Noah Kayser-Hirsh

MUSIC 248: Final research paper

12/8/17

Debussy’s Nocturnes

There is no doubt that the orchestral tryptich, Nocturnes, is one of the

foundational works in Claude Debussy’s career. In conjunction with its importance, this

piece holds its fair share of mystery. The Nocturnes are characterized as “problematic.”1

Vincent d’Indy described them as having “no literary programme, no explanation of a

dramtic nature [that] gives a reasonable explanation for the range of keys and the

agreeable, but uncoordinated, themes in these three pieces.”2 In this paper I will be

exploring two different editions of Debussy’s third Nocturne, entitled “Sirenes.” The

collected works and published editions of the Nocturnes bear particular intrigue, because

the Nocturnes were written right near the time when Debussy ended one publishing

contract and started another. The volume of the collected works containing the Nocturnes

was edited by Denis Herlin3, and published in 1999 (I will refer to this as “the Herlin

edition”). The performing edition I will use for comparison was published by Jean Jobert

1
Robert Olredge, “Debussy the Man,” The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Ed. Trezise,
Simon, Cambridge Companions to Music. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.) 103.
2
Deirdre Donnellon, “Debussy as a musician and critic,” The Cambridge Companion to Debussy.
Trezise, Simon, ed. Cambridge Companions to Music. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.) 103.
3
Herlin is the Director of Research at the Institut de recherché sur le patrimoine musical en
France. He has published many critical editions by composers such as Rameau, Fauré, and
Debussy. He is a general editor of the Complete Works of Debussy. “Denis Herlin.” Gresham
College, Gresham College, www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/denis-herlin/.
in 1930.4 Because of the tumultuous publishing process of the Nocturnes, there has never

been a definitive idea of what the true music of the pieces is. Thus to understand how the

work fits into Debussy’s career it is important to understand its history of conception,

revision and publication.

Achille-Claude Debussy was born in 1862 to Manuel-Achille and Victorine

Debussy, owners of a china shop in St Germain-en-Laye. During the Franco-Prussian

war, Manuel, without employment, joined the Paris Commune as a captain and was

subsequently arrested and imprisoned. During this time Antoinette Mauté cared for

Debussy and trained him to be ready to enter the Paris Conservatoire. At the conservatory

he studied with Ernest Guiraud5, Emile Durand6, and Cesar Franck7, among others.

Debussy is often characterized as the one of the most original composers of his time, but

at the conservatory his teachers described him, despite his clear musical talent, as “a little

backward in the rudiments.” To earn money, Debussy accompanied composition classes

at the conservatory, and there he met the singer Marie Vasnier. He wrote many melodies

for Vasnier during his early compositional years, and her husband, a civil servant,

introduced him to many different French authors of the time. It is clear that text and

literature had a great influence on Debussy, especially early in his career. In 1889,

Debussy visited the Universal Exposition, where he discovered Javanese gamelan music.

The interlocking rhythms, unique textures and performance process of gamelan music

greatly influenced Debussy’s style of orchestration and more broadly his conception of

4
Claude Debussy, Nocturnes. 1899 (Paris: Jean Jobert, 1930)
5
Guiraud was a French composer most well-known for writing the recitative passages that
replaced the spoken lines in performances of Bizet’s Carmen.
6
Durand was well known for his compositions and also his writings on music. He has no known
relation to the publisher Jacques Durand.
7
Franck was most well known as a masterful organ player.
music in general. During this foundational period, Debussy studied the opera of the

Italians, Verdi and Donizetti among others, and the Germans, most notably Wagner. He

decided very early on that he did not want to write music, especially opera, in the

Wagnerian style. Around 1890 he started but never finished an opera titled Rodrigue et

Chimene based on text by Catullus Mendes. During the next decade Debussy wrote many

of his most widely-performed works, some of which are very clearly essential to the

development of his compositional style. In 1892 he published Prelude A L’Apres-Midi

