Proses lyriques (1892-3)

De rêve

De grève

De fleurs

De soir

The reason why Debussy assigned himself the task of writing the texts for his next set of songs after Fêtes galantes was surely not because he seriously fancied himself as a poet. His prose poems did win approval from no less a writer than Henri de Régnier, on whose recommendation the words of De rêve and De grève were published in Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires in 1892, but he must have known that as a poet he could not begin to compare with Laforgue, Mallarmé or Verlaine - although it is precisely those comparisons that are invited in the Proses lyriques. A far more likely reason is that only he could provide the words for the kind of music he wanted to write at that time.

Charles Koechlin went so far as to suggest that the composer already had the music in his head and that he wrote the words to fit. While that is overstating the case, without some such hypothesis in mind it is difficult to understand why, for example, he introduces Knights of the Grail into De rêve. It is clear from the song itself that Parsifal, which had made such a profound impression on him at Bayreuth in 1889, was still echoing in his mind. The song is based on three themes, leitmotifs one might even call them - the luminous arpeggios associated with “les vieux arbres sous la lune d’or” in the opening bars, the wistful piano melody which accompanies the memory of the “celle qui vient de passer” and, in a particularly picturesque middle section, the Wagnerian harmonies, march rhythms and distant trumpet calls evoking the dead Knights of the Grail. The trumpets are still faintly sounding at the end.

De grève, which is perhaps the best of the poems and the most inspired of the songs, is clearly the work of a composer who was about to commit himself to Pelléas et Mélisande and after that to La Mer. It obviously cannot be claimed as a conscious preparation for either the opera or the symphonic sketches but it is certainly an indication of vital interests that were developing within him. From the whole-tone beginning we are in a Debussy seascape, the piano at “les petites vagues” anticipating the Jeux de vagues in La Mer while the voice sounds like that of Yniold in Pelléas et Mélisande. The last part of the song with its “flottantes églises” and its tolling bell in the piano part (the left hand crossing over the right) could almost be a study for La cathédrale engloutie.

De Fleurs, the words of which (not least “la serre de douleur”) provoked much amusement among Debussy’s contemporaries, is certainly not the strongest of the poems. It is, however, a fascinating insight into the mind of one suffocated by the art nouveau tendrils which proliferated so abundantly in the fin de siècle hot-house atmosphere of the time. Musically, it is no less interesting in that it integrates an apparent tribute to Duparc’s Phydilé - in the evenly spaced piano chords of the opening bars and the triplet rhythms entering with “les grands iris violets” - into a dramatically motivated construction that clutches passionately at the opening chords in quick tempo at its climax and recalls them in slow augmentation at the ennui-laden ending.

After that, the fresh outdoor sounds of De soir - with its bright Sunday bell sounds and its allusions to the popular song Tour prend garde in the songs of the little girls - is a welcome change in atmosphere. Night falls and the tempo slows down but the bells, which were audible even in the railway tunnel, still faintly chime and, although the vocal part is not without its melodiously sad thoughts, the textures remain as lucid as ever under the stars. The song, the whole work in fact, finally falls asleep on a poetically unresolved dissonance.