Children’s Corner (1906-1908)

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum: Modérément animé - Très animé

Jimbo’s Lullaby: Assez modéré

Serenade of the Doll: Allegretto ma non troppo

The Snow is Dancing: Modérément animé

The Little Shepherd: Très modéré

Golliwogg’s Cake-walk: Allegro giusto

Children’s Corner was conceived, in the first place, not for children but for doting parents. Debussy’s daughter Claude-Emma, or “Chouchou” as she was always known, was less than one year old when he wrote Serenade of the Doll and she was still in no position either to play or understand the music when he added the five other pieces two years later The suite was dedicated on its publication in 1908 “to my dear little Chouchou with her Father’s tender apologies for what is about to follow” and she was obviously expected to grow into it, as indeed she did. The titles, incidentally, are in the language of the fashionable Parisian nursery at a time when nannies, like Chouchou’s, just had to be English.

Far from parodying Clementi’s keyboard exercises, or even the way children play them, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum takes an affectionate view of them – as though Debussy was looking forward to his daughter’s piano practice. At this stage, however, she is playing with a toy animal, slightly mispronounced as Jimbo but unmistakably elephantine in the heavy tread of the left hand and the oriental associations of the pentatonic line. It is sent to sleep with the help of a variety of allusions to the lullaby “Do, do, l’enfant, do.” As for the doll Chouchou was given before her first birthday, her fond father serenades it in Spanish style with a delicately plucked guitar. Whatever the source of its title, The Snow is dancing is an adult interpretation of a child’s observation of snow flakes falling. Whereas the Little Shepherd, another of Chouchou’s toys, pipes a melancholy monody, her orthographically and politically incorrect Golliwogg performs a cheerful cake-walk in what must be the earliest example of a piano rag by a European composer – or, at the very least, the first with a parody of Wagner worked into it.

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum: Modérément animé – Très animé

Jimbo’s Lullaby: Assez modéré

Serenade of the Doll: Allegretto ma non troppo

The Snow is Dancing: Modérément animé

The Little Shepherd: Très modéré

Golliwogg’s Cake-walk: Allegro giusto

Children’s Corner was conceived, in the first place, not for children but for fond parents. Debussy’s daughter Claude-Emma, or “Chouchou” as she was always known, was less than one when he wrote Serenade of the Doll and she was still in no position either to play or to understand the music when he added the five other pieces two years later. The suite was dedicated on its publication in 1908 “to my dear little Chouchou with her Father’s tender apologies for what is about to follow” and she was obviously expected to grow into it, as indeed she did. But, stimulated in part by Mussorgsky’s Nursery song-cycle, Debussy’s inspiration derives from his observations of a child’s toys and games from the point of view of a doting if slightly ironic adult. The titles are in the language of the middle-class Parisian nursery at a time when nannies, like Chouchou’s, just had to be English.

Far from parodying Clementi’s keyboard exercises, or even the way children play them, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum takes an affectionate view of them – as though Debussy was looking forward to his daughter’s piano lessons. It is true that it slows down in the middle and rushes at the end but these wilful tendencies are worked into the structure of a piece that finds both melodic poetry and physical exhilaration in the repetitive arpeggio figuration.

“At fifty,” Alfredo Casella remembered, “Debussy amused himself more than did his little daughter Chouchou with the toys brought home for her by her mother.” Here they are with a toy animal, slightly mispronounced as Jimbo but unmistakably elephantine in the heavy tread of the left hand and the oriental associations of the pentatonic line. They send it to sleep, eventually, with the help of a variety of allusions to “Do, do, l’enfant, do” (the nursery song that Debussy had used in Jardins sous la pluie in Estampes a few years earlier). As for the doll she was given before her first birthday, while Chouchou might have taken little interest in it,    “Papadechouchou” serenades it in Spanish style with a delicately plucked guitar and a capricious succession of instrumental and vocal melodic images as unpredictable in their harmonies as in their rhythms.

Whatever the source of its title – the English nanny? – The Snow is dancing is an adult interpretation of a child’s observation of snow flakes falling, at first in rhythmic regularity and in a gradually richer texture until a wind arises in a more turbulent middle section and then falls away as the snow thins out to nothing at the end. The Little Shepherd, another of Chouchou’s toys, pipes a melancholy monody but also recalls, at a chaste distance, the dance tune that animates the passion of L’Isle joyeuse. Politically incorrect though Chouchou’s Golliwogg would have been by today’s standards, its cake-walk contrives to work a gentle parody of Wagner into what must be the earliest example of a piano rag by a European composer.

Whether Chouchou appreciated the allusions to Tristan und Isolde in the middle section of her Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk we do not know. Marguerite Long, however, did recall her playing The Little Shepherd – “It was very moving, she almost recalled Debussy” – which cannot have been long before her sadly early death from diphtheria in 1919.