Debussy: Prelude A L'apres-midi D'un Faune / Nocturnes

Description

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)Prelude ?á l'apres-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) Nocturnes La mer The French composer Claude Debussy was to exercise a powerfulinfluence over his successors, not least through his harmonic experiment and his delicatehandling of timbres. This second quality is particularly apparent in his use of relativelylarge orchestral forces to create effects often of the greatest delicacy, comparable tohis poetic treatment of the piano.Debussy was born in 1862, the son of a shop-keeper, who waslater to turn his hand to other activities, with varying success. He started piano lessonsat the age of seven and continued, two years later, improbable as it may sound, withVerlaine's mother-in-law, who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. In 1872 he enteredthe Conservatoire, where he abandoned the plan of becoming a virtuoso pianist, turning hisprincipal attention to composition. In 1880, at the age of eighteen, he was employed byTchaikovsky's unseen patroness Nadezhda von Meck as a tutor to her children and ahouse-musician. On his return to the Conservatoire he entered the class of Bizet's friendErnest Guiraud. In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome and the following year reluctantly took upobligatory residence, according to the terms of the prize, at the Villa Medici in Rome,where he met Liszt. By 1887 he was back in Paris, winning his first significant success in1900 with his Nocturnes and going on, two years later, to a succes de scandale with hisopera Pelleas et Melisande, based on theplay by Maurice Maeterlinck.Debussy's personal life brought some unhappiness in his firstmarriage, in 1899, to a mannequin, Lily Texier, and his association, from 1903, with EmmaBardac, the wife of a banker and an amateur singer, whom he eventually married in 1908.Debussy's final years were darkened by the war and by cancer, the cause of his death inMarch, 1918. His death interrupted a series of chamber works, only three of which hecompleted.The famous Prelude ?á l’apres-midid'un faune was completed in 1894. It was later to achieve unwarranted notorietyin the overtly erotic mime of the dancer Nizhinsky, when the score was used by Dyagilevfor a ballet in 1912. Debussy was unhappy with this treatment of his work. The inspirationfor w hat was essentially revolutionary music came from a poem by Mallarme, with itssubtly sensuous suggestions of a pagan world. In the form of an Eclogue, the poem is inthe words of a Faun, half-goat, half-man, in the mould of the pagan god Pan. He is stirredby the sight of passing nymphs, as he lies resting from the heat of mid-day in a woodedglade. The music opens with the sound of the Faun's reed-pipe, represented by the flute,in a score that makes imaginative use of woodwind, two harps and strings, with percussionconfined to delicate antique cymbals, used with sparing yet telling effect.Debussy originally planned his Nocturnes as a series of piecesfor the famous Belgian violinist Eugene Ysa??e, a work th