Debussy's Preludes

I enjoy the way French artists used to talk about their art. The Impressionists, for instance, often seized the chance to put words to their laissez vibrer wisps of pigment and chords, evoking in deliberate shadows the unmentioned object by allusive syllables, or some such smoke. Debussy, who stands with Monet when matters of influence among the Impressionists are measured, was one of the most vocal of chattering French artistes before the Great War. He went so far as to write under an alter ego’s nom de plume, Monsieur Croche; twenty articles in six months, for a pair of populist papers, La Revue Blance and Gil Blas, and the high-tone rag of the International Society of Music, La Revue S.I.M. He, that is, Monsieur Croche, wrote in declamatory absolutes (“Bach alone divined eternal truth”), and signed himself as an antidelittante.


Like Impressionists before him, he, that is Claude-Achille Debussy, enjoyed not only remarking on the art of others but on his own music. He was a most effective animateur musique, often showing turns of phrase worthy of a dutiful student of Mallarme. When using his own name he wrote with artful plainness (“A touch of charm has never spoiled anything – Chopin proved that”), or with irony enough to pop your eyes open (“I am not sufficiently dead to be safe from comparisons”). He was also not above writing of music metaphorically (“Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes”). Debussy was not the writer he was the composer, nor meant to be. In this way, when it came to writing, he played the dilettante – an irony Claude-Achille likely would have smirked at in his oft-reported biting way. But that did not stop him from indulging in artistic arenas in which he was not a master.

This kind of indulgence in more than one art at a time is rarer now, as old-fashioned as the gentle pointillist, but no less interesting for being old. I was reminded of it as I listened again after all these years to the Preludes played by Walter Gieseking, who in the 1930s and again in the mid ‘50s gave fullest voice to Debussy’s musique pour le piano. Gieseking’s latter day long-playing 33 1/3 rpm records, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London (they’ve been issued on CD, but I went back to the vinyl) were chosen by the Great Recordings of the Century panel as, well, among the great recordings of the 20th century. The Scholar writes, “Gieseking had the tonal control to play the triple pianissimos in Debussy so that, delicate as they were, they could be heard throughout a large hall. Somehow he had achieved complete identification with the music of Debussy, and here he was master of his own world.”

Listen to Gieseking deftly draw a pillar in the Louvre, sculptured with three bacchantes. Danseuses de Delphes. Sit with Debussy on a sailboard at anchor in a sunlit French port, as the boat rocks gently beneath you. Voiles. Is it only me, or are you also intoxicated by the melancholy parfumes of a dying day? The fusion of odors, as the Poet says, “corrupt and sensual, subtle and obscene, which exudes from the very texture of the Paris life, the acrid and nostalgic fumes of French tobacco, the black coffee, the mysterious liquors, the luxurious flesh of scented women.” During the time Debussy composed his Preludes (published 1910-1913), the scented woman whose flesh he corrupted was Emma Bardac, for whom Claude-Achille had thrown over his wife Lily-Lilo, as the Great Composer had affectionately renamed her. When it comes to such a Prelude as Les Collines d’Anacapri, Gieseking identifies with Debussy’s instruction, “with the libertre of a popular song.” The bells, the Neapolitan swing. Conversely, Des Pas sur la neige is painted with the grey silence of regret. It palpitates with doubt. Debussy’s friend (as much as Debussy had friends) Andre Suares spoke of this three-and-a-half minute exquisitely triste et lent masterpiece thus: “The long, interminable road; the nostalgia for the light which is not there and for the warm caress: this solitude, infinite, in a word, the solitude of our soul, wandering along absorbed in itself, a solitude which all the deserts and all the winters of earth never approach.”

With the dying chord of solitude, Debussy whips up a tumultueux storm at sea! Gieseking, with luminosity of tone which shines more eerily to my ears on vinyl than on CD, obliges like a man remembering an illness he once had and from which he has fully recovered. Such drama from such a pastel art. Yet these are not Chopinesque melodramas played out in Claude-Achille’s Preludes. Debussy’s is the objective art. Debussy seizes the delicate sensations of Nature like a clairvoyant. It is, how you say? – Impressinoniste. Take us down to the tolling of the bells, down to the watery depths of the past, the medieval past – ah, organum! – the plainchant and swelling waves, the moving clocks of hollow chords. Is the cathedral really under water, or engulfed by antiquity? And while you ponder, for there is much (and yet nothing!) which Debussy gives you to ponder, up pops arpeggiated Puck, dancing a mocking, mercurial danse. I think of Claude-Achille courting Lily-Lilo by mimicking her high, countrified voice. The final Prelude of the first book (which is generally held in higher regard than the second book for its organic spontaneity) has Debussy sending forth the clowns, American minstrels, circus performers (he loved the circus and used to attend wearing his cowboy hat). Oh, the droll home d’esrit. The unhappy genius. The antidilettante. “I try to free music from the barren traditions that stifle it,” wrote Debussy.