Images: Book 2 (1907)

Poissons d’or: Animé

Images was a significant title for Debussy. He first applied it to a set of three piano pieces in 1894 but he decided against publishing them in that form (they were first published as a set under the title Images oubliées in 1977). In 1905, having in the meantime discovered a whole new vocabulary for translating visual impressions into piano music in Estampes, he returned to the idea in his first book of Images, which he did not hesitate to send to his publisher as soon as he completed it.

The kind of scene Debussy had in mind in at least the first two of the second set of piano Images was one that a painter could not set down on canvas. He found fruitful inspiration in, for example, a friend’s account of an ancient custom on All Saints Day in the Jura according to which “between vespers and the mass for the dead church bells ring from village to village through forests turning gold in the silence of the evening.” There is more to Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells though the leaves) than just that – the composer’s memory of the sonorities and pentatonic harmonies of the Javanese gamelan above all – but it is at least a start in interpreting the poetry of the intricately interwoven whole-tone lines, each with its own rhythmic pattern, and the delicate metallic colouring of a piece that at its climax calls for fortissimo and pianissimo simultaneously. The difference between the brilliant definition of Ravel’s Vallée des cloches and the limitless suggestivity of Debussy’s Cloches à travers les feuilles is in some respects the difference between the two composers.

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon sets over the temple that was) – a title chosen because the composer liked its exotic associations and it alexandrine rhythm – is even further from the painter’s canvas. The building is no longer there, after all. It emerges only as the light of the moon, represented by the bright dissonances of the opening bars, descends on the scene, evoking the shape of the temple in parallel harmonies and its music in suggestions of vocal chant and percussive melody. It’s an anticipation of La Cathédrale engloutie but in a seductively elusive, oriental rather Brittany setting.

Poissons d’or (Goldfish) is said to have been inspired by a decorative Japanese panel in black and gold lacquer that hung on Debussy’s wall. It is a virtuoso piece which, not long before its quiet ending, develops far more turbulent movement than anything suggested by the two goldfish depicted on the panel.         

Poissons d’or: Animé

Images was a significant title for Debussy. He first applied it to the set of three piano pieces he dedicated to Yvonne Lerolle in 1894 but – presumably because he felt that he had it in him to write something more worthy of such an evocative title – he decided against publishing them in that form (they were first published as a set under the title Images oubliées in 1977). In 1905, having in the meantime discovered a whole new vocabulary for translating visual impressions into piano music in Estampes, he returned to the idea in his first book of Images, which he did not hesitate to send to his publisher as soon as he completed it. It was only in 1907, however, in the second book of Images that he finally achieved what he had envisioned thirteen years earlier.

The kind of scene Debussy had in mind in the second set of piano Images was not one that a painter could set down on canvas but one with sounds or at least movements associated with it. That is why he found such fruitful inspiration in a friend’s account of an ancient custom on All Saints Day in the Jura according to which “between vespers and the mass for the dead church bells ring from village to village through forests turning gold in the silence of the evening.” There is more to Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells though the leaves) than just that – the composer’s memory of the sonorities and pentatonic harmonies of the Javanese gamelan above all – but it is at least a start in interpreting the poetry of the intricately interwoven whole-tone lines, each with its own rhythmic pattern, and the delicate metallic colouring of the piece.

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon sets over the temple that was) – a title chosen because the composer liked its oriental associations and it alexandrine rhythm – is even further from the painter’s canvas. The building is no longer there, after all. It emerges only as the light of the moon, represented by the bright dissonances of the opening bars, descends on the scene, evoking the shape of the temple in parallel harmonies and its music in suggestions of vocal chant and percussive melody.

Poissons d’or (Goldfish) is said to have been inspired by a decorative Japanese panel in black and gold lacquer that hung on Debussy’s wall. Dedicated to Ricardo Viñes, who gave the first performance of the complete work in Paris in February 1908, it is a virtuoso piece which, not long before its quiet ending, develops far more turbulent movement than anything suggested by the two goldfish depicted on the panel.