| Contents |
Foreword / by Wilfrid Mellers -- Preface -- Debussy's works for piano -- Introduction: Les Images -- Part I: Background. Impressionist or Symbolist? "Reflets dans l'eau" ; "La cathédrale engloutie" -- Three Japanese prints: Estampes -- Correspondances: Debussy and Baudelaire: "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" -- Watteau, Verlaine, and the Fête Galante. "Clair de lune" ; "Masques" ; "L'isle joyeuse" -- Impressionism and realism: Debussy's Réalités -- Music and painting: visual stimulus in Fin-de-Siècle Paris -- Part II: Foreground. The origins of a style: the Javanese gamelan. "Pagodes" ; "Canope" ; "Cloches à travers les feuilles" ; "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" -- Debussy and the virtuoso. "Feux d'artifice" ; "Poisson d'or" ; "Ce qu'a vu le Vent d'Ouest" -- Humor and childhood: the interrupted serenade. Children's Corner ; "Minstrels" ; "La sérénade interrompue" ; "General Lavine, excentric" ; "Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses" ; "Ondine" -- Préludes, Books I and II: the case for a complete performance -- Some questions of technique and the Études. "Pagodes" ; "Cloches à travers les feuilles" ; "Feux d'artifice" ; "Mouvement" ; "Hommage à Rameau" ; Douze études -- Appendix: The origin of the impressionist label in painting ; Harmony and synesthesia in "Les ons et les parfums" ; The mouth organ of J.-K. Huysmans ; Debussy, Chopin, and Delacroix -- Glossary of terms in Debussy's piano music. |
| Abstract |
Paris at the turn of the century was obsessed with the interrelations of the arts. It was a time when artists and writers spoke of poetry as music, sounds as colors, and paintings as symphonies. The music of Claude Debussy, with its unique textures and dazzling colors, was the perfect counterpart of the bold new painting in France, the canvases of Manet, Monet, and Degas from the Impressionist generation, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec in the eighties and nineties, and Matisse in the new century. Debussy drew inspiration, too, from the sensual poetry of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarme; the exotic sounds of the Orient; the circus and the music-hall; and the playful world of his little daughter Chou-chou. In the first years of the twentieth century, his keenly visual imagination and his awareness of the piano as an instrument of illusion gave birth to music of a confident originality, a new music entirely at one with the instrument that creates it. The author uses his love and understanding of the repertoire and his musical imagination to probe the sources of Debussy's artistic inspiration, relating the "impressionist" titles to the artistic and literary ferment of the time. With clarity and insight, the author touches on all the principal technical problems for a performer of Debussy's piano music. His many suggestions about interpreting the music, coming from a pianist who has performed the repertoire extensively, will be particularly valuable to performers as well as listeners. |
