L’Acceuil des Muses: In Memoriam Debussy (1920)

Albert Roussel (1869–1937)

L’Acceuil des Muses: In Memoriam Debussy (1920)

Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy, a special supplement of the Revue Musicale, was one of the most successful publications of its kind. It was a little late perhaps – it was issued more than two years after Debussy’s death – but, adorned with a lithograph by Raoul Dufy, it offered specially composed contributions from Dukas, Roussel, Malipiero, Eugene Gossens, Bartók, Florent Schmitt, Stravinsky, Ravel, Falla and Satie. The Roussel piece, L’Acceuil des Muses (The Welcome of the Muses), is particularly fascinating for its painfully dissonant harmonies as it proceeds, by way of repetitions of key phrases and rhythms, through a lugubrious procession towards a luminous ending. The right hand rises high up the keyboard towards, presumably, Parnassus. – and an ambiguous ending where a tritone is sustained over F major harmonies,.

The contribution by Paul Dukas is a more personal tribute, addressed to the composer of Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune. That much is clear not only from the title La plainte, au loin, du faune… (The Lament, at a distance, of the Faun…) but also from the melodic line in the right hand. Often accompanied by a tolling G, it is an at first distant but increasingly passionate improvisation on the flute soliloquy at the beginning of Debussy’s famous orchestral work. The clearest allusion is held in reserve for the closing bars where a literal quotation is heard over a tolling A flat, which note persists with an unsettling effect on the G major harmonies.