Today’s post is the fifth article in concert pianist and piano professor Julian Jacobson’s insightful series highlighting Debussy’s two books of preludes in preparation for his concert at the 1901 Arts Club in London on June 6th.
Read earlier posts in this series here.
Preludes Book 2, Nos. 1 – 6
And so to the second book of Debussy’s great, if understated collection. This followed reasonably swiftly from the first book, Debussy being occupied with no other major projects for the time being. They took him a little longer than book 1, composition being spread over the years 1911 and 1912. There is no major change in musical language: perhaps the earlier numbers show greater richness and confidence than the equivalent numbers in book 1, also Debussy has surprises in store for us at the end of the book, just when we think he might be running out of steam and starting to repeat himself.
One difference for the pianist, if not for the listener, is that all the Preludes in book 2 are laid out on three staves, while none of the ones in book 1 are. This reflects their ever-growing richness of texture and multi-layering of heterophonous material: it simply became more practical to write many passages on three staves – an innovation faithfully followed by Messiaen and Ligeti, to name only two composers profoundly influenced by Debussy – and if anything makes the music easier to read. Indeed several of the Preludes in book 1 might be easier to read and understand if Debussy had written them on three staves, clarifying the texture for instance in Des pas sur la neige, as he probably realised.
1. Debussy opens with an intensely atmosphere nature painting, Brouillards (Fogs – interestingly in the plural, inviting the pianist to imagine a shifting variety of fogginess of greater or lesser impenetrability). Here we are close to a conventional view of Debussy as “impressionistic”, yet even here the more important human, psychological element – lonely and lost? – is indicated in the middle section with its trapped, inchoate melody and the obsessive, somewhat threatening bass motif, with its faint overtone echo in the extreme treble five octaves higher, a magical texture. Incidentally this motif, starting at bar 18-19, is marked to be played “portato”, semi-legato, slurs and dots, until the final appearances in the left hand only, bars 38-40, decorated at 41: here the manuscript and first edition have no slurs, just the staccato dots. Modern editions, including the new Durand, add the slurs in brackets, but I see no reason to do this: the new dryness (I add no pedal till indicated by Debussy at the end of bar 41) brings a new, perhaps even scarier colour to the picture, as if half waking from a troubled dream. Note the unusual time signature of 4/8, not 2/4: four trudging pulses, as if groping one’s way slowly through this grey, featureless landscape.
(In this, and in many other preludes, try finding an appropriate painting, either online or in a book, and placing it on the piano to the left of the score, or right in the middle once you have memorised it – an excellent stimulus to finding colours! Sisley and Monet are two fine sources.)
2. Remaining in the subdued atmosphere, but here much warmer and more consciously projected, Feuilles mortes (Dead leaves) is a short, concentrated piece where Debussy’s direction “Lent et mélancolique” (slow and melancholy) tells us most of what we need to know for a good interpretation. The source of the title has not been identified with any certainty. The piece seems to have been conceived jointly with Brouillards: the ambiguous bitonality of Brouillards makes way for a clearer harmony based on the finally predominant tonality of D flat/C sharp. Feuilles mortes opens as a slow, languid waltz, distantly recalling Les sons et les parfums from book 1; the duple time central section is more anguished. In the melody marked “un peu en dehors” at bar 25, I try to imitate the plangent tone of the cor anglais. The ending reminds me inescapably of the cascading downward scales that decorate the chorale theme in Chopin’s 3rd Scherzo. Note that the crotchet rest in bar 49 is the only “silent” moment in the whole prelude – it’s a pity to cover it with pedal.
3. La puerta del Vino. Here is one of Debussy’s strongest “Spanish” pieces, depicting the Moorish Gate of Wine at the Alhambra Palace and said to have been inspired by a picture postcard sent to Debussy by Manuel de Falla. This prelude marvellously wakens the listener (and pianist!) from the dreams of the first two preludes, with its forte âpre (rough, harsh) direction from Debussy plus the instruction to play with “brusque oppositions of extreme violence and passionate sweetness”. Here again are quite new colours to convey for the interpreter who is used to devoting all their concentration to finding a convincing continuity of tone and line, with no harshness in the tone: here the sunbaked, tumultuous vitality of the piece only lives by an uninhibited “exaggeration” of all its gestures. The Habanera rhythm must remain constant throughout – even in the bars with the somewhat tricky right hand double thirds! (Particularly 74). The key, of course, is D flat, shown by the obsessively repeated Habanera rhythm to which one might imagine adding bongos and pizzicato double bass – rendering the sudden fortissimo explosion in an unprepared B flat major at bar 44 all the more thrilling. The Ironique and Gracieux directions later on are a delicious challenge to the imaginative player.
4. “Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses” (“The fairies are exquisite dancers”). The title is in inverted commas because it is itself a quotation, referring to the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens following the illustrations by Arthur Rackham (c.1906). And we are still in D flat major, though tonality here is so attenuated as to be practically invisible for much of the time. Nevertheless the more lyrical theme marked “Rubato” at bar 24 is in as clear and warm a D flat major – even if the tonic chord is never sounded – as we could wish to find in Balakirev or Borodin, two favourite composers of Debussy’s! (Here, as often in Debussy, the direction “rubato” can be taken to mean a slight slowing down, indicated by “au Mouvt” – a tempo – at bar 28). “Rapide et léger” is Debussy’s main tempo direction, and speedy and light it must be, with the most delicate, gossamer colours and inflections, and constant play of both main pedals. A prelude written with humour and love – I see the composer’s daughter Chouchou, then five years old, very present in the piece – and its subtleties demand the most patient practice and intense “listening”.
5. Bruyères (Heather, moorland). At last to the subdominant key of A flat! After the intricacies of no.4, this is one of the simplest preludes in the entire collection, the introduction to the set for many young (or older) pianists including myself. It has echoes of La fille aux cheveux de lin from book 1, including the same magical effect near the end where the main theme floats over a sustained subdominant chord (bar 44), but Bruyères is more breezy and open-hearted, as befits its title, without the erotic undercurrent of the earlier piece. Its main problem for the less experienced pianist is likely to be the timing of pedal changes, for instance at bars 8, 11 and similar, where one needs to maintain the smooth legato line without any overlap or “smudging” of the harmonies – no Impressionism here! For instance, at bars 10-11, one can play the bass B flat octave almost simultaneously with the the last right hand semiquaver G, keep both in the pedal and then leap neatly to the downbeat chord of bar 11, thus avoiding both a gap and a smudge!
6. “General Lavine” – excentric – [sic]. Debussy’s “eccentric” spelling introduces – or rather sums up – one his most humorous pieces, maintaining the lighter mood from Bruyères but here moving into the sphere of jovial popular entertainment and clearly recalling Minstrels, the final Prelude from book 1. Edward Lavine was a famous American clown, popular in Paris where Debussy would have seen him at the Théatre Marigny in Paris in 1910, dressed in a bizarre costume that “made him appear nine feet tall”. We are instructed to play “in the style and tempo of a cakewalk”, and since many of us cut our Debussy teeth in the Golliwogg’s Cakewalk we should have no problem finding the appropriate style and tempo. This is vaudeville, slapstick comedy, and we can enjoy and “exaggerate” all the gestures, dynamics with their sudden changes, self-advertisement and suggestions of imminent disaster that clowns like to entertain us with. Debussy will then astound us with the most profound and mysterious of all the Preludes (La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune), so we need to convey the maximum of high-spirited farce in Lavine for the listener to savour the complete contrast!
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