Seven Preludes

Bruyères

Feux d’artifice

La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune

Les Collines d’Anacapri

La fille aux cheveux de lin

La cathédrale engloutie

Minstrels

When Debussy published his 24 piano Preludes – 12 of them in a first Book in 1910 and 12 more in a second Book three years later ­ – he was following a tradition initiated by J.S. Bach, who twice compiled sets of preludes and fugues in all of the 24 major and minor keys. Among those who followed him before Debussy’s intervention, all of them allocating a prelude to each of the 24 key, were Chopin, Busoni, and Scriabin. Debussy, however, had no interest in covering the whole range of keys. While he chose to complete the traditional total of 24, his aim was to persuade the piano to express visual images, poetic thoughts, literary, theatrical and real-life caricatures.

Bruyères (Heather) from Book 2 evokes with its pentatonic folk harmonies a Celtic or perhaps even Breton setting echoing with reed-pipe melody and elaborate bird song. The title of Feux d’artifice, the last Prelude in Book 2, is no doubt intended to imply “fireworks” of the virtuoso kind as well as those which are customarily displayed in France on 14 July – to the accompaniment, Debussy discreetly indicates near the end, of the Marseillaise. While it reverts to Lisztian keyboard devices here and there, it is also a daringly adventurous piece, directly prophetic of Bartok’s studies in “night music” and of much in the piano writing of Olivier Messiaen. The central Prelude of Book II, La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, was the last to be written. Inspired by a misreading of a report in a newspaper – which, in detailing the arrangements for the coronation of George V as Emperor of India, referred to a “terrace for audiences in the moonlight” and not “of the moonlight” – it seems to be a meditation on the intriguingly fanciful idea of on an audience gathered to contemplate the moon. Certainly, it is based on a phrase from the nursery song Au clair de la lune which is introduced in the opening bar and a variant of which becomes the theme of the translucent waltz which occupies the middle section.

Italy being unfamiliar territory for Debussy in musical terms, he approaches Les collines d’Anacapri (The hills of Anacapri) in Book 1 by way of a quiet accumulation of pedal-sustained pentatonic intervals, echoing distant church bells perhaps. Against this reassuringly familiar harmonic background he can now indulge himself, if cautiously at first, in his Neapolitan tunes – a tarantella in the higher registers, a popular song in the bass, and a languorous dance apparently related to the habanera. Without forgetting his pentatonic bells, he finally recalls the tarantella with the exuberance it was too discreet to show on its first apearance. The most popular of all the Preludes, La Fille aux cheveux de lin from Book 1, which visits much the same Celtic territory as Bruyères, is more a song without words – a setting, so to speak, of Leconte de Lisle’s poem of the same name – than an impressionistic piano piece.

Another famous item from Book 1, La cathédrale engloutie is another Breton inspiration. It is based on legends surrounding the sunken city of Ys off the Brittany coast and its cathedral which is said to emerge from sea at the lowest of low tides. It finds its ecclesiastical atmosphere initially in the parallel fourths and fifths of 12th-century organum, its structure in the gradual materialisation of the bell tower, its climax in the massively sonorous triads of an archaic chorale, its ending in shrouded echoes of earlier material. The inspiration of Minstrels, the last Prelude of Book 1, is nearer to home – specifically the streets of Eastbourne where, on holiday in 1905, Debussy encountered a troupe of blacked-up American minstrels. The development of the piece, incorporating not only the minstrels’ banjo and drum but several other allusions to the jazz-inflected music-hall idiom is stylistically as far from the city of Ys as a musician of the day could get.