DEBUSSY

Images, I&II (tekst):

https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/2012/images-book-2
Images, link za snimak sa partiturama:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L47SRue0gt8

In 1911, when he was almost 50, with a raft of tradition-breaking compositions to

his credit and with many more yet to come, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) wrote
these critical words in a letter to composer Edgar Varèse (1883-1965), words that
reveal how much he understood about the nature of his creativity: “I love pictures
almost as much as music.” This quasi-confession, linking his aural art to the
graphic one, calls to mind a similar connection between music and a different
creative discipline made by Robert Schumann. In the mid-19th century, Schumann,
like Debussy a critic and journalist, expressed it this way: “The painter can learn
from a symphony by Beethoven, just as the musician can learn from a work by [the
great German writer] Goethe.”

The point here is that Debussy must have felt that a picture, at least an important
one, expressed that which lay beyond the obvious and communicated to the
observer that which is intangible and “inexpressible.” The French composer sought
to paint pictures with tones, to create visions as yet unrecorded in music, and to the
extent that his music evolved in a manner consonant with such a painter as Monet,
it was inevitable that he become associated with the painterly movement called
Impressionism. But Debussy rejected that term just as he recoiled at being dubbed
a Symbolist. In reality it was not so much that he disdained the terms
Impressionism and Symbolism as it was his intense desire not to be categorized.

Yet however much he rankled about being labeled anything, Debussy’s historical
fate has been to be identified as the inventor of Impressionism in music. One can
think of a lot worse things to be called. What is far more important than his
classification is his music itself. And whether or not one searches beneath the
sensory impressions of, say, Reflections in the Water (the first of the Images) to
find an underlying meaning to Debussy’s sonorous painting of the scene, beauty of
sound and impressiveness of pianistic means employed almost certainly are value
enough to the listening experience.

Debussy’s contemporaries clearly recognized the musician’s desire to be allied to

the visual arts. His close friend René Peter said, “To judge by his works, and by
their titles, he is a painter and that is what he wants to be. He calls his compositions
pictures, sketches, prints, arabesques, masques, studies in black and white. Plainly
it is his delight to paint in music.” The painter Maurice Denis expressed it this
way: “His music kindled strange resonances within us, awakened a need at the
deepest level for a lyricism that only he could satisfy. What the Symbolist
generation was searching for with such passion and anxiety – light, sonority, and
color, the expression of the soul, and the frisson of mystery – was realized by him
unerringly; almost, it seemed to us then, without effort. We perceived that here was
something new.”

As in virtually everything that is new, there is something old being acted upon. In
the case of Debussy’s piano music, there was the keyboard heritage of Chopin and
Liszt. Like an inspired chef, Debussy created a ravishing new pianistic menu by
reshaping, reordering, and adding distinctly new flavorings to the ingredients at
hand. In the area of harmony, he struck out in new-old paths, invoking ancient
times with the modal intervals of octaves, fourths, and fifths. He conjured the Far
East by exploiting the whole-tone and pentatonic (five-note) scales; and he broke
down the traditional system of key relationships. Further in his quest for originality
he abandoned classical forms almost completely and freed rhythm of confining
strictures. With all of these methods he created music that served as a sensuous
suggestion of poetry, nature, and a myriad variety of moods and atmospheres. And
he accomplished all of this with such originality that the 20th century’s great
innovator Igor Stravinsky said simply, “The musicians of my generation and
myself owe the most to Debussy.”

Debussy composed his first piano piece in 1880 – the somewhat innocuous Danse
bohémienne, but he hardly formed his characteristic style until many years later,
specifically in Claire de lune, the slow movement of his Suite bergamasque. Here
the Chopin nocturne is seen to be ingeniously updated by parallel harmonies,
which are often blurred as they overlap and/or are blended by the pedal (a crucial
tool in his building of tonal structures); by hazy, suggestive textures and vaguely
contoured phrase structures; and by sonority as an end in itself. In all, there is an
ambiance of idyllic paganism that marks much of Debussy’s music.

