Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien: fragments symphoniques

Prélude: lent doux et soutenu - expressive

Danse extatique: assez animé

La Passion: lent

Le Bon Pasteur: sombre et lent

The day before the first performance of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in May 1911, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris issued a statement forbidding Catholics to attend, on pain of excommunication. The problem was not Debussy’s score, which amounted to little more than an hour of incidental music in a spectacle lasting nearly five hours, but Gabriele d’Annunzio’s half-visionary, half-crazy scenario. Its sin was that it associated, or even identified, Christianity with the pagan cult of Adonis. What is more, its central figure, St Sebastian, was to be performed by a Jewish woman dancer renowned for the beauty of her legs. If that strategy disguised the homoerotic element in d’Annunzio’s celebration of Sebastian’s martyrdom, it in no way concealed the masochism very clearly at the heart of his inspiration.

The first-night audience, as one critic put it, “leaked away like water from a broken vase.” The director of the theatre complained that he had employed the best poet, the best composer, the best choreographer, the best designer and the best dancer - d’Annunzio, Debussy, Michel Fokine, Léon Bakst, and Ida Rubinstein - and had staged a failure even so. But Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien in its original form, a monumental exercise in mystic self-indulgence on d’Annunzio’s part, would have been a failure produced and performed even by angels. It has never been successfully revived.

Usefully, however, some of the best of Debussy’s music is contained in the suite of Fragments symphoniques arranged by his friend and disciple André Caplet, who had not only conducted the first performance at the Châtelet but had also assisted in the actual composition of the work. When Debussy committed himself to collaborating with d’Annunzio there was very little time to furnish a choral and orchestral score on the vast scale required. Normally a slow worker, he found himself in the situation of having to write in two months what would otherwise have taken two years - which is where Caplet came in, to help with the orchestration and perhaps even to originate a passage here and there. The shortage of time seems also to have influenced the nature of the music. In comparison with the fluid, finely detailed and texturally complex score of Jeux, Debussy’s next major work, that of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien is for the most part slow moving, plain in line and economical in texture.

It also has a distinct harmonic identity prophetic, in its use of church and other modes, of later developments in French music. The opening section of the Prélude, which introduces a melodic image of the Cross in a high-profile chorale on woodwind, could almost have been written by Olivier Messiaen in one of his religious contemplations. Sebastian is represented by a theme rising through six horns to clarinets and flute, each note assigned in turn to a different instrument and sustained to form a radiant bell-like chord. The rest of the movement develops those two ideas, first on melodious woodwind over murmuring harp figures derived from the Sebastian theme and then in the contemplative manner of the opening.

The first of Sebastian’s trials is the Danse extatique where he braves the hot coals prepared by the Roman Prefect for the torture of two young Christians, the twins Mark and Marcellian. After an introduction of increasing intensity, one of the few quick-moving episodes in the score, the twins can be heard - their voices transferred to a solo trumpet in Caplet’s version - singing confidently of their faith. As the tempo slows down for the entry of sweetly expressive harmonies high on first violins, Sebastian takes their place and dances in ecstasy on the coals: “My feet are naked in the dew!” he enthuses in the original version, “I have my feet in growing corn!” A seraphic chorale, re-scored by Caplet for woodwind and solo strings, salutes his achievement. The resumption of the quicker tempo leads to a recall of the Sebastian theme on six horns, a massive climax on the theme of the Cross, and a closing fanfare standing in Caplet’s version for the chorus’s proclamation, “All heaven resounds!”

In La Passion - to music of brooding darkness, ethereal string harmonies and percussive violence - Sebastian defiantly enacts before the Emperor the Passion of Christ. The controversial chorus, which laments the death of Adonis as though Christ and Adonis were one and the same, comes at the end of the piece, the voices transferred by Caplet to an ensemble of oboes or flutes and cor anglais. Although the Emperor is attracted to Sebastian, his handsome captain of the archers, nothing can save him now.

The martyrdom scene itself, where Sebastian is pierced by the arrows of his own archers, is not included in Caplet’s suite. Le Bon Pasteur, the last of his four extracts, begins with the prelude to that scene, a lonely cor anglais calling out over shivering tremolando strings. Its emotional climax is Sebastian’s ecstatic vision of Christ the good shepherd represented in a quietly expansive, sweetly harmonised version of the theme of the Cross on strings. Caplet’s ending is adapted from the final bars of the original score.