Two Preludes for piano

Canope

Les tierces alternées

All twenty-four of Debussy’s Preludes, published in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1913 respectively, are essentially piano music, music conceived for what the composer called that “box of hammers and strings.” One of them, however, Les tierces alternées, is even more essentially piano music than the others. With that single exception, they are impressions - of scenes, sites, literary and theatrical characters, events and objects with poetic associations - which are communicated through the medium of the piano but which, even though the colouring and the articulation are bound to be different, are not unimaginable in orchestral terms.

Canope, which immediately precedes Les tierces alternées in Book 2, is a characteristic example. It is Debussy’s ode to an Egyptian funerary urn. He owned two of these objects himself - complete, no doubt, with their much-prized head-shaped covers - and it might well have been in contemplating them and their hieratic associations that he found the inspiration for the piece. Scarcely rising above piano, it is a remote evocation of ancient ritual, beginning perhaps with a procession (distantly reminiscent of the Promenade from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition) and including chanted invocations, an exotically inflected lament on flute or reed pipe (calling to mind Debussy’s own Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune) and echoes of ceremonial percussion sounds.

Les tierces alternées, which is about nothing but the application of the fingers to the piano keyboard, is a very different matter. It is made up almost exclusively of thirds, just two notes at a time, alternating between the right and left hands and represents a severe challenge to anyone who sets out to transcribe it for orchestra. Should the orchestral texture be equally sparse, not just in the comparatively hesitant introduction but throughout the impulsive toccata that is the larger part of the piece? And should the colouring be as restricted as in the piano original, where the exchange of semiquavers varies only modestly in dynamics, pitch levels and articulation? If anyone has the answers it is a composer with the sensitivity to sound and the orchestral technique of Colin Matthews.