SONG OF THE DAY

“Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy. Composed from 1890 to 1905 as the third of the four movements of “Suite bergamasque”. Published in 1905.

WHERE I HEARD IT

Yesterday, I referenced a compilation album titled Artist’s Choice: Joni Mitchell while I was blogging about the Marvin Gaye song “Trouble Man”. Well, that set of tracks hand-selected by Joni Mitchell also contains this earth-shattering classic piece of music. I heard it. It rocked me. I blog it.

Also, you HAVE to watch the video below. It’s an incredible piece produced by the amazing people at the Music Animation Machine.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

– “Suite bergamasque” is one of the most famous piano suites by Claude Debussy. Debussy commenced the suite in 1890 at age 28, but he did not finish or publish it until 1905, when he was 43.

– It seems that by the time a publisher came to Debussy in order to cash in on his fame and have these pieces published, Debussy loathed the earlier piano style in which these pieces were written. While it is not known how much of the Suite was written in 1890 and how much was written in 1905, we do know that Debussy changed the names of at least two of the pieces. “Passepied” was called “Pavane”, and “Clair de lune” was originally titled “Promenade Sentimentale.”

– The Suite bergamasque consists of four movements: “Prélude”, “Menuet”, “Clair de lune”, and “Passepied”.

РThe suite has been orchestrated by many composers, including Andr̩ Caplet, Leopold Stokowski and Lucien Cailliet.

– The third and most famous movement of Suite bergamasque is “Clair de lune,” meaning “moonlight” in French.

– Its name comes from Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same name which also refers to ‘bergamasques’ in its opening stanza: “Votre âme est un paysage choisi / Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques / Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi / Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.”

– Claude-Achille Debussy (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer, among the most important of all French composers, and a central figure in European music of the turn of the 20th century.

– He was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1903.

– His music is noted for its sensory component and how it is not often formed around one key or pitch. Often Debussy’s work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music.

– He began piano lessons when he was seven years old with an elderly Italian violinist named Cerutti; his lessons were paid for by his aunt.

– His talents soon became evident, and in 1872, at age ten, Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he spent eleven years. During his time there he studied composition with Ernest Guiraud, music history/theory with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, harmony with Émile Durand, piano with Antoine François Marmontel, organ with César Franck, and solfège with Albert Lavignac, as well as other significant figures of the era.

– He also became lifelong friend of fellow student and noted pianist Isidor Philipp. After Debussy’s death, many pianists sought out Philipp for advice on playing his music.

– From the start, though clearly talented, Debussy was also argumentative and experimental, and he challenged the rigid teaching of the Academy, favoring instead dissonances and intervals which were frowned upon at the time.

– Like Georges Bizet, Debussy was a brilliant pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career as such had he so wished.

– From 1880 to 1882, he lived in Russia as music teacher to the children of Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of Tchaikovsky. Despite von Meck’s closeness with Tchaikovsky, the Russian master appears to have had little or no effect on Debussy. In September 1880 she sent Debussy’s Danse bohémienne for Tchaikovsky’s perusal. A month later Tchaikovsky wrote back to her, “It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity”. Debussy did not publish the piece; the manuscript remained in the von Meck family, and it was sold to B. Schott’s Sohne in Mainz, and published by them in 1932.

– More influential was Debussy’s close friendship with Madame Vasnier, a singer he met when he began working as an accompanist to earn some money. She and her husband gave Debussy emotional and professional support. Monsieur Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine, his former teacher Mme. Mauté de Fleurville’s son-in-law.

– As the winner of the 1884 Prix de Rome with his composition “L’enfant prodigue”, he received a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which included a four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further his studies (1885–1887).

– According to letters to Madame Vasnier, perhaps in part designed to gain her sympathy, he found the artistic atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the monastic quarters “abominable”. Neither did he delight in the pleasures of the “Eternal City”, finding the Italian opera of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. Debussy was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, whose command of the keyboard he found admirable.

– In June 1885, Debussy wrote of his desire to follow his own way, saying, “I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas.”

– The Academy chided him for “courting the unusual” and hoped for something better from the gifted student. Even though Debussy showed touches of Jules Massenet in his efforts, Massenet himself concluded, “He is an enigma.”

– In his visits to Bayreuth in 1888-9, Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which had a lasting impact on his work. Richard Wagner had died in 1883 and the cult of Wagnerism was still in full swing. Debussy, like many young musicians of the time, responded positively to Wagner’s sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies, but ultimately Wagner’s extroverted emotionalism was not to be Debussy’s way either.

– Around this time, Debussy met Erik Satie, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition and to naming his pieces. During this period, both musicians were bohemians enjoying the same cafe society and struggling to stay afloat financially.

– Debussy’s private life was often turbulent. At the age of 18 he began an eight-year affair with Blanche Vasnier, wife of a wealthy Parisian lawyer. The relationship eventually faltered following his winning of the Prix de Rome and obligatory incarceration in the eponymous city.

– On his permanent return to Paris in 1889, he began a tempestuous nine-year relationship with Gabrielle (‘Gaby’) Dupont, a tailor’s daughter from Lisieux, with whom he cohabited on the Rue Gustave Doré. During this time he also had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, to whom he was briefly engaged.

– He left Dupont for her friend Rosalie (‘Lily’) Texier, a fashion model whom he married in 1899. Although Texier was affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well-liked by Debussy’s friends and associates, he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity.

– In 1904, Debussy was introduced to Emma Bardac, wife of Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac, by her son Raoul, one of his students. In contrast to Texier, Bardac was a sophisticate, a brilliant conversationalist, and an accomplished singer.

– Debussy soon abandoned Texier; distraught, like Dupont before her, she attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest while standing in the Place de la Concorde. She survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life.

