy met an amateur but not unaccomplished, married but not unsusceptible soprano called Marie-Blanche Vasnier. Between 1881 and 1884 he wrote more than twenty songs for Mme Vasnier and, on leaving for Italy as the winner of the Prix de Rome, he presented them to her with a loving dedication in a leather-bound volume. The most prophetic of them is Mandoline, one of his first settings of words by Verlaine, whose verse was to be the major source of inspiration for Debussy’s songs for the next 22 years. A discreet sort of tarantella, in its mixture of modal and diatonic harmonies Mandoline matches perfectly the poet’s delicately ironic view of the Watteau-esque scene before him.