Sound Visionaries

In a letter dated September 3, 1907 to Jacques Durand, Debussy wrote, “I am more and more convinced that music, by its nature, is something that cannot be poured into a rigid and traditional form. It is colors and time, in rhythm.” His Préludes Deuxième Livre for piano, written at intervals between 1911 and 1912, masterfully exemplifies Debussy’s concept of music. Debussy, like Messiaen and Boulez, was an exceptional painter of musical sounds, discovering new combinations of color, form, and line for every poetic idea he was expressing in his music. His connections with poets and authors Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe are reflected in Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune and Pelléas et Mélisande, to name just two. In a letter to Edgard Varèse in 1911, Debussy proclaimed, “I love pictures almost much as music.” However, he disliked being called an “Impressionist.” A glance at the composer’s scores shows precision, fastidious detail, and numerous dynamic markings, not the blurring of some impressionist painters. Debussy creates tonal color, atmosphere through motifs, distinctive harmonies, exotic scales such as pentatonic and whole-tone, chromatic and unresolved chords. Nothing was the same in 20th century music after Debussy.

Preludes, Book Two by Debussy was published in 1913, three years after the publication of Book One. Book Two consists of 12 short pieces, each bearing a descriptive title.

No.1. Brouillards (Mists)
Music as evanescent and insubstantial as its title. Mere wisps of sound, repeated arpeggios, are blurred by the use of the pedal. The piece uses neither theme, counterpoint, accompaniment, development, diatonic harmony, nor chromaticism, but juxtaposes the white keys against the blacks to create polytonality. In this harmonic mist, short melodic phrases appear briefly. Like a fog, the piece lacks a defined ending, but is suddenly gone as a complex chord hangs in the air at the conclusion.

No. 2. Feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves)
Debussy indicated that this evocation of autumn should be played with “melancholy.” One hears the leaves slowly falling, one by one. The gray mood suggests regret over the departed summer and foreboding of the winter to come. The spacing of the sonorities underlines the air of resignation that pervades this prelude, full of poignant expression of autumn’s bittersweet melancholy. The final major chord does hint at a hopeful yearning.

No. 3. La Puerta del vino (The Wine Gate)
The Wine Gate is one of the entrances in the many walls surrounding the 13th-century Alhambra Palace in Granada. Debussy, who never visited Spain, was supposedly inspired by a picture postcard of the site that he received from Manuel de Falla. The music alternates between passion and languor, superimposed on the insistent rhythm of the habanera.

No. 4. Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses (The fairies are exquisite dancers)
The title is derived from a line in James Barrie’s Peter Pan. The music is a sonic equivalent of Walt Disney’s shimmering “pixie dust,” all gossamer and sparkle. The fairies dance without their feet ever touching the ground. A dreamy, slow waltz in the middle leads to the fluttering and dizzying trills and reminiscences of the opening. The prelude concludes with a citation of the horn melody from the Oberon Overture by Weber, a composer much admired by Debussy.

No. 7. La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune (The terrace for moonlight audiences)
This prelude had its title drawn from L’Inde sans les Anglais by Pierre Loti. Its opening ironically quotes from Debussy’s earlier Clair de lune, inspired by Jean Corot’s famous canvas. The imaginative, widely spaced sonorities using the extreme registers fully realize what Debussy once said: “Music alone has the power to evoke, at will, those imaginary sites and that fantastic but indubitable world which is secretly at work in the mysterious poetry of the night, in the thousand anonymous noises of the leaves, caressed by the rays of the moon.”

No. 8. Ondine (Water nymph)
Debussy, that supreme tone-painter of waterscapes, here describes the mythical Naiad as she swims and splashes, leaving glittering sprays of notes in her wake. Ondine, the soulless water nymph who lures innocent fishermen to their destruction, fascinated numerous artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Debussy suggests the flowing water and the darting of fish with rapid arpeggios and tremolos. The interval of the tritone is emphasized to create a feeling of nebulousness.

No. 11. Les tierces alternées (Alternate thirds)
More an “etude” than a “prelude,” this is a piece of pure pianism, a cheerful toccata in which the fingers are kept busy and the ears are kept entertained. It anticipates Debussy’s Études of 1915. It is the only prelude without an extramusical title. Using almost exclusively major and minor thirds alternating between the hands, Debussy relishes the technical limitations and manages to give the material a Latin American flavor with the appearance of the tango rhythm near the end.

No. 12. Feux d’artifice (Fireworks)
A virtuosic evocation of the July 14 Bastille Day celebration in Paris. Pinwheels, Roman candles, and skyrockets are delineated by repeated figures and exploding arpeggios and scales. The combined glissandos, pounding chords, and octave passages are all reminiscent of Liszt and rare in Debussy’s music. The opening, though, hearkens back to the atmosphere created at the beginning of Brouillards, and the athematic, atonal static character fully demonstrates Debussy’s mature approach to music creation. As the brilliant display ends, a strain of La Marseillaise is heard in the distance.

— Christina Petrowska Quilico, edited by Linda Litwack