– The scandal obliged Debussy and Bardac (already carrying his child) to elope to England, via Jersey, in April 1905. The couple ultimately settled at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.

– Claude and Emma returned to Paris that autumn in time for the birth of their child, a daughter (and the composer’s only child), Claude-Emma, on 30 October. She outlived her father by scarcely a year, succumbing to the diphtheria epidemic of 1919.

– Her parents were eventually married in 1908, their troubled union enduring until Debussy’s death in 1918.

РClaude Debussy died of rectal cancer in Paris on March 25, 1918, in the midst of the aerial and artillery bombardment of the city during the Spring Offensive of World War I. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets to P̬re Lachaise cemetery as shells from the German guns ripped into his beloved city. At this time, the military situation in France was desperate, and circumstances did not permit his being paid the honour of a public funeral or ceremonious graveside orations.

– Rudolph Réti points out these features of Debussy’s music, which “established a new concept of tonality in European music”: “Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality; Frequent use of parallel chords which are “in essence not harmonies at all, but rather ‘chordal melodies’, enriched unisons”; Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords; Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale; Unprepared modulations, “without any harmonic bridge.” He concludes that Debussy’s achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based “melodic tonality” with harmonies, albeit different from those of “harmonic tonality”.

– The application of the term “impressionist” to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908, he wrote “I am trying to do ‘something different’–an effect of reality…what the imbeciles call ‘impressionism’, a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art.”

– The opposing side argues that Debussy may have been reacting to unfavorable criticism at the time, and the negativity that critics associated with impressionism. It can be argued that he would have been pleased with application of the current definition of impressionism to his music.

– Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner’s style, colored in part from the dreamy, sometimes morbid romanticism of the Symbolist Movement.

– Debussy became a frequent participant at Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist gatherings, where Wagnerism dominated the discussion.

– In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, however, around this time Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms.

– “Suite bergamasque” (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement. This suite contains one of Debussy’s most popular pieces, “Clair de Lune”.

– Given that Debussy’s music is apparently so concerned with mood and colour, one may be surprised to discover that, according to Howat, many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat suggests that some of Debussy’s pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence.

– At the same time, Howat admits that in many of Debussy’s works, he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably in the late works) and that no extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.

– Debussy had a wide range of influences. Among the Russian composers of his time, the most prominent influences on Debussy were Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky. It can be inferred that from the Russians “Debussy acquired his taste for ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules.”

– In addition to the Russian composers, one of Debussy’s biggest influences was Richard Wagner. According to Pierre Louys, Debussy “did not see ‘what anyone can do beyond “Tristan”.”

– After Debussy’s Wagner phase, he started to become immensely interested in non-western music. He was drawn to unorthodox approaches to composition that non-western music utilized. Specifically, he was drawn to a Javanese Gamelan, which was a musical ensemble from the island of Java that played an array of unique instrumentation. He first heard the gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition (though it should be noted that Debussy was not as interested in directly citing his non-western influence in his music, but instead used his non-western influence to shape his unique musical style in more of a general way).

– Debussy was just as influenced by other art forms as he was by music, if not more so. He took a strong interest in literature and visual art and used these mediums to help shape his unique musical style.

– Debussy was heavily influenced by the French symbolist movement, which was an art movement in 1885 that influenced art forms such as poetry, visual art, and theatre.

– He shared the movement’s interest in the esoteric and indefinite and rejection of naturalism and realism. Specifically, “the development of free verse in poetry and the disappearance of the subject or model in painting influenced Debussy to think about issues of musical form.”

– Debussy became personally acquainted with writers and painters of the movement and based his own works off of those of the symbolists. One of Debussy’s main influences was the famous poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who “held the idea of a ‘musicalization’ of poetry.”

– Like the symbolists in respect to their own art forms, Debussy aimed to reject common techniques and approaches to composition and attempted to evoke more of a sensorial experience for the listener with his works. Since his time at the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy believed he had much more to learn from artists than from musicians who were primarily interested in their musical careers.

– Contemporary painter James McNeill Whistler who lived in France for a period of time had a profound influence on Debussy. In 1894, Debussy wrote to violinist Eugene Ysaye describing his Nocturnes as “an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one color – what a study in grey would be in painting.” Although it is not known what it is meant by this statement, one can observe in his music a careful use of orchestral, textural, and harmonic ‘shading’.

– Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass as well as the influential Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

РHe also influenced many important figures in Jazz, most notably George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Ant̫nio Carlos Jobim, and Herbie Hancock.

– Furthermore, he had a profound impact on contemporary soundtrack composers such as John Williams because Debussy’s colorful and suggesting style translated easily into an emotional language for use in motion picture scores.

– In 1999, The Art of Noise released a concept album titled The Seduction of Claude Debussy. The group blended the music of Debussy with drum and bass, opera, hip hop, jazz, and narration, and described the album as “the soundtrack to a film that wasn’t made about the life of Claude Debussy”.

– In 2000, the band released Reduction, a limited-edition album composed mainly of outtakes from this album.

– Debussy participated in a handful of recordings, made in 1904, with soprano Mary Garden. He also made some piano rolls for Welte Mignon in 1913.

LINKS

– Listen to all four movements by multiple musicians here, in the “Free Classical Music” section of the Piano Society’s website.

– Here is a link to the complete score and MP3 recordings of the suite, thanks to the International Music Score Library Project (helping musicians for free since 2006).

– Here is a video of Lydia Kavina performing “Clair de Lune” on Theremin, as arranged by the Radio Science Orchestra.

– Here is a video featuring the audio of “Clair de Lune” as performed on cello by Julian Lloyd Webber.

– Here is the IMDB.com listing for Claude Debussy. [Wow! Who is getting those royalties?!?!]

VIDEO OF THE DAY