D’un Faune, a semi-programattic piece for orchestra. In 1895 he finished the first version

of his opera Pelléas et Melisande, based on a play of the same name by Maurice

Maeterlinck. During this period in the 1890s, Debussy began to work on an orchestral

triptych, which he would later title Nocturnes.8 The history of the Nocturnes is unclear in

some aspects, and the piece was composed at a time when Debussy had interesting and

sometimes tumultuous relationships with the people that published his works. In the

Nocturnes Debussy played with many elements of orchestration and harmony that would

become trademarks of his style, which is why many believe that the Nocturnes are truly

formative works in Debussy’s career. Mark DeVoto9, in his review of Herlin’s edition of

the Nocturnes described them as Debussy’s “farthest reaching forward leap into the future

of music, and...his single most radical exploration of previously unknown realms of

tonality-a resplendent beginning to the new twentieth century that Debussy’s art did so

much to change.”10 Because of the importance that the Nocturnes hold in Debussy’s

8
Francois Lesure and Roy Howat, "Debussy, (Achille-)Claude," The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, eds. Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), Volume 7:
96-118.
9
DeVoto is a music historian who spent most of his career at Tufts University. His work includes
focuses on Alban Berg, as well as Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
http://emerald.tufts.edu/~mdevoto/Biography.htm
10
DeVoto, Mark. Notes 58, no. 1 (2001): 167-70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/900905.
career, it is especially important to understand their history and how Debussy went about

writing, publishing, and revising such an influential work.

The Nocturnes, though not performed until 1897, first started to take shape in 1892

when Debussy mentioned in letters to Prince Andre Poniatowski that he was working on

three Scenes au crepuscule (scenes at dusk). By 1894 the title had changed to Nocturnes,

but he conceived of the work still as three movements: one with just strings, one with just

winds, and one combining both. In this he attempted to explore the different orchestral

colors he could create. In a letter to violinist Eugene Ysaÿe Debussy wrote, “It’s an

experiment, in fact, in finding the different combinations possible inside a single color, as

a painter might make a study in grey, for example.”11 By 1896 however, the piece had a

different shape, as Debussy described it as three pieces for violin and orchestra written

for Ysaÿe to perform. And then again in 1897, he described it as a work of orchestral

music. In an 1898 letter to Georges Hartmann, Debussy wrote, “You’re going to hear, and

own, the Nocturnes, which together have given me more trouble than the five acts of

Pelléas. I hope it’ll be open-air music that will vibrate in the breeze of Freedom’s mighty

wing.”12 From 1897 to 1899 the Nocturnes developed into the version that is known

today, but Debussy was also going through a period of financial struggle. In a letter to

Pierre Louys he wrote “the three Nocturnes show the effects of my life: once full of hope,

then full of despair and then full of emptiness!”13 A good friend of Debussy’s, Georges

Hartmann, provided him with significant financial assistance during this period.

11
Nigel Simeone, “Debussy and expression., The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Trezise,
Simon, ed. Cambridge Companions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.)
103.
12
Simeone, “Debussy and Expression,” 104.
13
Letter from Claude Debussy to Pierre Louys, 27 March 1898, Correspondance 1884-1918,
131.
Hartmann was closely associated with the publisher Eugene Fromont and as a result

many of Debussy’s early works were published by Fromont.14 Fromont published the first

version of the Nocturnes sometime between May 1900 and November 1901, and the first

performance took place on December 9, 1900 by Camille Chevillard and the orchestra of

the Concerts Lamoreux. All three Nocturnes were not played together until October of the

following year. Though of course of note, the first publications and performances of the

Nocturnes were merely the beginning of the long journey of editing and publishing and

re-editing and re-publishing that this piece endured.

