Suite bergamasque [1890]

Looking at the movement headings of Suite bergamasque one might reasonably assume that there is a strong neo-classical element in the work. Obviously, Clair de lune is different, but all the other titles have eighteenth-century associations of one kind or another. In fact, it is only as neo-classical as Verlaine’s 1869 collection of poetry, Fêtes galantes, inspired by the paintings of Watteau, is neo-classical. The key to the Suite bergamasque is not in the Prélude, the Menuet or the Passepied but in Clair de lune which takes its title from the first of the Fêtes galantes. Verlaine’s Clair de lune begins as follows:

Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Your soul is a choice landscape

Charmingly crossed by maskers and bergomaskers

Playing the lute and dancing and almost

Sad under their fantastic disguises.

Although it was published, much againt the composer’s will, in 1905, the Suite bergamasque was actually written in about 1890 when Debussy was deeply involved with Verlaine: he had already made song settings of ten of his poems and was just about to complete a set of Fêtes galantes of his own. So the the first movement is conceived in a spirit quite different from that of the neo-classical Prélude of the suite Pour le piano that he was to write in 1901. Perhaps this Prélude could be heard, at least in the first part of its ternary construction, as an evocation of the sound of the masked lutenists so poetically observed by Verlaine in the Watteau paintings. Instead of a bergomask Debussy offers a Menuet which is not so much a classical pastiche as a stylish fantasy, beginning    with another simulation of plucked strings on the introduction of the playful main theme.

If Clair de lune seems rather more sophisticated than the two preceding movements it could be because it was thoroughly revised before its publication in 1905. Certainly, it is one of the most inspired of Debussy’s piano pieces up to that point, so subtly elusive in its rhythmic and harmonic definition at the beginning that there is scarcely any movement in it. Even where clouds seems to cross the scene in the middle section the piano sonorities retain their radiant lucidity and the harmonies their “quasi triste” demeanour. As for the last piece, it is actually in the wrong metre to be the Passepied it claims to be but whatever it is, pavane or passamezzo, it moves in the same charming but unreal world as its Watteauesque companions.