DEBUSSY. Prélude à l après-midi d un faune Nocturnes Images pour orchestra Le martyre de Saint Sébastien. Pierre Monteux

Transcription

1 Eloq uence DEBUSSY Prélude à l après-midi d un faune Nocturnes Images pour orchestra Le martyre de Saint Sébastien Pierre Monteux

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3 CLAUDE DEBUSSY ( ) 1 Prélude à l après-midi d un faune 9 24 Nocturnes 2 I Nuages II Fêtes 6 03 Images pour orchestre 4 I Gigues 7 13 II Ibéria 5 1. Par les rues et par les chemins Les Parfums de la nuit Le Matin d un jour de fête III Rondes de printemps 8 01 Le martyre de Saint Sébastien: Fragments symphoniques 9 I Le Cour de lys II Danse extatique et final du 1er acte 7 22! III La passion 4 IV Le Bon Pasteur 6 07 London Symphony Orchestra Pierre Monteux Total timing: 80 03

4 For Debussy, three must have been a favourite number. La Mer, his orchestral depiction of the sea, is in three movements, and three separate works constitute his Images: Gigues, Ibéria and Rondes de printemps. Ibéria, the middle work, is itself in three sections. Although Debussy conducted all three works on the same orchestral program in 1913, Gigues and Ibéria received separate premieres in 1910, suggesting that the composer did not insist on the three works being performed as a triptych. Indeed, Ibéria has surpassed its companions in popularity, and is frequently recorded and performed on its own. Gigues originally titled Gigues tristes (Sad Jigs) is the first part of the triptych, but it was the last to be completed. As Debussy s original title suggests, this is not jolly highland music, nor even a look back at the gigues that Louis Couperin and Bach, among others, had introduced into their keyboard suites in earlier centuries. An air of veiled unhappiness hangs over the music, and when the oboe d amore introduces the jig theme a fragment from the Scots folk song The Keel Row it sounds distant, ironic and maybe even a little malign, despite the score s marking of doux et mélancolique. Gigues was written during a relatively fallow period for Debussy, who (unlike Puccini, for example) found it difficult to compose on demand, as it were. In an interview with the New York Times in 1910, he compared composition to vegetable farming, saying, I can t force myself If you put a lot of chemicals and goodness knows what in the earth you may be able to raise salad in the winter, but it is not the real, true salad And in the same way, music born under such conditions is not true music it is a hot-house product. If Debussy was unconvinced about the intrinsic gaiety of British folk music (and of the British Isles, which he visited several times), he showed no such ambivalence in Ibéria, a cheerful and colourful portrait of Spain a country he visited just once. This is the score in which Debussy, for all his differences, most resembles Maurice Ravel. Par les rues et par les chemins places the listener in the streets and byways of a Spanish town. Rather than writing picture-postcard music, however, Debussy uses scraps of Iberian rhythms here and characteristic melodic turns there to create a vivid but non-literal impression of Spain. Les parfums de la nuit serves as an interlude; the intermittent rattle of a tambourine and fragments of themes heard in the previous section remind us that the time has changed, but not the country. As the title suggests, this

5 is music whose sensuousness one can practically smell. The final section, which arrives without pause after a sly transition ( it sounds as though it is improvised, remarked the composer) evokes the morning of a festival day a cue for the use of orchestra bells. Other percussion instruments (castanets, tambourine, xylophone, etc.) add to the brilliant atmosphere, yet Debussy skilfully avoids Spanish clichés and writes music so authentic that even composer Manuel de Falla approved of it. From the Scotland of Gigues and the Spain of Ibéria, Debussy returns to his native France in Rondes de printemps (Spring Rounds). The title implies an element of dance. In the course of about seven minutes, the music seems to depict an earth awakening not without poignancy from its winter slumbers and at first slowly, and then more explosively, breaking forth in fruits and blossoms. The nationalistic element comes from the quotation of two French songs, the nursery lullaby Do, do, l enfant, do and Nous n irons plus au bois. Nocturnes ( ) is another tripartite orchestral work, although the third section ( Sirènes ) was sometimes omitted in earlier recordings as it is on Monteux s recording here because it calls for a wordless women s chorus. If we are to believe the overall title, these are night pieces. Nuages refers to clouds, but not necessarily, as fellow composer Paul Dukas correctly noted, in the meteorological sense: the music suggests quiet restlessness, and that which is unfixed and constantly shifting. Debussy referred to it as a grey agony, tinged gently with white. This cloud-piece, so ethereally devoid of fleshly substance, is succeeded by the vibrantly living and breathing Fêtes, which swirls with human activity, cheerful light, popular music and dancing. Perhaps the setting is Paris, because in the middle of the celebrations, a military band appears in the distance the Garde Républicaine, perhaps? and draws ever closer. At the climax, the military procession merges with the people s celebration, and then Debussy skilfully dims the lights on both of them, leaving listeners to wonder whether what they heard was real or imaginary. Comparing Nocturnes favourably to La Mer, French critic Pierre Lalo praised the subtle sensations of the night, wind and clouds passing through the sky in Nuages and the dazzling and delicate impression of dances, light, and distant uproar in Fêtes. The orchestral work in which Debussy arrived at his mature style was Prélude à l après-midi d un

