Three Preludes from Book II (1910-13)

Général Lavine - eccentric

“Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses

Feux d’artifice

For Debussy, as for Chopin, a prelude doesn’t have to precede anything and it can take any small-scale shape or form. Unlike Chopin’s Preludes, however, Debussy’s - published in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1913 respectively - are not so much emotional sensations as observations, acoustic impressions of scenes, sites, characters and literary associations.

Edward Lavine, for example, was an American vaudeville artist who billed himself as “The Man Who Has Soldiered All His Life” and who, to the delight of the composer, appeared at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs-Elysées in 1910 and 1912. In Général Lavine - eccentric, the music-hall counterpart of Minstrels in Book I, Debussy matches his military clowning with bugle calls, a cake-walk march accompanied by a theatre band with an ill-tuned banjo, and a discreet allusion to “The Camptown Races.”

Although the title, “Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses,” derives from a line in J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens - “The fairies are exquisite dancers” - it should not be linked exclusively to the Arthur Rackham illustration which accompanies it. A brilliantly mobile, freely flexible dance on feet that, except perhaps in a brief valse lente, never touch the ground, it is a close relation to La Danse de Puck in the Book I of the Preludes. The sound of Oberon’s horn can be heard in both pieces. The title of Feux d’artifice 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 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.