Beau soir (c1893)

Beau soir is one of the twenty or so songs Debussy included in a morocco- bound volume of manuscripts he presented to Marie-Blanche Vasnier in 1884. As a winner of the Prix de Rome he was leaving Paris to take up official residence in the Villa Medicis and would not be seeing her for some time. An accomplished amateur soprano, Mme Vasnier had been a formative influence on the young composer’s development - and, though she was twelve years older and married with two children, not just his musical development. Some commentators have claimed that Beau soir was written as early as 1880, before they met, but since the poem was published in Paul Bourget’s Aveux only in 1883 that seems unlikely. Although as a friend of the poet Debussy might have seen the poem before then, the song seems - in comparison with the Banville setting Nuit d’étoiles which we know to have been written in 1880 - too sophisticated for such an early date. One of six Bourget items in the Vasnier songbook, it is subtly unsettling in its harmonies and, as the voice of nature makes its melodious entry in the pianist’s left hand in the third line, discreetly resourceful in its textures.