6 faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Biographer Edward Lockspeiser, alluding both to the work s unprecedented form and content, wrote, something had snapped, and something also had disintegrated. Stéphane Mallarmé s Symbolist poem describes a woodland faun, who, awakening in a languorously erotic state of mind, is not sure whether he only has dreamed about a visit from the forest nymphs, or whether it has actually occurred. The music, full of fine painterly details, perfectly mirrors the still yet supercharged atmosphere of Mallarmé s hazy, sexual poem. At its 1894 premiere, there was fogeyish muttering from more conservative elements. This, however, was nothing compared to the scandal that erupted in 1912 when Vaslav Nijinsky turned it into a ballet and made its implicit auto-eroticism very explicit indeed. A bit of stage business involving the faun blissfully lowering himself groin-first onto a nymph s discarded veil might raise eyebrows even today. By the second performance, the police was present, in case a disturbance erupted in the auditorium. What Debussy thought of Nijinsky s masturbatory interpretation of the score s closing moments is not on record, but a few years later he gave an interview to a Roman journalist and decried the dissonance between the indistinct outlines of his music and the sharp edges of Nijinsky s choreography, taken as a whole. In his twenties, Debussy twice visited Bayreuth, the emotional centre of all things Wagnerian. Parsifal made a lasting impression on him, and also on his music. The ghost of Wagner s last music-drama haunts parts of La Damoiselle élue (1888), Pelléas et Mélisande (completed in ), and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911), a musical mystery play cum dance work. In contrast to the devout religiosity of Parsifal, however, Le Martyre seems almost to have been calculated to shock the Parisian bourgeoisie. It originated as a vehicle for Ida Rubinstein, the fiery and scandal-attracting dancer who had conquered Paris the season before with Serge Diaghilev s Ballets Russes. The symbolist poet Gabriele d Annunzio, wowed by her dancing, agreed to collaborate with her on a new production and suggested the story of Sebastian, an ancient Roman archer of epicene beauty a favourite of Caesar who rejects the emperor, converts to Christianity, and is therefore sentenced to impalement with arrows shot by his reluctant fellow archers. D Annunzio blended Christianity with pagan elements, conflating Adonis with Jesus Christ. The story s incipient homoeroticism, plus the bare-limbed Rubinstein dancing the role of male

7 saint, pushed Paris s Roman Catholic Archbishop over the edge: he threatened those who attended with excommunication. (If only the video camera had existed in 1911!) Debussy was d Annunzio s third choice of composers the first two are just names in the history books today and he wrote the score quickly, leaving some of the orchestration to his pupil André Caplet, who conducted the premiere. That event went on for nearly five hours, necessitating extensive cuts. Modern concert performances of Le Martyre are perforce cut even further, leaving Debussy s music, which requires, in addition to the orchestra, a chorus, vocal soloists, and a reciter. PHOTO: DECCA Four symphonic fragments for orchestra alone are performed more frequently. In the first, which serves as a prelude, two young Christian brothers serenely await their martyrdom at the Roman Court of Lilies. In the second, Sebastian, inspired by their faith and their sacrifice, dances ecstatically on hot coals. The martyrdom of Sebastian (and its parallel to Christ s crucifixion) is the basis of the third fragment. Finally, Sebastian is delivered and transfigured by the mercy of the good Shepherd. Raymond Tuttle Pierre Monteux Recording producer: Erik Smith (Prélude, Nocturnes) Recording engineer: Kenneth Wilkinson (Prélude, Nocturnes) Recording locations: Kingsway Hall, London, UK, December 1961 (Prélude, Nocturnes); Wembley Town Hall, London, UK, May 1963 (Images, Le martyre de Saint Sébastien) Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Art direction: Chilu Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt

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