prelude to the afternoon of a faun is based on a poem by the same name by poet stephane mallarme, a symbolist artist and critic. it was written in 1894 and eventually became part of a ballet. the prelude itself is considered one of the cornerstones in the compositional/tonal development, a sort of set-up for 20th century tonality.
this and almost all other french compositions of the time were all works that would have likely not been composed were it not for paris itself. while vienna, salzburg, berlin etc all had thriving musical exchange, it's hard to find any place that music got as truly integrated into the artistic scene as paris. by this i mean how artists across disciplines constantly produced works that were directly inspired by their contemporaries. the sheer number of gatherings that ALWAYS involved artists from all corners made it inevitable. that's of course not to say that artists in other countries/cities didn't know each other or of each other; of course they did. no single body of work from one place reflects that bond as strongly as anything produced in paris during the 19th century.
this is the original poem, which was published in its final form in 1876. you can pop it into a translator to read. but the premise is just about the lazy afternoon of a faun (a mythical creature of the forest half goat half human). he is playing some pipes as he watches lustily but lazily at the passing forest nymphs and naiads. after he fails in his pursuit he drifts off to sleep and has lots of sketchy dreams.
though the poem has a sort of plot, the piece is very atmospheric - it basically is meant to evoke a mood, and not really to portray any events, though you might liken some of the elements in it to those found in the piece (such as the sinuous lazy opening flute line, which you might hear the faun playing at the beginning of the poem). it's possible that it is meant to represent only the first part of the poem - the lazy adulation of all the forest creatures - because debussy originally planned for there to be two other movements (they were never written). but all in all it is not so much a tone poem as a mood piece (or, appropriately, just a prelude).
this is the only recording i can find that is interesting on youtube...
stokowski apparently on his 90th birthday.
this piece is hard to dissect because it is so languid and so well blended. i'll give it a rough shot.
we begin with a slow flute solo, slithering up and down, accompanied by harp glisses and gentle swells of the strings. this is marked tres modere. it comes and goes in speed and intensity, but the flute line remains a constant presence. sometimes it finds its way to the sunlight. the writing here reminds me a lot of his first nocturne, nuages.
3:31 a new section, new instrumentations - whole tone scales given by solo clarinets and flutes, with a shadowy collection of skittering celli and pizz underneath. one can imagine lots of sinuous visions flitting by.
at 4:00 we have the beginnings of a swell that will spur the piece to a higher level of intensity; strings come out lushly, and the harmonies get a bit brighter, but still nebulous. at the last moment there is a retenu, and we return to tempo primo dreamily at 4:59.
5:27 is a shift into a different key area, a sort of d-flat major. the new motif given by the winds here reminds me a lot of the third movement of pines of rome. this new theme is quite a bit sunnier, and is accompanied by ongoing harp arpeggios and triplets which grind against the strings' duple rhythm melody. a minute later everything dies away and we have a rendition of that same melody but now played by one solo violin, with the triplet figures in gentle solo winds.
OK, instead of finishing this sort of play by play i'm just going to paste something i wrote for a class in which this was one of the listening assignments we had to respond to. that week was debussy/ravel, a bridge to twentieth century tonality. i think the nature of this piece is described a bit more aptly below. for me the prelude has no boundaries, internally. there are sudden moments of clarity which we can grab onto, but otherwise it is just like being in a drug induced haze or a dream. the reason this piece was such a big deal was because of its real lack of tonal center, and that's mostly what i've written about below.
These pieces display a nebulous, constantly shifting tonal center and a pushing of the traditional boundaries of functional harmony (or in many cases throwing it out the window). There aren't really chord progressions or modulations in the usual sense, instead, Debussy uses alternative scales (the whole-tone and pentatonic, often) and moves around keys as if they have been mapped out in a field according to both their parallel and relative keys, resulting in a lot of surprising key changes in enharmonic keys (different approaches which seem to converge on the same key, substitutions, etc) which make both his and Ravel's music really difficult to read on a string instrument, except perhaps the harp, which is built to move around keys in just such a way. In this sense both composers' music, while extremely difficult for harpists, seems to suit the instrument rather well.
There are a lot of tritones and other augmented intervals (from the whole-tone scale or some other alternative to the traditional diatonic scale) that lend themselves to the feeling of "enharmonicism," the feeling that the intervals occupy a function somewhere in between different keys, and may allow the music to change harmonic "centers" on a dime.
[...]
The poems that Ravel and Debussy both selected to set to music have an ethereal, somewhat lazy, misty quality in the word choice and subject material that is well-evoked in the music of both these composers.
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