Masques (1904)

Masques is one of the two longest of Debussy’s piano pieces. The other, written at much the same time in the summer of 1904 and in the same place, is L’Isle joyeuse which, in emotional terms at least, is its direct antithesis. For the composer and his newly acquired mistress Emma Bardac, who was to become his second wife four years later, their holiday on Jersey was, as L’Isle joyeuse suggests, ecstatic. There was, however, another side to the experience – his awareness of the distress suffered by his first wife. Although he could not have known that she would attempt to kill herself, as she was to do a few months later, Masques is a dance of death or, as he more delicately put it, “the tragic expression of existence.” It shares the same commedia dell’arte idiom and the same Watteauesque setting as the Fêtes galantes but this percussive toccata, its pressure scarcely relieved by a quieter middle section, is no gently strummed mandolin just as its melodic interjections are no intimately whispered confidences.