Nocturnes (Debussy)
| Nocturnes | |
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| Orchestral music by Claude Debussy | |
,_p_3r.jpg) Original manuscript of the orchestral arrangement | |
| Catalogue | L. 91, CD. 98 |
| Based on |
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| Composed | 1892–99 |
| Dedication | Georges Hartmann (publisher) |
| Performed |
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| Published |
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| Movements |
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| Scoring |
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Nocturnes, L. 91, CD.98, sometimes Trois Nocturnes or Three Nocturnes, is an impressionist orchestral composition in three movements, by the French composer Claude Debussy, who wrote it between 1892 and 1899. It is based on poems from Poèmes anciens et romanesques (Henri de Régnier, 1890; [1]).
The composition
Three Scenes at Twilight
Composition of the Nocturnes began in 1892 under the title Trois Scènes au Crépuscule ("Three Scenes at Twilight"),[1] an orchestral triptych[2] inspired by a set of ten poems by Henri de Régnier entitled Poèmes anciens et romanesques (published in 1890; [2]).[1] Régnier was a symbolist poet, and his poems contain vivid imagery and dreamlike associations of ideas. Debussy desired to write music "made up of colors and rhythms... [not] something that can be poured into a tight and traditional form"; he found suitable material in these poems.[1][3]
Debussy was creating the work for an intended performance in New York City, promoted and sponsored by Prince André Poniatowski, a banker and writer, and a confidant to whom Debussy frequently expressed himself in long letters.[4][5][6] The New York performance was to consist of the premiere of Debussy's Fantaisie for piano and orchestra completed two years earlier, a rather traditional work in classical form, a tradition which Debussy in the next two years would reject and musically move away from (resulting in the Fantaisie never being performed or published in his lifetime), and his experimental oratorio La Damoiselle élue, from four years prior, also still unperformed as yet, and the Twilight Scenes, which Debussy told the Prince were "pretty much finished" even though he hadn't really put anything on paper yet.[4][5] The American concert deal fell through mostly due to the slow postal correspondence across the Atlantic with Poniatowski,[4] but also because Debussy was busy with so many as-yet unfinished projects occupying his time.
Debussy was already working with difficulty on his opera Rodrigue et Chimène, a biography of El Cid, eventually destroying its complete score because he felt he could no longer write "that kind of music" to "that kind of literature".[7] He was also working on another orchestral triptych after a cycle of three poems by another symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, called L'après-midi d'un faune, that was more in keeping with the new style of music and inspiration Debussy was seeking. He had in fact asked Henri de Régnier, a close associate of Mallarmé, to inform the latter of his interest in setting the poems to a new kind of musical impression.[1] Mallarmé was vehemently opposed to juxtaposing poetry and music and was strongly against Debussy's compositional idea,[8] but after he heard the completed Prélude based on his first poem, Debussy had evidently caused him to completely reverse his belief, as he expressed his astonishment in lavishing praise and admiration in a personal letter to the composer.[9]
Three Nocturnes for solo violin and partitioned orchestra
Meanwhile, Debussy's Scènes au Crépuscule, after Régnier's poetry, were finally completed in piano score in 1893, but before Debussy had a chance to orchestrate them he attended the premiere performance of his String Quartet in G minor in December, given by the Ysaÿe Quartet, led by Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe.[10] Debussy was impressed and flattered by Ysaÿe's interest in his music and decided to rewrite his Twilight Scenes into a piece for solo violin and orchestra.[1]
In 1894, after completing the first movement of his Mallarmé triptych, entitled Prélude (to "The Afternoon of a Faune"), he began the recomposition of the Twilight Scenes, in a new inspired style, retitling the new version Nocturnes, after a series of paintings of the same name by James McNeill Whistler, who was living in Paris at the time.[11][1] In September he described the music to Ysaÿe as "an experiment with the different combinations possible with a single musical colour, in much the same way a painter might make a study in various shades of grey".[10] Debussy was referring to Whistler's most famous painting of his mother called Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, the first of Whistler's Nocturnes.[1] Debussy scored the orchestral part of the first of the three pieces for strings alone, the second for only flutes, horns, trumpets, and harps, and the third for the two groupings together.[10][1]
Following the burning of the manuscript of Rodrigue et Chimène in 1893, Debussy had immediately begun work on an opera more to his liking, Pelléas et Mélisande, which occupied him with no small measure of trouble over the next nine years. Thus it wasn't until 1896 that he informed Ysaÿe the music for the Nocturnes had pretty much been completed and he still wanted Ysaÿe to perform the solo violin part.[1][10] Before Debussy put the finishing touches on the work, however, Pelléas continued to consume him and he only occasionally wrote smaller piano pieces and songs to take a break from composition of the opera.
