Bilitis

arranged by Karl Lenski

1 Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’été

(For the invocation of Pan, god of the summer wind)

2 Pour un tombeau sans nom

(For an unnamed tomb)

3 Pour que la nuit soit propice

(For a propitious night)

4 Pour la danseuse aux crotales

(For the dancing girl with crotales)

5 Pour l’Egyptienne

(For the Egyptian girl)

6 Pour remercier la pluie au matin

(For thanking the rain in the morning)

As an intimate friend of Pierre Louÿs, Debussy was not at all shocked that the poet had deliberately set out to hoax the public when he published his Chansons de Bilitis in 1895. What interested the composer was not the question of the authenticity of the poems - Louÿs had claimed that they were “translated from the Greek” of Bilitis, an alleged contemporary of Sappho - but their erotic content and their eminently musical qualities. They inspired at least three works, the three songs called Chansons de Bilitis completed in 1896, the stage music also called Chansons de Bilitis written for a dramatic presentation of the poems in 1900 and, less directly, the Six Épigraphes antiques which were developed and arranged for piano duet from the Bilitis stage music in 1913.

Intimately associated with Debussy’s Bilitis music is the sound of the flute, which is clearly invoked by the piano both in the songs and in the Épigraphes antiques and which is actually present in the scoring (for two flutes, two harps and celesta) of the stage music. So it makes sense to arrange the Épigraphes antiques for flute and piano and realize something of the colour potential that Debussy himself had in mind when he toyed with the idea of making an orchestral version of the piano duets in 1914. With the composer’s own scoring of the Chansons de Bilitis stage music to refer to as a guide, Karl Lenski has been able to provide an idiomatic transcription of the first five of the Épigraphes antiques piano duets. For the last of them, which is pure piano music until the recall of Pan’s theme at the end, he wisely turned to the original stage- music version.

Syrinx for solo flute

Syrinx is music with a dying fall: written as incidental music for Gabriel Mourey’s Psyche in 1913, it is the melodious expression of the last breath of the god Pan. The title - an allusion to the nymph who, to escape pursuit by Pan, transformed herself into a reed, but only to be fashioned by the god into the first pan-pipe - was added when the piece was first published in 1927.

La plus que lente

La plus que lente, a “more than slow” waltz, confected in 1910 “for the brasserie at tea time,” according to the composer, “and for the pretty listeners who meet there,” contrives to be both wickedly satirical of the café-concert and endearing at the same time. Debussy was incapable of writing bad music even when he tried.

arranged by Karl Lenski

Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’été

Pour un tombeau sans nom

Pour que la nuit soit propice

Pour la danseuse aux crotales

Pour l’Egyptienne

Pour remercier la pluie au matin

When Pierre Louÿs published his Chansons de Bilitis in 1895 he claimed that the poems were “translated from the Greek” - a pretence which was taken so seriously by some of his contemporaries that a party of antiquarians set off for Greece in search of authentic traces of Bilitis, alleged contemporary of Sapho, and her manuscripts. The fact is, of course, that the poems were written by Louÿs himself. He had found his inspiration not in Lesbos but in Biskra where he had fallen for a dancer called Meriem ben Atala: “amber-skinned, firm-fleshed, her figure was round but still almost childish, for she was barely sixteen,” recalled André Gide who was with Louÿs at the time.

As an intimate friend of the poet, Debussy knew all about this. Indeed, he had met Meriem’s sister Zohra whom Louÿs had brought from Biskra to live with him in Paris. Questions of Greek authenticity were of little importance to the composer. What attracted him to the poems was their erotic quality, obviously, but also some very clear parallels with his own artistic interests. They inspired at least three works - the three songs called Chansons de Bilitis completed in 1896, the stage music also called Chansons de Bilitis written for a dramatic presentation of the poems in 1900 and, less directly, the Six Epigraphes antiques which were developed and arranged for piano duet from the Bilitis stage music in 1913. It is possible that there is also a connection between the Bilitis songs and Des pas sur la neige in the first book of piano Preludes.

Intimately associated with Debussy’s Bilitis music is the sound of the flute, which is clearly invoked by the piano in the songs and the Epigraphes antiques and which is actually present in the scoring (for two flutes, two harps and celesta) of the stage music. So it makes sense to arrange the Epigraphes antiques for flute and piano, as Karl Lenski has done here, and realize something of the colour potential that Debussy himself had in mind when he toyed with the idea of making an orchestral version of the piano duets in 1914.

Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’été (“For the invocation of Pan, god of the summer wind”) and Pour un tombeau sans nom (“For a nameless tomb”), both with graceful modally inflected melodic lines characteristic of Debussy’s flute writing elsewhere, cannot have been too problematic to transcribe. With the score of the stage music and the composer’s own solo piano version as well as the duet version of the Epigraphes antiques to refer to, there is every chance of making an idiomatic transcription too of the more eventful and texturally more complex Pour que la nuit soit propice (“For a propitious night”). If the flute line in the impulsive Pour la danseuses aux crotales (“For the dancer with crotales”) is not so obvious, it is clear enough in the exotic languor of Pour l’Egyptienne (“For the Egyptian girl”). With Pour remercier la pluie au matin (“For thanking the rain in the morning”) the basis of the present transcription is not the last of the Epigraphes antiques - which is pure piano music until the recall of Pan’s theme at the end - but the original stage-music piece from which it was so enterprisingly developed.