Rêverie

“You are wrong to publish my Rêverie,” said Debussy to Fromont in 1905. “It’s something quite unimportant that I wrote very quickly… In two words: it’s bad!” Clearly, as the composer of such recent works as Estampes, L’isle joyeuse and the first set of Images, he had no wish to be associated with a piece written fifteen or more years before he had developed his distinctive piano style. But Fromont, who was one of the two publishers to whom Debussy had sold Rêverie in his indigent and less scrupulous youth, had every right. Besides, although it sounds more like Fauré than Debussy in places, it is not such a bad piece. It is most sensitively written for the piano, tenderly poetic in both its melodic line and its harmonies and, as it evokes a memory of the middle section just before the end, modestly imaginative in construction.