Debussy by Stephen Walsh

Author:Stephen Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Lilly’s attempted suicide was widely reported, and there were even subsequent false stories that she had tried to kill herself a second time. So once again Debussy was faced with the opprobrium of a society at ease with adultery but unable to reconcile itself to (or perhaps too ready to enjoy) the marital failures of the famous and their sometimes tragic consequences. Once again many of his friends turned against him, and when on 6 November his Danses sacré et profane for harp and strings had their first performance at the Concerts Colonne, the critics either absented themselves or took the opportunity to twist the knife in the composer’s chest, even if they liked his music. “I did everything I could to dislike the piece,” one critic informed his readers. “It wasn’t possible…An invincible attraction…tantalising whole-tone scales.” And Fauré, Mme Bardac’s previous musician à la mode, wrote in Le Figaro that “one finds there once again in profusion the same harmonic singularities, sometimes curious and seductive, sometimes merely disagreeable.”9

These charming but harmless harp dances were an ironic comment on the painful events on which they set their seal. They had been commissioned a year earlier by Gustave Lyon, director of the instrument makers Pleyel and Wolff, for a harp of his own invention, a fully chromatic, cross-strung instrument that was intended to cope better than the standard pedal harp with the complicated demands of modern music. Debussy’s work, completed in May 1904, was a promotional exercise; but it fell flat, partly because his music—harmonically quite straightforward—was playable and just as effective on the pedal harp, so made no particular case for the chromatic instrument, and partly because the music itself, however attractive, was hardly calculated to set the doves fluttering in the musical dovecots. When Ravel composed his Introduction and Allegro the following year to a commission by the Érard firm for their pedal harp, the result was in every way more spectacular and persuasive. Debussy’s pieces are lightweight, but the instrument was heavy, and yet less powerful than its rival. Today the chromatic harp still has its enthusiasts, but orchestral players play the pedal harp, even when they play Debussy’s dances.

Soon after finishing these pieces, he had composed two more sets of songs, one a setting of Charles d’Orléans and the seventeenth-century poet and dramatist Tristan (François) l’Hermite, the other a new series of Fêtes galantes to poems by Verlaine. No wonder, one might think, that La Mer was hanging fire, despite the optimistic predictions of the previous autumn. The Trois Chansons de France—as Debussy called the Orléans–l’Hermite set—are admittedly very short, not much more than five minutes for the three songs, but they have an intensity that belies their brevity. The two Orléans settings are both rondels, in which the first line (or two) is repeated at the end of each subsequent verse, a device that Debussy respects musically, as he had in the rondels by Leconte de Lisle many years before; but a feature of both

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.