Images for orchestra

Gigues

Ibéria:

    1 Par les rues et par les chemins

    2 Les parfums de la nuit -

    3 Le matin d’un jour de fête

Rondes de Printemps

If Debussy’s Images can be compared with images of any kind they are not paintings or still photographs but moving pictures – with the vital difference that the visual element can be seen only in the mind’s eye and only when the imagination is stimulated by the magical suggestions of time, place, colour, character and movement in the music. Even the composer could be surprised by its evocative potential: after listening to a rehearsal of the third movement of Ibéria he delightedly told a friend of his perception of “people and things waking up. There’s a man selling water melons and urchins whistling, I see them quite clearly.” Certainly, there is more for the eye in Ibéria than in the other two Images for orchestra but, like many impressionist paintings, both Gigues and Rondes de printemps are vibrant with atmosphere even where the imagery is elusive.

In spite of the rival claims of earlier works like Nocturnes and La Mer and the later Jeux, not to mention his Images and Préludes for piano, the Images for orchestra is surely the greatest achievement of Debussy’s impressionism (a term he hated, incidentally). It took him seven years to do it – beginning with Ibéria in 1905 and ending with Gigues in 1912 – but what he finally produced, in a series of poetic tributes to the three countries that meant most to him, was a work unsurpassed in its breadth and variety by any composer of his time.

Gigues

Gigues is Debussy’s tribute to England. The first clue is in the opening bars on the entry of a solo flute with a distant echo of a phrase from “The Keel Row”– a song which Debussy rightly identified with England in spite of its alleged Scottish associations. Before he can enlarge on it, however, and present the tune in something more like its familiar jig-like rhythm and in the brisk tempo that is proper to it, he introduces another melody, this one coloured by the plaintive tones of the oboe d’amore. A close relation of the “Hankin Booby” tune that Britten uses in his suite on English folk songs A Time There Was, the oboe d’amore theme is a reminder of the original title of the piece, Gigues tristes (or Sad Jigs). The sadness derives, in fact, from a poem by Paul Verlaine, Streets, which is set in Soho and contrasts the private thoughts of the poet with the jig that is being danced in the street beside him.

The great inspiration of Debussy’s interpretation of the situation is that, in spite of its many appearances in a whole variety of rhythmic and melodic variants, “The Keel Row” never actually asserts itself directly enough or for long enough to take hold of the piece and run away with it. The main obstacle is the oboe d’amore, which is too preoccupied by its own reflections on the “Hankin Booby” tune and a more romantic melody it introduces in the middle section to get carried away by the activity round it.

Ibéria

“I hear the sounds of the roads of Catalonia and at the same time the street music of Granada,” said Debussy of the first movement of Ibéria – which was uncommonly perceptive of him since, apart from attending a bull fight just across the border at San Sebastian, he had never been to Spain. Perhaps he felt, like Bizet, that actually knowing Spain would only “get in the way.” As well as being part of a long tradition (next in line after Ravel) of French composers fascinated by the music of Spain, which he studied eagerly, he had a sense of atmosphere so authentic in both perception and communication that Manuel de Falla was moved to describe it “as nothing less than miraculous.”

Ibéria is more than just a Spanish rhapsody, however. Linked by an intricate network of thematic cross-references, its three movements are as finely wrought in construction as they are abundant in picturesque detail. Debussy begins by gathering some of the main themes together in a preliminary survey of “the streets and roads” of Andalusia. While there is no actual folk material in Par les rues et par les chemins, the setting is unmistakable from the opening bars onwards in the rhythms rattled by castanets or plucked by strings and in the cheerful sevillana dance tune introduced by clarinets. While the observations might seem accidental, every tiny motif is carefully chosen for both its immediate effect and its long-term value. And while the route might seem haphazard, it actually follows a ternary course by way of a central slower section coloured at first by delicate string harmonics, characterised by a soulful melody for oboe and solo viola in unison and interrupted by the entry of a brass band with    vigorous horns, brilliant trumpets and grumbling trombones and tuba. Some of the material from the middle section is worked into the reprise of the opening section when the initial tempo is resumed.

One of the principal attractions of southern Spain for visitors from France was the comparatively liberated sexuality of the night life. In Les parfums de la nuit Debussy could indeed, as the title suggests, be luxuriating in the heady floral scents of the night, but there are surely more senses than one involved in this extraordinarily voluptuous music. The seductive rhythms derive largely from that of the habanera, which makes its first clear entry in a rich texture of lower strings after an introduction which is not only fragrant with celesta arabesques, violin glissandos and chromatic sighs on woodwind but also reverberant with allusions to material from the previous movement. The expressive line poised by the oboe on the habanera rhythm in the strings is an echo of the soulful melody introduced by the same instrument in Par les rues et par les chemins, which is also the source of the melancholy horn tune heard a little later. Much of this seems to happen somewhere in the distance. But with the entry of a short but passionate exclamation high on first violins the action gets nearer and more heated until, after a recall of the sevillana, it moves away again.

“You can’t imagine how naturally the transition works between Parfums de la nuit and Le matin d’un jour de fête,” said Debussy after hearing a successful rehearsal of Ibéria. “It sounds as though it’s improvised.” As a flute and solo violin linger over the night-time scents, day-time life stirs in quietly throbbing march rhythms on the lower strings. Morning bells ring out and activity increases with lively echoes of sounds from the day and the night before on trumpet and on a raucous combination of oboe and piccolos; holiday celebrations are clearly about to begin. Debussy is too subtle a composer, however, to indulge himself in a sustained high-profile march. There are two short march-time passages, both of them plucked by strings as though on a giant guitar and accompanied by military drum. But two other fiesta episodes come between them: one mingles shrill street-wise clarinets with more expressive woodwind and trumpets; the other features a fiddler whose somewhat laboured dance music accelerates into the second march passage and then returns to stimulate a recall of the brass-band music on woodwind and to precipitate the joyous coda.

Rondes de printemps

Although the motto at the top of the score – “Welcome to May and its woodland banner” – derives from an Italian May-day song, the springtime rounds are clearly set in France. There is an early hint of that when flutes and oboe make gentle allusions to Debussy’s favourite nursery lullaby “Do, do, l’enfant, do” (Sleep, sleep, baby, sleep) before the day definitively dawns. The confirmation is in the next section where, against a background of triplet rhythms set up by woodwind, the oboe speculates on another favourite folk song “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (We’ll to the woods no more), which proves in the long term to be an inexhaustible source of thematic interest. There is another main theme, cheerfully introduced by violins and thoughtfully echoed by solo flute before it takes flight in a spontaneously extended development where the dancers’ feet scarcely touch the ground. But from the moment “Nous n’irons plus au bois” reappears, again on a solo oboe, it pervades the texture at every level, in all kinds of rhythmic transformations and in a variety of contrapuntal combinations both with itself and the other main themes. The ending, though conclusive enough, is as “immaterial” as Debussy considered the rest of the piece to be.