Nocturnes

Nuages: modéré

Fêtes: animé et très rythmé - modéré mais toujours très rythmé

Sirènes: modérément animé

There is no music closer to painting than Debussy’s Nocturnes. As the composer said, they have to do “not with the customary form of ‘nocturne’ but with everything that the word suggests of impressions and special effects of light.” In other words, they derive not so much from Chopin, one of Debussy’s favourite composers, as from Whistler, one of his favourite artists, who painted or etched several highly evocative “Nocturnes.”

This transformation of the normal condition of music to something akin to impressionist painting was neither quickly nor easily achieved. Debussy was thinking on lines related to the Nocturnes as early as 1892 when he was sketching Trois Scènes au crépuscule (Three Twilight Scenes), a title he borrowed from a series of poems by Henri de Régnier. Two years later he claimed to be well advanced in the composition of three Nocturnes which would explore restricted orchestral colours “like, for example, a painter’s study in grey” - though how he could have accommodated in this a promised solo violin part for Eugène Ysaÿe it is difficult to imagine. Anyway, neither of those early projects got very far. It was only in 1897 that he started on the definitive Nocturnes, which he completed two years later.

“It was very late at night on the pont de Solférino,” said Debussy of the origin of Nuages. “I was leaning on the balustrade of the bridge. The Seine without a ripple like a tarnished mirror. Clouds passed slowly in a moonless sky, many clouds, neither too heavy nor too light: just clouds.” The “slow and melancholy progress of the clouds” is reflected in the even crotchet rhythm and shifting harmonies introduced by clarinets and bassoons in the opening bars and sustained for much of the duration of the piece. The phrase heard at an early stage on cor anglais was suggested, it has been said, by the hooter of a passing boat. The luminous pentatonic melody that arises on flute and harp in the middle section, on the other hand, has no obvious pictorial function.

Fêtes is set in the Bois de Boulogne. “A torchlight procession in the woods… From afar, through the trees, I saw lights approaching and the crowd running towards the path where the parade would pass. Then the horsemen of the garde républicaine, resplendent, their weapons and their helmet lit up by the torches, and the bugles sounding their fanfare. Finally, everything getting dark again, receding into the distance…” It is another ternary construction with the jigging crowd making way for the brilliantly suggestive march in the middle section.

Although all three movements were ready in time for the scheduled first performance of Nocturnes in December 1900, because of problems with assembling an adequate chorus Sirènes was omitted on that occasion. The composer apparently did not object too violently, since the source of inspiration for Sirènes - the creatures endowed in Homeric legend with the power to lure sailors to their death through their song - is clearly quite different from the Parisian scenes depicted in the other two. “It is the sea,” said Debussy, “and its incalculable rhythm, then, amongst the waves silvered by the moon, the sound, the laughter and the passing of the mysterious song of the sirens.” Indeed, it is an anticipation of La Mer with the siren voices of sopranos and altos floating in on the orchestral texture at the beginning, assuming irresistibly seductive colours in the ecstatic middle section, and finally floating away again.

Gerald Larner©