Debussy – Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’

Recording: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Score: From IMSLP

Poem: Stéphane Mallarmé – L’Après-midi d’un faune

Lecture points

Review sheet for Debussy and Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’

Debussy

  • young virtuoso pianist, went to Paris Conservatoire at 10, won Prix de Rome at 22
  • visited Bayreuth, Wagner’s music made a deep (but conflicting) impression (compare the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and the middle of Golliwogg’s Cakewalk)
  • saw a Javanese gamelan ensemble at Paris exposition of 1889 (Eiffel Tower)
  • Pelléas et Mélisande was first major operatic success (1902), also based on a play, some Wagnerian influence
  • friends with Erik Satie, Stravinsky (both produced ballets for Sergei Diaghilev), Ravel
  • was appointed to Paris Conservatoire, wrote Première Rhapsodie for clarinet

Impressionism and Symbolism

  • impressionism in music: from impressionism in painting, tone and texture over melody and form
  • Debussy rejected the impressionist label, preferring…
  • Symbolism: a literary movement (including Stéphane Mallarmé), using images (or symbols) to suggest meaning
  • symbolism avoids direct and traditional narrative, using mystical elements and metaphor instead

Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’

  • Debussy’s prelude is based on Stéphane Mallarmé poem of the same name
  • the poem depicts the dreamlike trance of a faun thinking about nymphs
  • faun – half human, half goat, animalistic and lustful, instrument is the panpipes
  • whole-tone scale: scale composed of 6 notes a whole tone apart
    • lack of half steps makes it sound identical no matter what note you begin with
  • modal scales: scales with a different pattern of half and whole steps
    • in a given key signature, start scale on a note other than the tonic to get a mode
    • diverse modes existed in medieval music
  • chromatic scales combined with parallel fourths/fifths result in an absence of harmonic function
  • antique cymbals: a new instrument for orchestra, small finger cymbals
  • glissando: harp technique, creates unique timbre