The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (Dover Books on Music) by E. Robert Schmitz

Author:E. Robert Schmitz [Schmitz, E. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2014-05-05T03:00:00+00:00

CHILDREN’S CORNER (1909)

How often in paying spontaneous tribute to another does the person who writes reveal his own sensitive qualities, aspirations, understanding. One reads in Debussy’s own words (Monsieur Croche, p. 42-43)* his evaluation of Moussorgsky’s children’s song cycle (“The Nursery,” composed 1868–70) and through his warm appraisal of the humanity of the Russian genius, to whom he has more than one point of likeness, one glimpses Debussy’s own deeply abiding tenderness:

“Sometimes, too, Moussorgsky conveys shadowy sensations of trembling anxiety which move and wring the heart. In the Nursery there is the prayer of a little girl before she falls asleep which conveys the thoughts and the sensitive emotions of a child, the delightful ways of little girls pretending to be grown-up; all with a sort of feverish truth of interpretation only to be found here. The Doll’s Lullaby would seem to have been conceived word by word, through an amazing power of sympathetic interpretation and of visualizing the realms of that special fairyland peculiar to the mind of a child. The end of the lullaby is so gently drowsy that the little singer falls asleep over her own fancies…. All these little dramas are set down, I repeat, with the utmost simplicity…. We shall have more to say about Moussorgsky; he has many claims to our devotion.”

Indeed, through an “amazing power of sympathetic interpretation and of visualizing,” Debussy also composed the series of musical gems, “The Children’s Corner,” in 1908, for his daughter Chouchou, then five years old. The titles were in English, a form of humor, alluding to Chouchou’s English governess.

Great artists are often accused of being too egocentric to care for various members of their family, but, in the case of Debussy, it is a well-established fact that for his only child he experienced a very tender love. “The Children’s Corner” is as though the great composer had bent his own stature to donate the best of his art to the infant child. When Chouchou was still very young, her father would bring her some delightful little toys (as most fathers might well do). But then he would ponder over their real significance to the child (few fathers might still do this); it was not merely toys he wanted to give Chouchou, but an incentive to Joy! And so, he conceived that she could really derive joy from the toys when induced to make the little elephant walk and go to sleep, when she would have a serenade to play to her doll, when she would hear the little shepherd play some tunes on his reed and dance, and when she would make the Golliwog, the little Negro puppet-doll, dance a cake-walk, during which he would take those sublime and grotesque postures that only the greatest dancers, or the articulated toys, can perform. So came the inspiration to write the finest music to complete the make-believe universe of his beloved Chouchou; a music that would inspire her to play, to imbue her playthings with joy and life;

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