Two Images for orchestra

Gigues

Rondes de printemps

Debussy’s Images for orchestra are his mature tributes to the three countries that meant most to him - England, Spain and France in the order they are represented in the score but probably not in order of preference and certainly not in the order in which they were composed. The first part to be written, the three central movements grouped together under the heading Ibéria, was inspired by a country he knew scarcely at all as a visitor but which was an unfailing source of fascination to him as a composer. Of the two outer movements - those which are to be performed on this occasion - Rondes de printemps was written a year later in 1909 and Gigues was completed three years after that. Debussy hated the term “impressionism” - which he felt was used only by “imbeciles” - and preferred to call his Images “realities” but, whatever they are, they add up to an unsurpassed masterpiece of their kind.

Gigues

The first movement is Debussy’s tribute to England, the home of Turner, Dickens, Arthur Rackham and so much else he admired about British culture. The earliest perceptible clue is in the opening bars on the entry of a solo flute with a distant echo of a phrase from “The Keel Row” - a song which Debussy evidently identified with England rather than Scotland but which, since he made little distinction between the two, he would have been happy to embrace whatever its origin. Before he can enlarge on the tune, however, and present it in something more like its familiar jig-like rhythm and in the brisk tempo that is proper to it, he introduces another melody, this one coloured by the plaintive tones of the oboe d’amore. A close relation of the “Hankin Booby” tune that Britten uses in his suite on English folk songs A Time There Was, the oboe d’amore theme is a reminder of the original title of the piece, Gigues tristes (or Sad Jigs). The sadness derives, in fact, from a poem by Paul Verlaine, Streets, which is set in Soho and contrasts the private thoughts of the poet with the jig that is being danced in the street beside him.

The great inspiration of Debussy’s interpretation of the situation is that, in spite of its many appearances in a whole variety of rhythmic and melodic variants, “The Keel Row” never actually asserts itself directly enough or for long enough to take hold of the piece and run away with it. The restraining factor is the poetic oboe d’amore, which is so preoccupied by its own reflections on the “Hankin Booby” tune, together with a more romantic melody it introduces in the middle section, that it is in no mood to get carried away by the activity round it.

Rondes de printemps

Although the motto at the top of the score - “Welcome to May and its woodland banner” - derives from an Italian May-day song, the springtime rounds are clearly set in France. There is an early hint of that when flutes and oboe make gentle allusions to Debussy’s favourite nursery lullaby “Do, do, l’enfant, do” (Sleep, sleep, baby, sleep) before the day definitively dawns. The confirmation is in the next section where, against a background of triplet rhythms set up by woodwind, the oboe speculates on another favourite folk song “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (We’ll to the woods no more), which proves in the long term to be an inexhaustible source of thematic interest. There is another main theme, cheerfully introduced by violins and thoughtfully echoed by solo flute before it takes flight in a spontaneously extended development where the dancers’ feet scarcely touch the ground. But from the moment “Nous n’irons plus au bois” reappears, again on a solo oboe, it pervades the texture at every level, in all kinds of rhythmic transformations and in a variety of contrapuntal combinations both with itself and the other main themes. The ending, though conclusive enough, is as “immaterial” as Debussy considered the rest of the piece to be.