Images oubliées

Lent (mélancolique et doux)

Sarabande

Très vite

The three early piano pieces first published in 1977 as Images oubliées - to distinguish them from the familiar orchestral and piano Images - were never completely “forgotten.” Debussy had dedicated them in the winter of 1894 to Yvonne Lerolle, the then eighteen-year-old daughter of the painter Henri Lerolle, and for a while he intended to publish them as Images. In 1901, however, he included a revised version of the Sarabande in his suite Pour le piano and two years later plundered the material of the Très vite third movement for Jardins sous la pluie in Estampes.

So when these pre-Images were eventually published only the first movement was completely unknown. In a way it is the most interesting. Known for the “unreal” quality of her beauty, which is celebrated in paintings by both Renoir and Denis, Yvonne Lerolle was clearly also a source of inspiration to Debussy, who saw in her something of the heroine of the opera he was working on at the time. This “melancholy and gentle” opening movement, with its several poetic parallels to Pelléas et Mélisande, seems to confirm as much.

The Sarabande, which differs only in details from the Sarabande of Pour le piano, reminded Debussy in its “slow and serious elegance” of some old painting in the Louvre (he was to introduce a similar archaic element, Hommage à Rameau, in the first set of Images in 1905). The Très vite third movement he described in Yvonne’s manuscript as “some aspects of ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’ because the weather is terrible.” Inspired by a rainy garden scene, it is a more boisterous and much less subtle treatment of that nursery song (‘We’ll to the woods no more’) than the equivalent toccata movement, Jardins sous la pluie, in Estampes.