Debussy's Corner

[Kullervo]

Delius must be one of the most ardent imitators of Debussy's style (well he has his own style, but you know what I mean - he is a Debussy disciple if ever there was one)

That's interesting — as much has been said of Delius being an "impressionist" and a Debussian, his music has never struck me as sounding like Debussy, or even being similar (other than the two sharing a sort of un-Germanic lack of heaviness in their music). He inhabits a very particular soundworld in my opinion.

[karlhenning]

While yet a youth working on Diane au Bois:

There's no precedent to go on, and I find myself compelled to invent new forms.  I could always turn to Wagner, but I don't need to tell you how ridiculous it would be even to try.  The only thing of his I would want to copy is the running of one scene into another.  Also I want to keep the tone lyrical without it being absorbed by the orchestra.

[karlhenning]

The strength of Wagner's embrace is revealed as early as 1887 in Debussy's letter of thanks to Hébert, even before he had heard Tristan. (He possessed at this time a score for voice and piano, and later became renowned for rendering the whole of it himself at the keyboard, mostly from memory.) "The first act of Tristan and Isolde, decidedly the most beautiful thing that I know," he wrote.  "In its depth of emotion, which grasps and embraces you like a caress, it makes you suffer: what I mean is that you experience the same feelings as Tristan without doing violence to your own spirit or your own heart."  This act of self-identification, expressed so tellingly in contradictions, was costly, but wholly necessary.  No composer of this period came to know and understand the music of Wagner better than Claude Debussy, and nobody was to find a better means of escape.

Ah, blessed escape!  0:)

[karlhenning]

Claude Debussy's contemporaries were practically unanimous in their praise of his pianistic abilities.  Although only a few fairly low-quality recordings by the composer have remained, Debussy was undoubtedly one of the great pianists of his day, even though his rare public appearances were mostly restricted to performing his own compositions.  Small wonder, therefore, that piano pieces are to be found in all his creative periods.  Nor is it surprising that these pieces rank above his other works in style and in formal development.  The works Debussy wrote for the piano have a strong duality about them;  a firm bent for the archaic, interwoven with a wish to create something new – but the nature and the degree of this relationship changed with the stages of his life's work.

[Homo Aestheticus]

Here it is...

Thank you, James.

[karlhenning]

Originality comes at a price, and much of the initially hostile reaction to La mer was due to an inability to follow the composer down new paths.  Here was a descriptive work largely without the tried and tested formulae, those ocnventions of nineteenth-century descriptive music that Debussy largely spurned "in favor of his own highly individual vocabulary" (as Simon Trezise points out in his commentary Debussy: La Mer).  This is the answer to Lalo, and Debussy implies as much in his dignified but passionate letter of defense.  "If my idea of music isn't the same as yours, I am none the less an artist and nothing but an artist," he wrote to him.  "I love the sea and have listened to it with the passionate respect it deserves. . .  The heart of the matter is that you love and defend traditions which for me no longer exist, or at least exist only as representative of an epoch in which they were not all as fine and valuable as people make out;  the dust of the past is not always respectable."

Of course, this invincible argument of Debussy's (The heart of the matter is that you love and defend traditions which for me no longer exist, or at least exist only as representative of an epoch in which they were not all as fine and valuable as people make out) is equally applicable against the claim in our day that music being written now 'fails to conform' somehow to Debussyan norms.

[karlhenning]

One of the most significant of early comments on La mer was made, almost in passing, by Debussy's close friend of those years Louis Laloy, who in 1909 became the composer's first biographer (in French;  there had been an English biography the previous year by Louise Liebich).  In an essay from 1908 entitled "The New Manner of Claude Debussy" Laloy examined the clear presence of symphonic form in La mer, noting that "the music can, strictly speaking, be explained by itself.  This fact in no way diminishes the descriptive power of the music, in fact quite the contrary."  Descriptive music and pure music, he was saying, are not in opposition to each other, "in fact quite the contrary," for the pure actually enhances the descriptive, the 'purely musical' procedures (quasi-developmental, cyclical, structural) of the work embodying the descriptive purpose.

Let's say it again: Descriptive music and pure music are not in opposition to each other.

[Homo Aestheticus]

An anonymous commentator on  Pelleas et Melisande:

There is clearly a forward thinking phenomenon occurring here, a sort of hybridism as we hear essentially tonal music moving further and further away from the center of what was considered to be "normal." While Wagner (and others) essentially did away with the old style aria-ensemble format, Debussy brought even  more  "naturalism" to the text settings, and while not mimicking speech, brought a sort of approximation to it even more daring (and less acceptable to many people, still) than Wagner.  It almost depends on how the "light" falls on  Pelleas  and I think the work is sui generis for a great many reasons. It is almost a division point between the past and the future and, as such, I don't think we can quite pin it down to being the last born or the first.  Pelleas  shows itself to be tied - firmly, so - by both centuries which it ties together. What fascination and thought it brings to us, yes ?

[Joe_Campbell]

yes ?

No .

