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French pianist and Seattle Symphony's one-time Artist in Residence Jean-Yves Thibaudet returns to Benaroya Hall as part of the In Recital Series on October 26. Photo by E. Caren.

Claude Debussy’s Préludes for the piano extend, in highly original fashion, a line of keyboard composition that stretches from the late Renaissance to at least the 20th century. The term “prelude” originally denoted a preface or introduction to rigorously composed contrapuntal music — a meaning still operative in Bach’s pairings of preludes and fugues — and often implied a species of keyboard improvisation. In time, the genre’s improvisational character evolved into a type of character piece, a brief composition evoking a specific mood, usually through a particular type of keyboard figuration. Chopin’s Preludes, Opus 28, famously embody this concept. 

Debussy made the notion of the prelude as character piece more vivid and explicit than any previous composer. His two books of Préludes, completed in 1910 and 1913, respectively, bear picturesque titles and contain much picturesque music — so much so that Edward Lockspeiser, the composer’s foremost English-language biographer, could write of “[the] music’s sharply defined realistic associations.” The music is, then, very much about aural illusion, about sights and scenes poetically rendered in tone. Persons, places and aspects of nature all find expression in these two-dozen short pieces, which are at once highly evocative and extremely idiomatic to the piano.  

These two characteristics are not coincidental. Debussy’s writing for the piano emphasized texture, figuration and resonance no less than melody, harmony or counterpoint, and he found the instrument’s capacity for layers of diaphanous chords, swirls of notes, gong-like tolling and other effects perfectly suited to imagining events and scenes in music. 

It is nevertheless remarkable how simply Debussy sometimes achieves his sonic evocations. In Danceuses de Delphes, the first of his Préludes, the Delphic dancers of the title are conjured up through little more than a restrained sense of rhythm, a somewhat formal style of musical rhetoric and occasional references to ancient modal scales. Voiles, the second prelude’s title, can indicate either veils or mists. The ambiguity of the word is matched by the ambiguous harmonies Debussy employs here. 

In contrast to the languor of this second Prelude, the third, Le vent dans la plaine, presents a rush of circling figuration suggesting wind racing over a plain. Occasionally great gusts of chords punctuate the swiftly flowing texture. 

The fourth prelude, Les sons et les parfumes tournent dans l’air du soir, derives its title from a line in a poem by Baudelaire. Debussy’s music takes on the character of a quiet reverie, and its harmonies and textures have such palpable sensuousness that one can easily imagine eddies of sound and perfume in the air of a still evening. 

Les collines d’Anacapri gives us one of Debussy’s musical souvenirs of the Mediterranean. Here, the hills on Capri, the island in the Bay of Naples, seem to resound with dance music — not surprisingly, a tarantella — and the strumming of guitars. In contrast to the ebullient character of this piece, the one that follows, Des pas sur la neige, conveys a somber, almost lugubrious atmosphere, with obsessively repeating figures, spare textures and dark harmonies evoking the footsteps in the snow of the prelude’s title. 

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest is among the most outwardly brilliant of Debussy’s Préludes. Its title leaves us to guess who or what, exactly, has seen the western wind and what that vision might entail, but the music allows us to imagine a powerful experience.  

La fille aux cheveux de lin (“The Girl with Flaxen Hair”) takes its title and inspiration from a poem by the minor French writer, Leconte de Lisle. These verses, which Debussy also set as a song early in his career, describe a girl of the Scottish Highlands seated in a field of flowering clover, singing of the pristine morning. 

In La sérénade interrompue, the composer conjures the serenade of a Spanish gypsy musician. The spare staccato texture of the opening measures implies the playing of a guitar, and other developments — melodic figures in the flamenco cante jondo manner and a fleeting hint of dance rhythm — also impart a Spanish flavor. 

Precisely what Debussy had in mind in calling the next prelude La cathédrale engloutie (“The Sunken Cathedral”) is uncertain. Some authorities have assumed a link to Monet’s famous series of paintings of the cathedral at Rouen, in which the church seems almost lost in mist; others have imagined the legendary sunken city of Ys off the coast of Brittany. However this may be, Debussy’s use of resonant sonorities creates an impression of grandeur and mystery. 

Next, Debussy imagines the dance of the mischievous fairy Puck, that “merry wanderer of the night,” as Shakespeare has him describe himself in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Minstrels then conclude this set of pieces on a note of humor and virtuosity. 

Debussy’s highly imaginative use of piano sonority is evident in Brouillards, or “Mists,” the first prelude in Book II. The several distinct ideas that make up this piece include whirls of rapidly moving figuration and a spare modal melody doubled at the extreme high and low ends of the keyboard. 

Feuilles mortes, Book II’s second prelude, explores fine gradations of harmonic shading. The result is a beautifully mottled texture corresponding to the visual impression created by the fallen leaves of the prelude’s title. 

La Puerta del vino takes its name from a gate at the Alhambra, Spain’s celebrated Moorish palace, and is another of Debussy’s Spanish fantasies. In contrast to the sense of smoldering sensuality conveyed in this prelude, Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses features fleet passagework of great delicacy. This and other details lend credence to the title’s assertion. Fairies, it would seem from Debussy’s music, are indeed exquisite dancers. 

Bruyères, the title of the fifth prelude, refers to Scotland’s moors. This piece is a sibling of La fille aux cheveaux de lin. Debussy’s music seems to breathe the air of the heaths, its harmonies creating a fresh, open feeling that contrasts markedly with the complex layers and tonal ambiguities of most of the other Préludes. 

“General Lavine” was a puppet clown on the stage of the Folies-Bergère, where he performed various absurd antics. Debussy’s prelude named after him, a parody of a music-hall dance, captures his comic nature in angular movement, droll grace notes and sharp dissonances.  

The composer then takes us to India. The idea for La terrace des audiences du clair de lune reportedly came to Debussy from a description, published in a French newspaper, of the Durbar, an annual reception of dignitaries by the British governor at a palace near Delhi. The music seems to imagine a terrace where princes, rajahs and other denizens of the subcontinent are gathered in the mild evening air. A reference to the well-known French song “Au clair de la lune” in the opening measures establishes a moon-lit atmosphere. 

The water sprite Ondine turns up in a number of musical works, most famously the first of the three poems for piano that constitute Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Debussy’s eponymous prelude suggests both her watery habitat and her quicksilver movement through it. 

Hommage á Samuel Pickwick, Esq. P.P.M.P.C. paints a comic portrait of the title character of Dickens’ early novel, The Pickwick Papers. Debussy establishes Pickwick’s robust Englishness, and also something of his naivete, with a rather indelicate quotation of “God Save the King” at the outset of the piece. 

Canope, the 10th of the Book II Préludes, looks back in time to dynastic Egypt. (The title refers to a type of Egyptian vase.) Rhythmically steady progressions of harmonies create allusions to ancient chant, conjuring up a bygone world of disembodied figures and rituals. 

The title of Debussy’s penultimate prelude, Les tierces alternées, for once alludes to no extra-musical image. Rather, it describes the chief pianistic feature of the piece, the use of the interval of a third in conjunction with alternate hand movement.  

The Préludes close on a note of exhilaration. Feux d’artifice, or “Fireworks,” imagines a pyrotechnical display on Bastille Day. (A fleeting quotation of the Marseillaise near the close of the piece confirms the allusion to the French national holiday.) Debussy conveys the eruptions of color and light across the sky in a virtuosic display piece. 

Paul Schiavo © 2022