from 5 Poèmes de Baudelaire (1887–89)

Le Balcon

Le jet d’eau

La Mort des amants

Responding to 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.

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 of the accompaniment an essential element in translating water sounds into piano music. Written two years before Le jet d’eau, which was the last of the five songs in order of composition, La mort des amants, the earliest of them, is still in thrall to Bayreuth. It is suffused by Tristan echoes in much the same way as it is pervaded by the rising semitone in the pianist’s left hand in the first bar – a motif which, as is demonstrated by the accompaniment to the words “comme des tombeaux” in the opening stanza, derives from a phrase in the iconic opening theme of the opera. That phrase enters the vocal part with “les miroirs ternis” in the last line.