Georges Hartmann died in 1900, and his heirs expected that Debussy pay back the

money Hartmann had given him over the last six years. Hartmann’s heirs caught onto

Debussy’s growing prominence after the success of Pelléas and Melisande, so when

Debussy was unwilling and unable to pay back the money, Hartmann’s heirs published

several of Debussy’s older unpublished works, including the Suite bergamasque which

contains his most famous piece: Claire de Lune (Cite mark devoto). This marked the end

of Debussy’s contract with Fromont and in 1905, five years after Hartmann’s death

Debussy entered into an exclusive publishing contract with Jacques Durand. Durand still

holds the rights to Debussy’s music as the publishers of Debussy’s collected works. After

Fromont and Debussy cut ties, Debussy continued to polish and change the Nocturnes.

Because they were no longer working together, these edits never made it into the Fromont

edition of the Nocturnes, which was the most widely published version of the piece. In

1921, Jean Jobert purchased Fromont’s publishing company. (Footnote the jobert

company is still active today) Because of Debussy and Fromont’s severed ties, the

14
“Avant-propos,” Ouvre Complètes de Claude Debussy. Série V, Volume 3. Ed. Denis Herlin.
(Paris: Durand, 1986.)
Nocturnes seemingly existed in essentially two different versions: the published version

which was widely used for performance; and Debussy’s own version. Around 1930 Jobert

caught onto this, as the performances of the Nocturnes by French Orchestras contained

several things that were not in the Fromont score. Jobert wrote to Emma Debussy, the

composer’s second wife, asking for permission to publish a corrected edition that better

reflected Debussy’s most complete version of the Nocturnes. This is what Jobert

published in 1930, by closely consulting Debussy’s own copy of the score. The published

version included an inscription explaining the need for a revised edition, in which Jobert

wrote “A comparative study of the old version and the new editions will reveal profound

differences, principally in ‘Fêtes’ and ‘Sirènes,’ and will show the evolution of Debussy’s

art of orchestration, an art that reached its summit in the present work, which constitutes

one of the monuments of French symphonic music.”[3] Anyone playing this new edition,

which was the most widely used after its publication, would have seen this inscription.

The evocation of a national musical tradition and the discussion of the development of

Debussy’s music and orchestration shows that Jobert perhaps wanted this edition of the

Nocturnes to be widely used and thought of as the definitive, authoritative version of the

score.15 To an extent, Jobert succeeded, as the 1930 edition remains the most widely used

for performance today.

Of the three Nocturnes, “Nuages,” “Fetes,” and “Sirènes,” “Sirènes underwent the

most revision during Debussy’s lifetime. This process can be summarized by an account

given by Ernest Ansermet of a visit to Debussy in 1917. He said:

15
Ouvre Complètes de Claude Debussy. Série V, Volume 3. Ed. Denis Herlin. (Paris:
Durand, 1986.)
 “when it came to the Nocturnes he showed me a score covered in all sorts

of corrections, in ordinary pencil, blue pencil, red ink and green ink.

‘Which are the right ones?’ I asked. ‘I’m not actually sure’, he replied,

‘they are all possibilities. Take this score with you and use whatever you

like from it.”16

Between the time when Fromont published the first version in 1900 and Jobert published

the “nouvelle édition,” the piece was performed many times over most of Europe. There

were many conductors, most notably André Caplet and Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht17, who

owned scores and because the Nocturnes were essentially a working composition until

Debussy’s death, they had to update these scores as they learned of new changes.

Furthermore these conductors were all over Europe and North America, so each revision

had to travel great distances to make it into a performance, and thus the Nocturnes existed

in countless different versions. In 1989 an annotated copy of the score was discovered in

the library of Jean Robert-Ducasse. Some corrections made in Robert-Ducasse’s score are

reflected in the Jobert score, but not Debussy’s personal annotated copy.(Cite?) Though

some are trivial discrepancies, there are many significant differences and these can be

found in comparing the collected works edition to the Jobert edition. For example, in

measure 30 the flutes enter with a figure the violins just played under the sopranos

singing the melodic line. In the Jobert edition, the clarinet plays the same figure as the

flutes whereas in the collected works edition the English horn plays with the flutes.