If Debussy didn’t want to be a painter, one could hardly tell that considering the
subject matter of so many of his works: reflections in the water, gardens in the rain,
the ocean, dancing snow, cavorting goldfish, and on and on. In 1905 he began
three sets of compositions depicting or conveying a variety of pictures—images,
Images, one set of three pieces for orchestra and two sets with three pieces each for
piano.

Images, Set I (1905)

Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water)

Water was one of the favorite subjects of Impressionist painters, and so it became
for Debussy, and also for Ravel, e.g., Jeux d’eau, Une barque sur l’ocean. It can
certainly be argued that Reflections in the Water is more than an aural picture of
physical water, although it is surely that. In the very quiet opening there is a sense
of mystery that is evoked, akin to the familiar sight of a pebble thrown into a pond,
with the ever-widening circles that result hypnotizing one into thoughts of the
secrets of infinity. Indeed, the pianist Marguerite Long, a contemporary of
Debussy, said that the composer referred to the opening motif as “a little circle in
water with a little pebble falling into it.” A perfect fifth sounding in the bass sets
the water in motion by way of series of rising and falling chords in the treble set
against a three-note motif, also in the treble but played by the left hand. Streams of
arpeggios emerge until the opening returns, this time with the solid chords broken
into arpeggios. The “circle in the water” increases in scope, reaching a big Lisztian
climax that is, however, quickly exhausted and followed by a pensive, introverted
ending. The mystery is unsolved.
Hommage à Rameau

Because Debussy had a deep admiration for French culture of the 18th century, it’s
understandable that his attention would fall upon one of the greatest of the
country’s composers of that period, Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Indicating
that the Hommage is “in the style of a Sarabande,” a slow, stately 18th-century
dance form, Debussy proceeds to use all the resources of the piano to invest the
music with a sense of antiquity at the opening, and eventually of bold, broad
Romanticism. It is the longest and most highly developed of the Images.

Mouvement

Both sets of Images require the services of a virtuoso if the pieces are to be fully
realized. Mouvement, however, is pure virtuosity, beginning with the ostinato
(repeated) triplet figures and proceeding through a nonstop etude-like development
that Debussy said “must revolve itself in an implacable rhythm. The difficulties are
not exclusively digital but concern also the lower extremity of the leg—the foot,
that is, which must operate the pedal with ultimate subtlety, so that Debussy’s
instruction for “whimsical but precise lightness” be achieved.

Images, Set II

Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells Through the Leaves)

Debussy first heard Javanese musicians at the Paris Universal Exposition and the
sounds of the gamelan they played stayed with him, surfacing in the allusions to
the instrument in the present piece. Writing about Java in 1913, he said, “There
was once, and there still is, despite the evils of civilization, a race of delightful
people who learnt music as easily as we learn to breathe. Their academy is the
eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, thousands of tiny sounds which
they listen to attentively without ever consulting arbitrary treatises.” The bells of
the title are initiated in the first two measures by way of a whole tone scale, from
which the entire piece is constructed. The simplicity of this opening belies a
predominant complexity of intertwining parts that requires the music be written on
three staves. A middle episode of pianistic brilliance contrasts strongly with the
exotic, otherworldly sonorities of the first and last sections.

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Sets over the Temple That
Was)

Debussy dedicated this piece to his good friend and biographer Louis Laloy, an
authority on oriental and ancient Greek music. The poetic wording of the title, the
fragmentary melodic structure, the pungent dissonances, and the almost floating
nature of the sonorities all confirm what Debussy referred to as the search by the
poets and painters of the Symbolist movement for “the inexpressible, which is the
ideal of all art.”

Poissons d’or (Goldfish)

This piece, along with Reflections on the Water, is probably the most frequently
performed of the Images sets. And no wonder, since it is both brilliant and
evocative. Obviously, goldfish are inextricably associated with water, but here,
unlike Reflections, the imagery is concrete. It is said that a painting of two gold-
colored fish on a small Japanese lacquer panel that Debussy owned was the
inspiration for this work. In order to suggest the darting movements of these tiny
water creatures, a pianist must be at once the master of grace and elegance as well
as of freedom of expression. Debussy’s images, whatever the subject, have a
fantasy that is as closely related to mental images as to the physical reality of
pianistic bravura.

- Note by Orrin Howard