4 Preludes

Brouillards

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir

Le vent dans la plaine

La fille aux cheveux de lin

Speculating on how a composer might go about making an orchestral arrangement of piano music is one thing. Actually doing it is quite another. In theory, for example, Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin should be a gift. In practice, as Colin Matthews tells us in his note, it is anything but - and he, having passed the half-way stage in his long-term project of scoring orchestral versions of all 24 of the Preludes, is uniquely experienced in this area.

The first piece in the present instalment, Brouillards, is surely not as problematic as it would have been if Debussy had chosen, as he might well have done, to evoke fog by using the sustaining pedal to create a hazy texture. In fact, he does it harmonically. The conflicting harmonies of C and D flat induce a kind of double vision, which means that melodic features emerge in full clarity only at those moment when the harmonic mist is dispersed. So, although the swirling figuration that dominates the piece is an essentially keyboard inspiration, the harmonies transfer readily to the orchestra and, given the additional colour resources, the melodic lines should emerge in high profile.

The title of Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir is more problematic than the music itself. Sounds can “dance in the evening air” equally well on piano or orchestra. But scents? On either? In fact, the title is taken from Baudelaire’s Harmonies du soir, which Debussy had set to music as a song in 1889. Less fragrantly but more helpfully perhaps he might have chosen the next line, “Valse mélancholique et langoureux vertige” (“Melancholy waltz and dizzy languor”). The orchestra and the waltz have always gone well together. In the last few bars, incidentally, Debussy asks the pianist to simulate “une lointaine sonnerie de cors.” Does Matthews take that literally or does he use other instruments to suggest, as the piano has to suggest, the “distant sound of horns”?

As in Brouillards, the predominant figuration of Le vent dans la plaine is essentially pianistic. The piece depends less on piano sonorities, however, than some of the other Debussy Preludes and, indeed, the tune that evidently represents the breeze dancing through the rustling grasses seems to be inspired by the imagined sound of a wind instrument. As for La fille aux cheveux de lin, it is more a song without words - a setting, so to speak, of Leconte de Lisle’s poem of the same name - than an impressionistic piano piece. The problems encountered by Colin Matthews in this case are as unexpected and just as fascinating as his solution to them.

Gerald Larner ©2005

La Puerta del Vino

Des pas sur la neige

Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses

La sérénade interrompue

With these four pieces Colin Matthews is now half-way through challenging but enviable task of writing orchestral arrangements of all twenty-four of Debussy’s piano Preludes. It is enviable because some of the Preludes - published originally in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1913 respectively - are clearly inspired by a musical experience and reflect instrumental or vocal colours that are not too difficult to find or simulate in the orchestra. Others are more challenging either because they suggest no kind of sound at all or because, like Les tierces alternées which Matthews so resourcefully scored a couple of years ago, they are conceived entirely in keyboard terms.

Two Preludes in the present group have more or less precise musical associations - La Puerta del Vino and La sérénade interrompue, both of them highly evocative Spanish impressions by a composer who had scarcely ever been to Spain but who achieved, as Manuel de Falla so delicately put it, “truth without authenticity.” La Puerta del Vino was inspired by a picture postcard Falla sent to Debussy from Granada. Depicting a gateway (the Wine Gate) in the Alhambra, the photograph seems to have been particularly striking for its contrasts of light and shade, which Debussy translates in his directions to the pianist as “brusque contrasts between extreme violence and passionate tenderness.” It echoes throughout with a stubborn habanera rhythm strummed in the bass as though on a giant guitar and changing pitch only in the middle section - no matter what the tonal implications of the several vocal melodies, with their gipsy-scale modality and flamenco decoration, intoned above it.

Des pas sur la neige is one of the problem pieces. Since no one has been able to trace the origin of its title (Footsteps in the Snow) or define the scene, here is my own interpretation: written on 27 December 1909, the day after a successful performance of the Chansons de Bilitis, it could well be another look at Pierre Louÿs’s icy landscape in the Tombeau des naïades, which has much to do with dragging footsteps in the snow. Debussy’s 1898 setting of Louÿs’s poem features at one point a rhythmic figure not unlike that which limps through the Prelude. Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses suggests a far more graceful kind of movement - and in better weather. Although the title derives from a line in J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, “The fairies are exquisite dancers,” the piece should not be linked exclusively to the Arthur Rackham illustration which accompanies it. A brilliantly mobile, freely flexible dance on feet that - except perhaps in a brief valse lente - never touch the ground, it is a close relation to an earlier Prelude La Danse de Puck and associates itself with a wider fairyland by alluding at the very end to the three-note horn call from Weber’s Oberon.

Sérénade interrompue (Interruped Serenade), one of the wittiest pieces in the two books of Preludes, is unmistakably Spanish in the guitar figuration preceding the precariously pitched serenade and, after another false start, the flamenco cadenza. The major interruption, provoking an angry response from the serenader, recalls a familiar rhythmic pattern from Le Matin d’un jour de fête in Debussy’s Ibéria.

Gerald Larner ©2004

arranged for orchestra by Colin Matthews (born 1946)

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

Canope (Book II, No.10)

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

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

All 24 of Debussy’s Preludes, published in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1913 respectively, are essentially piano music, music conceived for what the composer called that “box of hammers and strings.” With one exception (Les tierces alternées in Book II), they are impressions – of scenes, sites, literary and theatrical characters, events and objects with poetic associations – which are communicated through the medium of the piano. While it would in theory be possible to write note-for-note orchestral transcriptions, the result would be not only unnatural but also, in most cases, meaningless.

Colin Matthews’s orchestral versions of the 24 Preludes, created over a period of five years following a commission from the Hallé Orchestra in 2001, are not straight transcriptions. As one of the most accomplished of British composers and one with a rare experience of working on the music of others – not least through his collaboration with Deryck Cooke on completing Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony and his privileged position as amanuensis to Benjamin Britten – he has made whatever adjustments he has felt necessary. “It has been fascinating,” he 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.”

All four of the Preludes to be performed on this occasion (three from Debussy’s Book I, the others from Book II) would indeed be difficult to restore to the piano, some more than others. Hommage à S.Pickwick, Esq., P.P.M.P.C., for example, adds vivid non-pianistic colour to Debussy’s chacterisation of one of Charles Dickens’s favourite comic figures, above all 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. Canope, 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 – would present less of a problem. 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.

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 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.”

Debussy’s one Italian excursion, Les Collines d’Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri) is also transposed to a different key but is so idiomatically treated here that it calls Respighi, the Italian master of orchestration, to mind. 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.

Gerald Larner © 2008