Additionally, in the Jobert edition, the bassoons hold an open fifth under the figure, but in

16
Denis Herlin, “Sirens in the Labyrinth,” Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.) 57-58.
17
Both prominent French composers of the time, the former was a close friend and colleague of
Debussy’s, the latter would go on to write a biography of the composer.
the collected works edition they rest. In a recording of the LA Philharmonic in 1994

(under Esa-Pekka Salonen) the bassoons do not play, and the figure is played by the

English horn, not the clarinet. Many of the changes, like this one, that Debussy made

were to lighten harmonic and rhythmic textures. In his article “Sirens in the Labyrinth,”

Denis Herlin calculates that 53% of the changes found in Robert-Ducasse’s score in some

way “lightened” the music, either by adding rests to short the duration of some notes,

thinning harmonies by removing fifths and octave doublings, and sometimes simply just

eliminating an instrumental part altogether.18 Other changes are not lightening of textures,

but simply altering them completely. In measure eight Debussy wrote for the horns to be

played with “sourdines” (mutes). In measure twelve of the Herlin edition, the horns are

instructed to play sans sourdines. In Jobert’s edition, however, there is no such

instruction. Horns playing at piano in the middle of the range with mutes is a vastly

different sound than without. Some alterations are significant for other reasons. In the

Herlin edition in measure fifty-hour, the clarinets previously in A become clarinets in Bb,

indicated by the words “Changez en Sib.” In the Jobert edition however, the previous

three measures are seemingly written for Bb clarinet. In the Herlin in measure fifty the

clarinets play C flat and A flat. In the Jobert they play B flat and G flat. There is no

indication whatsoever in the Jobert part that the clarinets should switch from A clarinet to

Bb clarinet, even though after measure fifty four both editions contain the same notes.

Additionally, in measures sixty and sixty-four in the Jobert editions, the clarinets play the

thematic rhythmic figure, alternating between duples and triples twice. This figure has a

call and response with the violas over chords in the low strings and chorus. In the Herlin

edition, the rhythmic figure is given instead to the cellos, and the clarinets simply arrive
18
Herlin, “Sirens in the Labyrinth,” 62.
on an eighth note in each of those measures. Primarily, the Jobert score is simply

mistaken. Without the indication of a change from A clarinet to Bb clarinet, the

harmonies are entirely different than those of the Herlin edition. In nearly every

recording, the harmonies in the Herlin edition are the ones that sound, showing that this

was simply a mistake in the publishing of Jobert’s score. Additionally, the following

passage played from the Jobert score has a completely different character than the Herlin.

Clarinets alternating the theme with the violas is an entirely different texture than the

violas alternating with the cellos. Though not all the alterations are significant, it is clear

that Debussy was never satisfied with the particulars of how “Sirenes” sounded.

Debussy’s Nocturnes are one of the definitive pieces of his symbolist years.

Certainly the harmonic experimentation and the orchestral textures influenced all of the

works that came after. Because of the complex nature of the publication process, and the

constant revisions the Nocturnes underwent, the piece has an unparalleled nature among

Debussy’s works.
Works cited:
Briscoe, James R., Claude Debussy: A Guide to Research New York: Garland Publishing,
Inc., 1990.

The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Trezise, Simon, ed. Cambridge Companions to

Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Debussy, Claude. Nocturnes. 1899. Paris: Jean Jobert, 1930.

DeVoto, Mark. Notes 58, no. 1 (2001): 167-70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/900905.
Herlin, Denis. “Sirens in the Labyrinth,” Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Lesure, Francois and Howat, Roy. “Debussy, (Achille-)Claude," The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, eds. Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London:
Macmillan, 2001/ Volume 7: 96-118.
Letter from Claude Debussy to Pierre Louys, 27 March 1898, Correspondance 1884-
1918, 131.
Ouvre Complètes de Claude Debussy. Série V, Volume 3. Ed. Denis Herlin. Paris:
Durand, 1986.