Debussy: Images / Le Martyre De Saint Sebastien

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ClaudeDebussy (1862 - 1918) ImagesLe martyre de SaintSebastien (fragments symphoniques) Marche ecossaise sur untheme populaire Berceuse heroiqueTheFrench composer Claude Debussy exercised a powerful influence over his successors, notleast through his harmonic experiment and his delicate handling of timbres. This secondquality is particularly apparent in his use of relatively large orchestral forces tocreate effects often of the greatest delicacy, in a manner comparable to his poetictreatment of the piano.Debussywas born in 1862, the son of a shop-keeper who was later to turn his hand to otheractivities, with varying success. He started piano lessons at the age of seven andcontinued two years later, improbably enough, with Verlaine's mother-in-law, who claimedto have been a pupil of Chopin. In 1872 he entered the Conservatoire, where he abandonedthe plan of becoming a virtuoso pianist, turning his principal attention to composition.In 1880, at the age of eighteen, he was employed by Tchaikovsky's patroness Nadezhda vonMeck as tutor to her children and house-musician. On his return to the Conservatoire heentered the class of Bizet's friend Ernest Guiraud and in 1864 won the Prix de Rome, thefollowing year reluctantly taking up obligatory residence, according to the terms of theprize, at the Villa Medici in Rome, where he met Liszt. By 1887 he was back in Paris,winning his first significant success in 1900 with Nocturnes and going on, two yearslater, to a succes de scan dale with his opera Pelleas et Melisande, based on the play byMaurice Maeterlinck.Debussy'spersonal life brought some unhappiness in his first marriage in 1899 to a mannequin, LilyTexier, and his association from 1903 with Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker and anamateur singer, whom he eventually married in 1908. In the summer of 1904 he had abandonedhis wife, moving into an apartment with Emma Bardac, and the subsequent attempt at suicide bythe former alienated a number of the composer's friends. His final years were darkened bythe war and by cancer, the cause of his death in March 1918, when he left unfinished aplanned chamber music series, of which only three works had been completed.Theorchestral Images occupied Debussyintermittently over a period of seven years, from 1905 to 1912, the chosen title an echoof an earlier work for piano. The completed orchestral composition opens with Gigues,originally Gigues tristes, apparently inspired by Verlaine's poem Streets, that had laterbeen set to the tune of the Northumbrian Keel Row. Written during the poet's stay inLondon and suggested by a street-corner in Soho, the poem is elegiac in tone, its refrain,Dansons la gigue!, poignant in its repetition as the writer recalls happier times of love- Je me souviens, je me souviens / des heures et des entretiens, / et c'est le meilleur demes biens.Thesecond section of Images, Iberia, is inthree movements, Par les rues et par les chemins, Les parfums de la nuit and Le matin d'unjour de fete. The