The Ellington Century (9 page)

In “De soir…” the piano sounds less like an orchestral reduction than an imaginary superorchestra. The contrapuntal
moto perpetuo
accompaniment rolls out a ceaseless stream of sound evocations all drawn from a short motive. As the motive evolves, its visual correlatives change as well. At first it evokes a clamor of church bells. Then, augmented in a dotted rhythm, it suggests the rattling bounce of a suburban train. As
the train is “devoured” by a tunnel a new contrapuntal texture appears, waves of sixteenth notes in the right hand against a grandly rising and falling arch in the left, all played on the black keys of the piano. Though the black keys may indicate the darkness of the tunnel, they also produce a pentatonic scale. The scale and rhythmic counterpoint sound like gamelan music. The significance of this occidental/oriental double image becomes clear when Debussy inverts the counterpoint, lifting the slow arch motive to the upper register of the piano as the words speak of “Dimanche, dans le bleu de mes rêves” (Sunday in the blue of my dreams), as if the day trip to the outskirts of Paris were just a poor substitute for more exotic travel. (Des Esseintes, the hero of A
Rebours
, preferred imaginary travel to the real thing.) As evening settles on the city the arch motive turns back into bell sounds, no longer clangorous but distant, nostalgic, slowly fading as the speaker falls asleep.

The Symbolist songs prepared Debussy for the full expression of textless musical symbolism in the
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
, an orchestral work inspired by Mallarmé's poem. The
Prélude
is not a tone poem but what Ellington would term a “tone parallel.” Debussy explained to a critic that the music was “perhaps the dream left over at the bottom of the faun's flute.”
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Debussy reduced Mallarmé's almost inscrutable text to its essential sonoric value, an unaccompanied C# on the flute in its breathy, slightly muted middle register, a pitch “naturally out of tune on French flutes of the period.”
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The unaccompanied flute solo that begins the
Prélude
is not a diegetic sound within the action (real or dreamed) of the poem but a floating sound symbol poised to take on any of the poem's inflections. Placing the sound of the flute first before addressing, however indirectly, the action of the poem, Debussy was implementing Verlaine's instruction: “De la musique avant toute chose” (Music first!).

Debussy's most sophisticated works of timbral symbolism, though, are not his songs or orchestral pieces but his piano compositions, especially Book I of the
Préludes
, a set of twelve “tone parallels” published in 1910. Debussy here applied the techniques of musical Symbolism to the central idea of Impressionist painting, the fleeting character of sensory experience. As in Turner and Monet, wind and water present images of constant change, but Debussy chose subjects that also placed those elements in relation to other works of art. Each prelude poses the question of how art can resist and embrace temporality. To indicate the thematic interplay of the enduring and the perishable Debussy framed the first book of
Préludes
with two dances, one from ancient Greece,
preserved on a frieze in the Louvre, the other from contemporary America, a ragtime Debussy had heard performed by street musicians (probably in blackface) while on vacation in England.

Debussy's piano never sounds simply like a piano but creates sonic metaphors. Lockspeiser describes Debussy's approach to the piano as illusionistic: “To both Marguerite Long and Louise Liebich [Debussy] insisted that the piano was to sound as if it were ‘an instrument without hammers' and he wanted the fingers on the keyboard to appear to ‘penetrate into the notes.' The illusion was to be complete. Nothing was to be allowed to destroy the impression that the mechanical piano, a mere ‘box of hammers and strings' was not a piano.”
⁶⁵
Illusionism is not the same as illustration; it would be a mistake to hear these pieces as musical depictions. The sound images evoked in the
Préludes
are themselves symbols; the music is part of the symbolic forest in which humankind wanders, a forest Debussy had evoked at the very opening of his opera
Pelléas et Mélisande.

Debussy signaled the complex symbolism of these relatively simple pieces by the placing and selection of titles. Titles appear in parentheses at the end of each prelude rather than at the top of the first page, as if they were just tentative, transient associations. Seven of the titles link the music to artworks, making the preludes reflections of reflections. “Danseuses de Delphes” refers to a Greek caryatid in the Louvre, “a support column sculpted in the form of a female figure.”
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“Voiles” may refer either to the dancer Loïe Fuller or to sailboats, depending on the gender assigned to the title word. “Le vent dans la plaine” begins a line of a poem by Favart that serves as an epigram for Paul Verlaine's “C'est l'extase langoureuse,” which Debussy had set to music in his
Ariettes oubliées.
“Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir” is a line from Baudelaire's “Harmonie du soir,” which Debussy had set to music in 1885. “La fille aux cheveux de lin” takes its title from a poem by Leconte de Lisle, itself based on a poem by Robert Burns. “La Cathédrale engloutie” refers to a Breton myth that formed the basis of the opera
Le Roi d'Ys
by Edouard Lalo. Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream
, as illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is the source of “La Danse de Puck.” Of the remaining five, three, “Les collines d'Anacapri,” “La Sérénade interrompue,” and “Minstrels,” are portraits of popular music (Italian, Spanish, and American, respectively). Scholars have yet to nail down specific references for the remaining two preludes, the violent “Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest” and the desolate “Des pas sur la neige,”
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whose title could have sprung from any number of
Impressionist snow scenes, a favorite genre of Monet and Sisley in particular (see, for example, Sisley's “Snow at Louveciennes” at the Musée d'Orsay).
⁶⁸