[Joe_Campbell]

Quote from: Zoltán Kocsis
Claude Debussy's contemporaries were practically unanimous in their praise of his pianistic abilities.  Although only a few fairly low-quality recordings by the composer have remained, Debussy was undoubtedly one of the great pianists of his day, even though his rare public appearances were mostly restricted to performing his own compositions.  Small wonder, therefore, that piano pieces are to be found in all his creative periods.  Nor is it surprising that these pieces rank above his other works in style and in formal development.  The works Debussy wrote for the piano have a strong duality about them;  a firm bent for the archaic, interwoven with a wish to create something new – but the nature and the degree of this relationship changed with the stages of his life's work.

Really? I remember reading that Debussy was, at best, a good amateur pianist who still struggled with some of his more difficult preludes.

Here's a self-critical composer:

Three piano preludes: I. Dancers of Delphi, II. The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, III. La Puerta del vino. In fact that's all my limited capabilities allow me to play! If necessary, I could always improvise on the Dutch national anthem?

This was in 1914, when he was ~52 years old. So perhaps he was no longer in his peak. I can't say for sure where I heard the original trivia from, though.

[karlhenning]

Really? I remember reading that Debussy was, at best, a good amateur pianist who still struggled with some of his more difficult preludes.

I don't think he concertized much as pianist;  I somehow carry away from the Roberts book an impression that most of his public music-making was as conductor (his own works, and largely through the arrangements of his publisher, Durand . . . good publicity, and all).  In this regard, good amateur pianist may be broadly fair.  Roberts does mention contemporaries speaking very highly of the poeticality (a vile phrase, beautified's a vile phrase) of his touch, and expert pedaling.

[Guido]

What do people think of the orchestrations of some of the preludes that Simon Rattle recorded on this CD:



They're rather beautiful to my ears. (though for obvious reasons lack the complexity and brilliance of his real orchestral works.)

[lukeottevanger]

I don't think he concertized much as pianist;  I somehow carry away from the Roberts book an impression that most of his public music-making was as conductor (his own works, and largely through the arrangements of his publisher, Durand . . . good publicity, and all).  In this regard, good amateur pianist may be broadly fair.  Roberts does mention contemporaries speaking very highly of the poeticality (a vile phrase, beautified's a vile phrase) of his touch, and expert pedaling.

You don't need to be content with having his playing described - you can hear it in some wonderful recordings on the Welte Mignon system - that's a kind of piano roll recording device, but it captures the pedalling too, and is obviously highly sensitive. (A huge advantage, of course, is that we can hear the performances in modern sound) This recording is extremely impressive:



The Welte recordings were made in 1913, and it's true that the pieces he's playing aren't his very hardest, although some, such as Le vent dans la plaine still require great delicacy and dexterity - there's a selection of Preludes from book 1, La plus que lente, La soiree dans Grenade, Children's Corner and D'un cahier d'esquisses.

Also on the disc are some earlier (1904) acoustic (that is, not reproducing-piano) recordings of Debussy accompanying the first Melisande, Mary Garden, in three of the Ariettes Oubliees (including Green, which is actually quite a hard piano part)....and...Eric will be disappointed - we get to hear the composer himself accompanying said Melisande in a short extract of the opera (Mes longs cheveux)

It's a disc all Debussy-lovers should hear. And there's another, comparable disc of Granados in the series which is equally unmissable.

[lukeottevanger]

....and...Eric will be disappointed - we get to hear the composer himself accompanying said Melisande in a short extract of the opera (Mes longs cheveux)

Eric will be disappointed, I meant to say, to hear how Debussy accompanies without the longeurs and unnecessary slow pace that the self-proclaimed Ardent Pelleastrean claims are necessary to the interpretation of the piece.

But actually I don't think Eric will care - he's always maintained his distinct indifference to the question of the type of performance that Debussy might have intended, just as he's always been only too happy to discard the vast majority of the rest of Debussy's output. It's always stuck me as odd that at one and the same time Eric implies two contradictory positions: 1) that Debussy wrote the most sublime music ever composed; and 2) that Debussy didn't know how this piece should be performed and, what's more, that most of the rest of his output isn't worth listening to.

Why, it's almost as if Eric is suggesting that the act of Debussy composing P+M was a mere monkeys-writing-Shakespeare fluke, and that really it is Eric himself, and especially his infamous nobody-can-love-a-piece-as-I-love-this-one Appreciation of the piece, which is the true artwork. 

[Ugh!]

The Welte recordings were made in 1913, and it's true that the pieces he's playing aren't his very hardest, although some, such as Le vent dans la plaine still require great delicacy and dexterity

Yes, I love this CD. I think that it is the seemingly easiest pieces by Debussy that are actually the hardest. I am sure you would agree

[lukeottevanger]

Almost! I think the hard pieces are hard. I also think the easy pieces are hard!

[Ugh!]

Tough composer   

[karlhenning]

You don't need to be content with having his playing described - you can hear it in some wonderful recordings on the Welte Mignon system - that's a kind of piano roll recording device, but it captures the pedalling too, and is obviously highly sensitive. (A huge advantage, of course, is that we can hear the performances in modern sound) This recording is extremely impressive: . . .

My musicianship thanks you;  my wallet does not 

[lukeottevanger]

Somehow I doubt that you'll regret it, nevertheless. 

[haydnguy]

I've read through this thread and don't really see any recommendations (recordings) for Debussy's piano music. Was wondering if anyone could steer me in the right direction on this. Thanks...