Afternoon of a Faun: How Debussy Created a New Music for the Modern World by Harvey Lee Snyder

Author:Harvey Lee Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography, classical music
Publisher: Amadeus Press
Published: 2015-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

15.

NOCTURNES (1899–1901)

Charles Martin Loeffler once remarked that if the grass could be heard growing, Debussy would have set it to music.

—Olin Downes1

On October 19, 1899, Lilly and Claude were married. Michèle Worms de Romilly provided a picture of his wedding day: On that morning Debussy, who always arrived promptly for Michèle’s lessons, was very late. Her mother was annoyed. At last, Debussy rushed into the room, out of breath, and asked to be forgiven for his tardiness: “It’s not entirely my fault: I’ve just got married.”2 Mother and daughter told him it was ridiculous for him to think of giving a lesson on such a day, but Debussy refused to leave. He sat down and asked to hear Michèle run through her exercises. He didn’t tell them that Lilly was waiting downstairs in the lobby.

He explained that the priest who was to marry them had asked for eighty francs, which neither Debussy nor his witnesses—Louÿs, Satie, and Lucien Fontaine—could scrape together. Instead, they went to the Town Hall for a civil wedding. He couldn’t have skipped Michèle’s lesson, he said, because he needed money to pay for the wedding supper later in the day. After the lesson, Claude took Lilly for a celebratory ride on the open top of a bus, then they joined his parents and friends at the Taverne Pousset.

In the month of Debussy’s marriage he completed, after many creative difficulties, the Nocturnes, a symphonic triptych for orchestra and chorus.

“The garden of our instincts”

The Nocturnes had a long gestation. In September 1892 Debussy told André Poniatowski he was “almost finished” with a three-movement symphonic piece called Scènes de crépuscule (Scenes of Twilight), inspired by poems of Henri de Régnier. “The orchestration is all worked out,” he wrote; “it’s just a matter of writing it down.”3 The small matter of writing it down proved to be the hard part, and nothing more is known of the Scènes. Two years later Debussy began writing Three Nocturnes for violin and orchestra, intended for the Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe; some scholars have supposed that the nocturnal music was a later iteration of the twilight music.

Debussy described the Nocturnes to Ysaÿe as an experiment: each movement would be scored for different groups of instruments, permitting “the different combinations possible inside a single color, as a painter might make a study in gray, for example.”4 Clearly he was taking Whistler’s large group of paintings called Nocturnes as his stimulus. The paintings are impressionistic scenes at twilight or darkest night, many of them done in London in the 1870s. Each picture is executed in a narrow range of colors: blue and gold, or gray and silver, for example. The reduced color range and dim light allowed Whistler to obscure or blur the objects in his paintings while intensifying the atmosphere. “As light fades and the shadows deepen,” Whistler said, “all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: The buttons are lost, but the

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