Images for piano

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.

Interestingly, however, although he was very pleased with them at the time and although Reflets dans l’eau is certainly very different from anything in the Yvonne Lerolle’s Images, the Hommage à Rameau is not entirely unlike her Sarabande and the new Mouvement is a kind of toccata equivalent to the Très vite at the end of her set. It was only in 1907 in the second book of Images that Debussy finally achieved what he had envisioned thirteen years earlier.

The orchestral Images - Gigues, the three-movements of Ibéria, and Rondes de printemps - were written between 1906, when he changed his mind about scoring them for two pianos, and 1912.

Book 1 [1905]

Reflets dans l’eau: andantino molto

Hommage à Rameau: lent et grave

Mouvement: animé

Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water) is different from the other movements in the first book of Images in that, like all three pieces in the second book, it is inspired by a visual impression. Even without the title, any of Debussy’s contemporaries familiar with his songs and Ravel’s piano music up to that time, would have recognised its watery setting in the rippling right-hand arpeggios in the opening bars. Given the title, the first reflection is surely the three-note theme held in the left hand just under the surface. A change in the wind or in the light, signalled by a cadenza rising on a chain of minor thirds, reveals a different reflection, a quietly expressive melody in dotted rhythms in the left hand. The opening image is restored to be displaced this time by a rising whole-tone scale and an increasingly vivid view of the second reflection in a variety of different shapes. A coda gently reviews both themes and secures an ending even more tranquil than the beginning.

Debussy had incorporated Yvonne Lerolle’s Sarabande in his suite Pour le piano in 1901. Inspired this time by his admiration for Rameau, he drew on the associations of the baroque sarabande once again for a central slow movement. In spite of its unadorned beginning in the Dorian mode, however, it is far from being a pastiche: the poised grace of its outer sections are most effectively offset by the harmonic complications, rhythmic displacements and melodic inversions of the middle section.

Mouvement, its title clearly implies, is not a visual impression either. Even so, it is related by its keyboard figuration not only to the Toccata of Pour le piano but also to Jardins sous la pluie in Estampes. By virtue of the mechanical drive of its outer sections, anticipating Prokofiev at one heavily syncopated point, and its spontaneously inspired middle section - not to mention its evaporation at the end - it surpasses both of them.

Book 2 (1907)

Cloches à travers les feuilles: lent

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: lent

Poissons d’or: animé

The kind of scene Debussy had in mind in the second set of piano Images, as in Reflets dans l’eau in the first set, was not one that a painter could set down 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.