The titular interpretations listed above are found in most program notes; these also usually divide the preludes between those based on artworks and those based on nature without seeing that the two groups are connected metaphorically to the central theme of temporality, which received its most monumental treatment in “La Cathédrale engloutie,” a fresco of stone, seawater, and metallic bells. Debussy placed its
Parsifal
paced unfolding between two more fleeting visions that could be termed salon music à la Grieg (a composer whom Debussy pretended to dislike): the interrupted serenade and Puck's dance. Just as each prelude associates sound with sight, each also evokes the sense of touch. Each title suggests a different physical material: stone, feathers, water, snow, flaxen hair, wind gusts, fairy cobwebs, guitar strings, drum skins, the scents of plants or perfume; each material suggests a different physical connection between pianist and keyboard.

To see how Debussy used tone color symbolically, let's examine “Danseuses de Delphes” and “Des pas sur la neige” in more detail. The title “Danseuses de Delphes” presents a conundrum similar to that of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in its suggestion of life suspended in fired clay:

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with breed

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

Debussy similarly represented a dance set in stone. The score tells the performer that the music should be “
doux et soutenu
,” at once sweet and sustained, no easy task, but the words encapsulate the almost impossible simultaneous evocation of grace and gravitas. The melody, an ascending legato line, hides between a bass figure in octaves and a rising chorale of three-note chords. The two framing figures are counterintuitively both slurred and marked staccato. The counterpoint demands a scrupulously controlled touch from the pianist, who must balance the three voices and also bring out the melody, all within a soft dynamic—as if the keyboard were made of modeling clay just beginning to set. Further expanding the varieties of touch, Debussy contrasts the airy heaviness of the opening texture with a cadential phrase to be
played even more quietly, like a distant harp or lyre—perhaps this is the music that the dancers themselves are hearing. In the next phrase Debussy repeats what we have just heard but stretches out each figure across the keyboard, as if he were reorchestrating. The accompaniment suddenly suggests the sound of finger cymbals or crotales, which Debussy had also used as a classical Greek color in “Afternoon of a Faun.” Debussy gradually animates his three lines into a complex hand-overhand choreography at bars 15 to 17, where the interplay of elements is finally, though briefly, heard at a
forte
dynamic. After this climax recedes the last three bars reiterate a single harmony in three contrasting colors: a seven-note statement of a B
major triad is sounded once
forte
, then repeated
pianissimo
, then underscored with a single B
at the very bottom of the keyboard, which must be released while the pedal sustains the upper chords—a
klangfarbenmelodie
that is also a melody of touch.

Debussy gave touch an even more complex symbolic treatment in “Des pas sur la neige.” The piece is built on an evolving ostinato, a short motive with a curiously nervous rhythm on which the composer placed a heavy synesthetic burden: “Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glacé” (this rhythm should have the tonal color of the depths of a bleak, frozen landscape). The motive sounds twice in each bar, the second statement one note higher in the scale, forming a rising four-note idea that recalls a similarly freighted motive in Wagner. Both the ostinato and the plaintive melody that rises above it sound like they are trying to restate the opening of the Prelude to the third act of
Tristan
, and indeed Debussy's prelude retraces the steps of Wagner's phrase by phrase. Debussy indicates the complexity of the allusion by mirroring Wagner's consoling second theme, a downward chromatic drift, with a diatonic theme in G
major that is not only as distant from the d minor tonic as possible but is also played mainly on the black keys, above the symbolic snow line.
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The submerged intertextual links, though, reinforce the central theme of the
Préludes.
Replacing romantic heat and humidity with a brittle chill, Debussy recast Wagner's heaving emotion-laden notes as black markings on a white page, evanescent as footprints in the snow. Once we hear the snowy landscape as a metaphor for the piano keyboard itself, the prelude becomes a commentary on the relation of piano and orchestra. The piano, essentially a percussion instrument, cannot simulate the swelling string crescendo (with all violins on the open G string) that begins Wagner's prelude. By comparison with that warm sound, the
piano is a treacherous icy timbral landscape; the pianist's touch, skating on thin ice, must assert illusion over physics. Yet, as Lockspeiser points out, the piano's physical limitation relative to the orchestra is also a strength: “It was sometimes to be an instrument that drew music from the circumambient air, or that could project patterns made up of myriads of little sounds. It was never admitted to be an instrument inferior, in the range of shadings of its dynamics, to wind or string instruments. Its defects were its virtues.”
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Transforming Wagner's warm sounds to an icy “
valeur sonore
” no orchestra could produce, the piano asserts its symbolic superiority.