Debussy [repost for Morenus and Rasiel]
LstPuritan
>the web, as free MP3s. The titles are:
>
>- The Hills of Anacapri ("Les Collines d'Anacapri")
>- Footsteps in the Snow ("Des Pas sur la Neige")
>- What the West Wind Saw ("Ce qu'a Vu le Vent d'Ouest")
>
>Debussy founded the Impressionist movement in music, which shared the
>Impressionist painters' goal of recording the artist's mental impression
>of a particular place at a particular moment. Both musical and visual
>Impressionists disregarded traditional rules of composition, in favor of
>immediate, free expression which was loose and vibrant.
Not true.
>The most characteristical aspect of Debussy's music, especially >his piano
compositions, is how these pieces are meant to evoke an >aural impressionism.
In this regard his works have often been >compared to the paintings of his
compatriot Monet. Easily his most >recognizable piece, Au Claire de Lune is
from the Suite >Bergamesque.
Not true
***Debussy is not an Impressionist!!!***
When writing to his publisher he explained that in his orchestral Images he was
a musical painter of "realities. . . what imbeciles call 'impressionism'."
Although Debussy was influenced by Impressionist painters and these words were
a harsh cry against those who did not understand Impressionist art, (remember,
the term "impressionist" was originally a derogatory term used by critics to
describe the style of of a group of painters who used odd colors and vague
outlines to express the subjective snapshot of a given scene. Only later did
the Impressionists themselves adopt the term for their movement) Debussy
himself associated with figures of the Symbolist movement of the 1890s, who
were actually reactionary _against_ the Impressionists. Only Debussy's
harshest critics initially called his music Impressionism; the first use of the
term applied to him was in 1887 in the response to his offering of Printemps
for the Ecole des Beauz-Arts. Debussy was said to
"have a pronounced tendency—too pronounced—toward an exploration of the
strange. One has the feeling of musical color exaggerated to the point where
it causes the composer to forget the importance of precise construction and
form. It is to be stronly hoped that he will guard against this vague
impressionism, which is one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in works of
art."
Impressionism is a subjective method of interpreting reality and presenting a
distorted and highly personal rendition of what _is_; Symbolism is an objective
method of discerning reality and presenting an _intact_ interpretation for the
recipient to distort and make personal for himself. In this way, Scriabin is
more of an Impressionist than Debussy, for his works are vague, distorted, and
highly personal interpretations of what he perceived to be reality. Debussy,
on the other hand, is a Symbolist, for he attempted to paint musically accurate
portraits of sensual reality, but did _not_ pass any judgements or compose
subjectively to his environment; rather, he composed *passively*, conveying
with pure sound the _reality_ of what he saw, read, and heard.
Baudelaire: "The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should paint only in
accordance with what he sees and feels. He must be _truly_ faithful to his own
nature. He must avoid like death itself the temptation of borrowing the eyes
or the feelings of another man, however great, for in that case the production
he gave us would be a pack of lies, in relation to himself, not _realities_."
[underline=italic]
Debussy seems to agree: "What you will be finding here [in my music] are my
own sincere impressions of reality, exactly as I felt them."
Thus, although the term impression is used here, it does not imply the
"rendition of spontaneous impression into constructed form through
subjectivity" but rather "the constructed and apparent spontaneity of
impressions rendered into form through objectivity."
Debussy: "I wanted music to have a freedom that was perhaps more inherent than
any other art, for it is not limited to a more or less exact representation of
nature, but rather to the mysterious affinity that exists between Nature and
Imagination."
The original Impressionist painters—Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Renoir—showed the
viewer all that they desired through a subjective and distorted lens. *Active*
composition. This was a natural reaction to Realism, the reaction to
Romanticism. Compare these true impressionists with Whistler and Turner,
post-impressionist Symbolists. Like Baudelaire, like E.A. Poe, like Whistler
and Turner, Debussy never tells you that the sky is purple or houses are
triangular; in fact, musically, he does not interpret anything without
considering whether he is producing with music accurate portraits of
_realities_. Whistler's Nocturne paintings are far from Impressions; they
suggest unseen furtive realities, and create mystery of concealed truths, but
do so through a great clarity of brushstroke and even greater self-discipline
against excess pre-interpretation.
Like the poor inquisition victim made famous by Edgar Allen Poe, in the music
of Debussy all that one actualy knows is that fleeting melodies, strange
harmonies, and ideas hidden in shadows and just barely concealed from view
surround him. Debussy is Poe's musical inquisitioner, torturing us with
suspense and luring us into aural traps and then surprising us once again with
a new "reality." From reality to reality we go; as pianists, our job is to
seize the position of inquisitioner and tantalize the listener with realities
barely realized and just out of reach. This requires clarity and objectivety,
the "transparency of Mozart" combined with the shrouded, mysterious, and often
witty "eccentricity of Satie" and "mystery of Scriabin."
The Alfred Masterwork edition of La Cathedrale discusses the cryptic 6/4=3/2
time signature although I have heard concert performers ignore these
instructions. I've wondered how they could simply ignore something written so
clearly on the score without ever researching what it meant.
As for pedaling in Debussy, I thought that your original post was very accurate
and specific, Greg, about the "two faces" of Debussy, but I too feel some later
posts may have confused a bit of the meaning.
