Debussy's ten-minute tone poem for
orchestra takes its inspiration from the eponymous poem by Stephane
Mallarme, and was meant to be the prelude to a ballet choreographed
by Valery Nijinsky. Though the ballet is rarely performed, Debussy's
prelude has proven to be nothing short of one of the most important
watershed works in modern music history. Ambiguous in its meter,
capricious in tonality, and full of the impressionistic colors which
were Debussy's unique legacy, the prelude is a loose montage of
scenes from a torpid afternoon in which the mythical faun vainly
pursues a pair of elusive wood nymphs. He reaches them only in a
sensual, dream-filled slumber in which he is united with them and
nature. The language in both the textual and musical poems is
suffused in light, unrealized passion, and vivid languor.
The famous opening flute solo is
representative of the faun, who plays his pan-pipe in the woods. From
the beginning our sense of tonality is tricked and tricked again, as
the flute oscillates between the two notes of a tritone; the melody
hints briefly at E-major, but then the orchestra enters in B-flat
major, the most unexpected key possible. There is a silent bar as the
music seems to ponder this turn of events, before trying again.
Wandering interjections from horns and harp wreathe the flute, padded
by soft strings. The harmonies wander, but every time it seems to be
reaching a point of arrival, of realization or resolution, the goal
shifts or evaporates altogether.
With the entrance of a solo clarinet
and muttering celli, the shadows of the nymphs appear, and the
consequent pursuit and flight are shown by fleeting, unresolved
scales, muted brass, and tantalizing pizzicati. As the music grows
more animated and passionate, the orchestration grows lush and
colorful, but the sweetest moments are also the most hushed and
delicate, undulating just underneath the surface. This is the
ethereal world that persists to the end of the piece, drifting in
between enchanted yearning and fleeting luxuriousness. And what to
make of the resolution: clear, unambiguous E Major, a certainty which
has eluded us the entire piece? The faun escapes to sleep, forsaking
his pursuit, but realizes his desires in the other world of slumber:
“Farewell to you... I go to see the shadow you have become.”
for preparation for conducting auditions, my teacher suggested that i be able to write down the title of this thing, in french. um... yea, i mean, i can sort of do it...
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.
usually as per my one movement a day custom I would try to separate the "sacred" and "secular" (for that's what "profane" means in this case), because they are actually two separate movements, but in the first place it's extremely difficult to find a recording which only does one of the two, and in the second place the two combined are only about 10 minutes long. so this counts as a double post.
probably the most interesting thing about this very serene, fairly conventional piece is that it was originally written for the chromatic harp, i.e. a harp with a string for every chromatic note, 12 strings per octave instead of the usual 7, and no pedals to change said keys. this thing took, as you might imagine, a ridiculous amount of time to tune, and was soon abandoned after its 1904 debut. but this piece isn't actually so unplayable on a conventional harp. debussy wrote it on commission from pleyel, the company which was producing the newly minted chromatic harps.
the first movement is usually described as modal, perhaps inspired by debussy's impressions of music from the greco-roman period. it's a slow and ritualistic contrast to the second movement, which is a graceful d major waltz.
