Jardins sous la pluie - from Estampes (1903)

The eighteenth-century children’s round “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (We’ll to the woods no more) held a special fascination for Debussy - partly because he liked the tune but probably also because he felt it was essentially French. Certainly when he used it in Rondes de printemps, the last of his orchestral Images, it was to change the scene to France after evocations of England in Gigues and Spain in Ibéria. It has a similar function in Jardins sous la pluie which follows the exotic harmonies of Pagodes and the habanera rhythms of La Soirée dans Grenade in the three Estampes for piano.

Debussy first drew on “Nous n’irons plus au bois” in the third (Très vite) of the three piano pieces (subsequently published as Images oubliées) he dedicated in 1894 to Yvonne Lerolle, the famously beautiful daughter of the painter Henri Lerolle. That piece, which he desribed to its dedicatee as “some aspects of ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’ because the weather is terrible,” was also associated with rain. Jardin sous la pluie (Gardens in the rain), which was written for Estampes nine years later, is a rather more sophisticated version of Mlle Lerolle’s Très vite. Beginning as a brilliant, pattering toccata in the manner of the eighteenth-century harpsichord composers, it develops into a witty scherzo, a game of hide and seek between “Nous n’irons plus au bois” - which emerges most clearly when the rain eases off in the middle of the piece - and another children’s song “Do, do, l’enfant, do” (Sleep, baby, sleep).

Gerald Larner ©2005