5 Poèmes de Baudelaire (1889)

Le Balcon

Harmonie du soir

Le jet d’eau

Recueillement

La Mort des amants

“1889!” Debussy recalled, “a delightful time when I was desperately Wagnerian.” And his favourite poet at that time was Charles Baudelaire. It was a potent combination, resulting immediately in the 5 Poèmes de Baudelaire, which are Wagnerian in proportion – the full cycle lasts more than 25 minutes – and, to a varying extent, Wagnerian in technique. It is partly a matter of structure: the repeated lines which are such a prominent feature of Le Balcon, Harmonie du soir and Le jet d’eau lend themselves naturally to a kind of leitmotif technique of repeated musical material. Each stanza of Le Balcon    is illuminatingly framed between first and last lines sharing the same vocal phrase. Harmonie du soir is a conscious study in structural repetition, based on the Malayan pantoum. While Le jet d’eau is an early manifestation of the impressionist Debussy in its watery piano part, Recueillement, which offers a direct echo of Tristan und Isolde (on “Sois sage, ô ma Douleur”) is the most Wagnerian song in the set - unless, by virtue of its morbid hot-house atmosphere and in spite of its echoes of Clair de lune, that distinction goes to La Mort des amants.   

Le Balcon

Harmonie du soir

Le jet d’eau

Recueillement

La Mort des amants

Answering a questionnaire in 1889, Debussy nominated Flaubert and Poe as his favourite prose writers, Hamlet and Rosalind as his favourite hero and heroine and Charles Baudelaire as his favourite poet. This overwhelming 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 and who would soon return to that most musical of poet in the Trois Mélodies and Fêtes galantes. 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.

Baudelaire and Wagner were natural partners. It was partly a matter of temperament: the poet had been an impassioned and eloquent advocate for the composer in a country which had been slow to recognise him as anything but a pernicious influence. More important for Debussy, it was also a matter of structure: the repeated lines which are such a prominent feature of Le Balcon, Harmonie du soir and Le jet d’eau lend themselves naturally to a kind of leitmotif technique of repeated musical material. Le Balcon is not only the longest of all Debussy’s songs but also one of the most elaborately scored and, in its sensual chromaticism, one of the most richly harmonised. Each of the five stanzas is illuminatingly framed, however, between first and last lines sharing the same vocal phrase, while the piano part weaves a thematic network of its own. 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, again, the piano develops its own material.

Although it is constructed in a similar way – by the recapitulations of the six lines beginning “Le gerbe d’eau” – Le jet d’eau is quite different in texture and colour. Here is an early manifestation of the impressionist Debussy, discovering in the splashy dissonances and flowing arabesques in the accompaniment an essential element in translating water sounds into piano music. Recueillement, on the other hand, is probably the most Wagnerian song in the set, which offers no more direct echo of Tristan und Isolde than in the piano harmonies accompanying the opening line “Sois sage, ô ma Douleur.” There are no repeated lines in the text here but Debussy supplies his own motivic framework by echoing the nocturnal piano introduction at the end of the second stanza and in the closing bars.