Pour le piano

Prélude: Assez animé et très rythmé

Sarabande: Avec une élégance grave et lente

Toccata: Vif

When Ricardo Viñes gave the first performance of Pour le piano in Paris in January 1902 the audience at the Société Nationale had surely heard nothing like it before. Debussy himself was not yet known for his piano music and no other French composer had so deliberately turned away from what was fashionable at the time – as represented by Fauré, say, or the followers of César Franck – to rethink his keyboard writing in terms of the harpsichord music of Couperin and his contemporaries.

The new style is evident from the beginning of the Prélude in the detached articulation of the main theme in the opening bars – a characteristic developed later in the piece into a dramatically percussive variant of the same theme. Harpsichord figuration is allied too to such pre-impressionist features as the whole-tone harmonies in the middle section and, most poetically, with the modal intervals in the running lines of the cadenza at the end. The Sarabande, which was first published in a slightly different version in 1896 and which belongs here by virtue of its allusions to a baroque dance form, is a tribute not so much to Couperin as to Erik Satie, whose Sarabandes it resembles both technically in its chains of sevenths and ninths and expressively in the liturgical gravity of its progress. The Toccata, which sustains a perpetual motion of semiquavers throughout, seems to be inspired directly by the clavécinistes in the brilliant clarity of its figuration, although there is also room for a more romantically inclined middle section which is briefly but climactically recalled just before the end.           

Prélude: assez animé et très rythmé

Sarabande: avec une élégance grave et lente

Toccata: vif

When Ricardo Viñes gave the first performance of Pour le piano in Paris in January 1902 the audience of the Société Nationale had surely heard nothing like it before. Debussy himself was not yet known for his piano music and no other French composer had so deliberately turned away from what was fashionable at the time – as represented by Fauré, say, or the followers of César Franck – to rethink his keyboard writing in terms of the harpsichord music of Couperin and his contemporaries. The neo-baroque element in Pour le piano is nowhere near as thorough as it was to be in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin fifteen years later but it is that which, in the outer movements at least, gives the music much of its distinctive freshness.

The new style is evident from the beginning of the Prélude in the detached articulation of the main theme in the opening bars – a characteristic developed later in the piece into a dramatically percussive variant of the same theme, anticipating something of the technique of Pour les accords, the last of the Etudes of 1915. Harpsichord figuration is allied too to such pre-impressionist features as the whole-tone harmonies in the middle section and, most poetically, with the modal intervals in the running lines of the cadenza at the end. The Sarabande, which was first published in a slightly different version in 1896 and which belongs here by virtue of its allusions to a baroque dance form, is a tribute not so much to Couperin as to Erik Satie, whose Sarabandes it resembles both technically in its chains of sevenths and ninths and expressively in the liturgical gravity of its progress. The peculiar reminders of Rachmaninov, arising from a chromatic treatment of the quartal harmonies in the middle of the piece, are entirely coincidental.    The Toccata, which sustains a perpetual motion of semiquavers throughout, seems to be inspired directly by the clavécinistes in the brilliant clarity of its figuration, although there is room for a more romantically inclined middle section which is briefly but climactically recalled just before the end.