HYPERION LPA-68463 DEBUSSY PRÉLUDE A L'APRES-MIDI D'UN FAUNE NASH ENSEMBLE LP

	€		38
	$		44

HYPERION

LPA-68463

1LP gatefolder set

Debussy composed what he characterized as a ‘very free illustration’ of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune in 1894, the music evoking (but not describing) the ‘desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon’. For Pierre Boulez, this restrained piece was something of a musical revolution, particularly in terms of Debussy’s approach to musical form. Boulez noted ‘much greater audacity’ than in the String Quartet and put this down to the sense of freedom which the inspiration of the poem provided.

He added that: The flute of the Faune brought new breath to the art of music; what was overthrown was not so much the art of development as the very concept of form itself set free of impersonal constraints … Modern music was awakened by L’après-midi d’un faune. Another of the work’s most novel features is its use of extraordinarily delicate orchestral timbres, but Debussy himself made an arrangement of it for two pianos in 1895 and Ravel transcribed it for one piano, four hands, in 1910. In 1920 Schoenberg’s pupil Benno Sachs rearranged the Faune for the ensemble of the Society for Private Musical Performance in Vienna. The present arrangement—for wind quintet, string quintet, harp and crotales (Debussy’s ‘cymbales antiques’)—is by the French oboist and composer David Walter.

A particularly sensitive and ingenious transcription, it captures much of the half-lit subtlety of Debussy’s original orchestral score. ‘Where is French music? Where are the old harpsichordists who wrote so much true music?’ It was thoughts like these that prompted Claude Debussy to embark on a series of instrumental sonatas at the start of World War I. The teenage Poulenc, eager to acquire Debussy’s autograph, wrote to the composer in October 1915 (masquerading as a Belgian music critic) and Debussy replied: ‘This is a time when we should be trying to regain a hold on our ancient traditions: those whose beauty we have let slip from us, but which has not ceased to exist.’ It was in this frame of mind that Debussy set out to write a set of six sonatas. Weakened by cancer, he lived to complete only three of the planned set. According to his publisher Jacques Durand, it was hearing a performance of Saint-Saëns’s septet that inspired the composer to return to chamber music for the first time since the String Quartet. Debussy’s plans for the unwritten sonatas (Nos 4-6) are tantalizing: the fourth was to be for oboe, horn and harpsichord; the fifth for trumpet, clarinet, bassoon and piano; and the sixth combining all the instruments used in the previous sonatas, with the addition of a double bass. The Cello Sonata was the first of the sonatas to be finished, in the summer of 1915, and it was originally going to have a title: ‘Pierrot angry with the moon’.

Although the work was written at great speed, Debussy was pleased with the result, telling Jacques Durand on 5 August 1915 that he liked ‘its proportions and form—almost classical in the good sense of the word’. As well as its links to a vanished past, the Cello Sonata has debts to more recent music, including the use of a cyclic theme. Debussy, who borrowed this device from César Franck, had already used it in his early String Quartet, but in the Cello Sonata there is greater refinement and delicacy in the way he handles the theme. The first movement opens with a gesture which introduces the motif that unites many of the musical ideas in the work (and which recalls Baroque ornamentation).

The second movement is a ghostly serenade full of enigmatic harmonies, and this leads to a more flowing and animated finale that seems reluctant to settle until the closing D minor chords. The first known public performance of the work was given not in France, but at the Aeolian Hall in London on 4 March 1916, played by the cellist Charles Warwick Evans and pianist Ethel Hobday. The work was not heard in Paris until 24 March 1917, when the performers were Joseph Salmon and Debussy himself. Of the three completed sonatas, the only one scored for relatively unconventional forces is the Sonata for flute, viola and harp. Debussy toyed with the idea of scoring it for flute, oboe and harp but then decided to replace the oboe with the richer sonorities of a viola. The sonata is cast in three movements: a pastorale (marked ‘lento, dolce rubato’), an interlude (‘tempo di minuetto’) and a quick finale. In this astonishing work, the moods are often fleeting, the ideas quite fragmented, and the seemingly effortless exploration of instrumental colours gives the music a thrilling freshness. Its first performance was given at the New England Conservatory in Boston on 7 November 1916 and Debussy heard it at a private concert in Durand’s house on 10 December 1916.

A performance in London (2 February 1917) was followed by the work’s French public premiere on 9 March 1917. The Violin Sonata was the third (and last) of the sonatas ‘pour divers instruments’ to be completed. Debussy’s original plan had been to write it for violin, cor anglais and piano, but when he started sketching the work in 1916 he settled on violin and piano. The work did not come easily: Debussy was unwell and often depressed during the war years, and in October 1916 he wrote to Jacques Durand: Going for a walk recently at Cap Ferret [Arcachon], I found the cellular idea for the finale of the Violin Sonata. Unfortunately, the first two movements don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Knowing myself as I do, I am certainly not going to force them to put up with an awkward neighbour. In February 1917 the finale was still giving him trouble and he reverted to an earlier idea for it. The sonata was completed by the start of May, and Gaston Poulet and Debussy gave the first performance at the Salle Gaveau on 5 May 1917 in what turned out to be the composer’s last public appearance. According to Poulenc, who was there, the hall was half empty and the applause ‘was just barely courteous’. Two days later, Debussy wrote to his friend Robert Godet: I’ve at last finished the Sonata for violin and piano. By one of those very human contradictions, it’s full of tumultuous joy. In future, don’t be taken in by works that seem to fly through the air; they’ve often been wallowing in the shadows of a gloomy brain. Such is the finale of the same sonata which goes through the most curious contortions before ending up with a simple idea which turns back on itself like a snake biting its own tail … It was played last Saturday at a concert for the benefit of blind soldiers. The public had come with charitable purposes and applauded it. A month later, Debussy started to have doubts about the work, telling Godet on 7 June that he only finished it to get it off his desk, and because he was being nagged by his publisher, noting that ‘the sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what a sick man can write in time of war’.

This is an absurdly self-deprecating assessment of a work in which Debussy’s ideas flow with a freedom that often approaches a kind of capricious dreamscape, all within a very concise three-movement design. The allegro vivo opens with piano chords over which the violin spins a melody which is initially rather melancholy, before becoming more animated. The whole movement is in a kind of compressed and highly concentrated sonata form. The ‘intermède’ which follows (marked ‘fantasque et léger’) is much more mercurial, its moods shifting suddenly from playfulness to introspection, its energy eventually spent as it dies away to a close. The finale begins with an allusion to the first movement, but what follows most closely mirrors Debussy’s description of the sonata as ‘full of tumultuous joy’. It was his farewell to composition.

Nigel Simeone © 2025

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