I have heard horrendous extremes by well-known pianists who either used too
much or too little pedal in Debussy (and Ravel). Most often they are pianists
who do not play much Debussy, i.e., Cliburn and Horowitz. Cliburn plays the
"cluster chords" in Ce Qu'a a vu le Vent D'ouest with the pedal down through
the entire progression, which is an example of interpreting "impressionist" as
"murky" and "unclear." I think this is a mistake, as I also feel it is a
mistake for the previous poster who planned to hold down the pedal through the
dramatic marcato chords in measures 92-93 of Reverie. Some of Debussy must be
pedaled frugally and responsibly no differently than any other music (pedal
each chord, pedal each major harmonic change, do not allow melody notes to blur
together when that is not clearly the intention of the composer).
On the other hand, there is Horowitz' awful rendition of l'isle joyeuse, in
which he uses almost no pedal at all and the piece sounds like a Bach toccata
on a badly tuned piano. For pieces such as this, La Cathedrale, Danseuses de
Delphes, Claire De Lune, et cetera, where Debussy is not clear in his pedal
indications common sense must dictate where and how much pedal should be used.
Uses of pedal which may be unique to Debussy's music include: blurring the
repeated chords together in Claire De Lune just before the center section with
a bit of fluttering to maintain the bass while achieving as much clarity as
possible in the upper chords, pedaling any "Bell" or "Gong" sonorities so as to
keep the dampers off allowing those sounds to ring while playing the melody
(most important in Danseuses), and using no dampers (all pedaled) for special
effects such as the submerged atmosphere of portions of La Cathedrale,
including parts indicated by "sans nuance" and the rising of the Cathedral.
However, the majestic middle fortissimo section needs to be half pedaled
carefully to keep the low C while changing for each of the chords played by
both hands.
Pedaling La Fille aux cheveux de lin is problematic because although the origin
of the title is known as the line of a poem by Leconte de Lisle of the same
name, Debussy may have also had in mind Wordsworth's poem, "The Solitary
Reaper."
"Solitary Highland lass
Reaping and singing by herself...
...I listened motionless and still;
And as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more."
The mood of Lisle's poem would suggest a faster tempo, a type of pastoral
idealism, with little pedal to support the archaic and pentatonic melody. If
one takes the approach of the "Solitary Highland lass/Reaping and singing by
herself" I would imagine playing this prelude with far more pedal through the
entire exposition of the melody, at a much slower tempo. And this is exactly
what we find in the recordings: fast tempos with little pedal, or slow tempos
with abundant rubato and lots of pedal. In this case, it's an interpretive
decision.
However, I don't feel Le Vent dans la Plaine is open to interpretation. The
title is a line from Charles-Simon Favart:
Le Vent dans la plaine
Suspend son haleine
The wind on the plain
Holds its breath
The humming ostinato here clearly should not be pedaled at all; the sound of
what amounts to two semitone trills causes the listener to hold _his_ breath
until the forte Gb Major chords and the subsequent Gb-Db tremolo in the left
hand, which can played with the pedal down for the first three chords labeled
with the crescendo, but then the pedal must change for the 4th chord which is a
"subito" pianissimo that requires the elimination of those startling preceeding
chords. With each chord change in the next few measures, Fb minor, Db major,
back to Fb minor, the pedal must change to hear both the harmony suggested by
the right hand chords and the changing tremolo 5ths in the left hand. This is
very similar to Le Vent D'ouest in that both are musical portraits of wind; the
gusty wind on the calm plain and the violent and unforgiving West wind,
respectively. Gusts of wind do not leave resonance; wind whirs by in a frenzy
and then leaves silence behind. Thus, no pedal should be employed at all for
the repeated-note octaves (I don't know any official name for these: such as
D#3 D#4 D#4 D#5 D#4 D#4 D#3, fingered 1-4-1-5-1-4-1, for example). Too many
performers treat these the same as arpeggios and pedal them thinking them to be
all belonging to the same "harmony" when they are to be fleeting bolts of
wind-like sound. These "ascending/descending broken octaves" are found in
Debussy, Liszt's B minor sonata and La Campanella, and also Prokofiev.
Debussy's use for them is far different from the others, and needs to be
examined each time they are encountered.
In Anacapri, this figuration represents festive bells and I've always pedaled
through them, seeing them as a way to evoke melodious silence with a single
note played over octaves. The harmonic meaning is nil, melodic value nil, so
in the case of Anacapri I would term them as "atmospheric" in meaning; they
connect the various incidental sounds and melodies found on Anacapri by filling
the silence with distant bells before offering a closer look at just what those
bells symbolize, and what various festivities accompany them. This is one of
my favorite Debussy pieces, and when I play it I always feel like a tourist
traveling around the land of Anacapri and hearing fragments of exotic popular
native songs, most clearly in the middle section, when the listener is in the
center of it all. Debussy marked the last five notes to be played with the
thumb; I actually go a step further and play them with either fingers 1-2-3
squeezed together (as if one were about to snap) or even with a fist. It
depends on the piano. I imagine that last whirl of polyrhythmic notes like a
fading dream as one leaves the sonorous world of Anacapri, so there is no place
for a pleasing tone; the end should be sharp, harsh, and fast. Pedal is
irrelevant in this register.
Debussy himself was not pleased with how others played his music, and it's easy
to see why.
Not an easy task, but rewarding both for the pianist and listener.
--Justin
--Justin
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www.mp3.com/justin_d_scott
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