Pour les octaves (from Etudes, Book I)

Debussy once admitted to having heard “only two fine pianists - my old piano teacher Antoinette-Flore Mauté…and Liszt, whom I heard in Rome.” It was in 1884 that he heard Liszt play, and the memory of that experience influenced his own music for a long time afterwards. It is to be found in a comparatively early work like L’Isle joyeuse or in a late one like Feux d’Artifices at the end of the second book of Préludes. But the pianist who had the greatest influence on Debussy, though he never heard him play, was Chopin, Madame Mauté’s teacher. Without Chopin’s examples there would have been no Debussy Préludes or Etudes, which were clearly written on the assumption that Chopin’s were imprinted on the general musical consciousness.

Debussy’s two books of Etudes were both published in 1915, two years after the second book of Préludes, and were dedicated to Chopin. Like Chopin’s “they conceal,” as Debussy himself put it, “the severe technical aspect beneath flowers of harmony.” The study in arpèges composés (arpeggios covering more than one octave) are concealed, if not by flowers, by Lisztian liquid rustlings in the outer section and are incorporated in the another delightful music-hall parody in the middle. As Debussy said, “a touch of charm has never spoiled anything - Chopin proved that,” and there is more than a touch of charm in the study in degrés chromatiques (chromatic intervals) with its intriguing conflict between the whirring chromatics on the one hand and the simple diatonic melody on the other. As for octaves, although they were indispensable to Liszt, they are not a prominent item in Debussy’s repertoire (or Ravel’s either) - which could explain why, when he made a special study of the technique, it proved to be a discovery as surprising and as joyous as the scherzo-waltz which makes such resourceful use of it.