Fêtes galantes 2

Les Ingénus

Le Faune

Colloque sentimental

Debussy set more of Verlaine than of any other poet – twenty poems in all, beginning with five texts from the Fêtes galantes in 1882 and ending with three more from the same collection in 1904. The dates are significant: Mandoline, Pantomime and the first versions of En sourdine, Fantoches and Clair de lune, the three songs he later revised for publication in the first set of Fêtes galantes, date from the period of the composer’s association with the amateur but obviously seductive soprano Mme Vasnier; Les Ingénus, Le Faune and Colloque sentimental were written shortly before Debussy left his first wife for Emma Bardac.

Verlaine opened his collection of Fêtes galantes with Clair de lune, which introduces an idyllic landscape derived partly from the paintings of Watteau and partly from his own erotic imagination. Debussy, however, chose to open his first set of Fêtes galantes with En Sourdine, which comes last but one in Verlaine’s collection where it at last emphasises the unhappy side of the emotional ambiguity of the foregoing scenes of flirtation and galanterie.

There is no unhappy side to the coquetry described in Les Ingénus, the first song in Debussy’s second set, but at the same time there is something so breathtakingly erotic in it for the willing “dupes” of those revealing little autumn-evening games that he sets it not so much lightheartedly as with a delicate kind of excitement. The scherzo here is Le Faune. Ignoring the warning in Verlaine’s text, Debussy has his terracotta faun identify himself with a characteristic flourish on the panpipes while a drum beats an ostinato accompaniment to the passing of this amorous little scene. The last song, Colloque sentimental, is clearly intended not as a reflection on Debussy’s relationship with Emma Bardac but as an expression of disillusionment with former relationships. It is an unhappy nocturnal ending but, as Debussy indicates by echoing the song of the nightingale from En Sourdine, it was there from the beginning as far as he was concerned.