Images - Série 2 (1907)

Cloches à travers les feuilles

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut

Poissons d’or

Having decided not to publish the Images he wrote for Yvonne Lerolle in 1894 - and having discovered a whole new vocabulary for translating scenic impressions into piano music in Estampes in the meantime - Debussy retrieved the title to apply it to his next ventures into the same precariously indefinable area.

The kind of scene Debussy had in mind in the two sets of piano Images (completed in 1905 and 1907 respectively) was not one that a painter could set down canvas but one with sounds or at least movements associated with it. That is why Debussy 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, after all, is no longer there. 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.