Debussy: Prlude lAprs-midi dun faune Debussy described this 1894 piece as a general impression of a poem by his friend,

, the French poet Mallarm, in which the faun (a mythological creature) stands beside a lake on a hot afternoon and sees nymphs across the water he is not sure whether they are really there or he is dreaming. The most notable feature of this piece is the orchestration. Debussy aims for transparent textures in which different timbres are never obscured. He focuses particularly on woodwind and makes much use of the harp. He achieves balance by presenting melodies in different orchestral colours, and in turn creating a variety of textures. The Prlude opens with a solo flute playing the principal theme of the work. Each time the theme recurs, it is heard in a different transformation sometimes a different pitch, sometimes extended or compacted, sometimes with different rhythms. The interval that the melody covers is a tritone ( augmented fourth) between C harp and G, which clouds any sense of diatonic tonality due to its chromaticism. The work seems unpredictable, but still has a unified structure. The opening three or so minutes consist of four presentations of the theme each time transformed. The first contains a bar of silence after the theme ends (00:34), the second uses a full-bodied orchestral sonority (00:59), and the third and fourth are rhythmic variations, ending with a cadence in B major (3:09) the only point of tonal punctuation until the end of the work. The thematic material is then developed in a fragmentary manner that was to become a feature of Debussys later works. The whole-tone scale is used at 3:29 (deriving from the tritone in the opening theme), followed by a theme on the oboe (3:50) which is also derived from the opening. Another new theme, on the woodwind at 5:10 (repeated by strings at 5:52) is underpinned by the bass notes D flat falling to G another tritone. Later in the work, the principal theme returns in augmentation with the tritone softened to a perfect fourth (7:11). This happens twice, interrupted each time by a scherzo-like passage. After the second of these, we return to the material of the opening again without the tritone, and a perfect cadence at 9:44 coloured by descending harp chromatics.