Three Nocturnes for orchestra
By 1897, Debussy had decided to dispense with a solo violin part and the orchestral groupings, and simply write all three movements for a full orchestra. He worked for the next two years on the Nocturnes, and once confessed to his friend and benefactor, the publisher Georges Hartmann,[12] that despite the difficulties he still frequently encountered in composing a five-act opera, these three orchestral pieces were giving him even more trouble.[1] Wanting to equal the sensation caused by the success of the Afternoon of a Faune piece,[1] he drove himself toward an over-perfectionism with the Nocturnes. Having worked on the composition for seven years, constantly revising it and changing its very structure several times, he expected it to live up to his own grand, avant-garde views: "I love music passionately, and because I love it I try to free it from the barren traditions that stifle it," he said, "It is a free art, gushing forth, an open-air art, an art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea! It must never be shut in and become an academic art."[1]
Completion, dedication, publication, performance, and revision
The final manuscript of the Nocturnes is signed with the completion date of 15 December 1899 at 3 A.M.[2] The manuscript bears a dedication to Georges Hartmann, and it was published by him under the Eugène Fromont imprint in 1900.[13]
The first two movements, Nuages and Fêtes, received their premiere on 9 December 1900 in Paris by the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard. The third movement Sirènes could not be staged because the female choir needed for it was unavailable.[10] The complete work was premiered by the same orchestra and conductor on 27 October 1901. Though these initial performances received a cool response from the public, they were unanimously hailed by fellow musicians. A typical review ran: "It is pure music, conceived beyond the limits of reality, in the world of dreams, among the ever-moving architecture that God builds with mists, the marvelous creations of the impalpable realms" (Pierre de Bréville in the Mercure de France).[1]
For several years after their publication, almost until the day he died, Debussy continued to tinker with the composition, at first making corrections to dozens of errors in his copy of the published score, but then to adjusting small passages and to fundamentally revising the orchestration.[13][1] Two of these scores exist with Debussy's changes in different colors of pencils and inks, and often these changes are contradictory or simply alternate versions.[13] As Debussy told conductor Ernest Ansermet when the latter asked which were the right ones: "I'm not really sure; they are all possibilities. Take this score with you and use whatever you like from it."[13] Debussy continued to modify the composition just as he had for the seven years prior to its publication, sometimes just not satisfied or sometimes thinking of a new experiment in sound, a new colour combination of instrumental timbres he hadn't heard yet.
Many of these changes were finally incorporated into a "definitive version" published in 1930 by Jobert.[13][1] This is the version that is performed today, though yet another version with many more of Debussy's "possibilities" was published in 1999 by Durand, edited and anotated by Denis Herlin.[13] The Nocturnes are considered one of Debussy's most accessible and popular works, admired for their beauty and for still holding new possibilities and wonder upon repeated hearings.[11]
Movements
There are three movements, each with a descriptive title. The entire work lasts approximately 25 minutes.[11] Debussy wrote an "introductory note" to the Nocturnes and each of the individual movements, printed in the programme for the first complete performance in 1901: "The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests."[14]
I. Nuages ("Clouds")
Instrumentation
2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais (English horn), 2 (soprano) clarinets in B♭, 3 bassoons;
4 valve (French) horns in F;
2 timbales in B & D, harp;
(strings): 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses.
Tempo markings
Modéré – Un peu animé – Tempo I – Plus lent – Encore plus lent.
Notes
"'Nuages' renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white." — Debussy[14]
Biographer Léon Vallas recorded Debussy's comments on the genesis of this piece: "One day, in stormy weather, as Debussy was crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris with his friend Paul Poujaud, he told him that on a similar kind of day the idea of the symphonic work 'Clouds' had occurred to him: he had visualized those very thunderclouds swept along by a stormy wind; a boat passing, with its horn sounding. These two impressions are recalled in the languorous succession of chords and by the short chromatic theme on the English horn."[1]
-
Cor anglais melody, bars 5-8 -
Theme -
Chromatic elements -
Pentatonic elements -
Parallel seventh chords in Nuages -
Use of dissonance
II. Fêtes ("Festivals")
8 time
Instrumentation
3 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais (English horn), 2 (soprano) clarinets in B♭, 3 bassoons;
4 valve (French) horns in F, 3 valve trumpets in F, 3 trombones, tuba;
2 harps, 3 timbales in D♭, A, & E, cymbals, snare drum;
(strings): 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses.
Tempo markings
Animé et très rythmé – Un peu plus animé – Modéré (mais toujours très rythmé) – Tempo I – De plus en plus sonore et en serrant le mouvement – Même Mouvement.
Notes
"'Fêtes' gives the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm." — Debussy[14]
Léon Vallas, in his biography, continues: "Debussy went on to explain to Poujaud that 'Festivals' had been inspired by a recollection of merry-making in the Bois de Boulogne, with noisy crowds watching the drum and bugle corps of the Garde Nationale pass in parade."[1]
III. Sirènes ("Sirens")
Instrumentation
3 flutes, oboe, cor anglais (English horn), clarinets in A, 3 bassoons;
4 valve (French) horns in F, 3 trumpets in F;
2 harps;
(female chorus): 8 sopranos, 8 mezzo-sopranos;
(strings): 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses.
Tempo markings
Modérément animé – Un peu plus lent – En animant, surtout dans l’expression – Revenir progressivement au Tempo I – En augmentant peu à peu – Tempo I – Plus lent et en retenant jusqu’à la fin.
Notes
"'Sirènes' depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on." — Debussy[14]
Léon Vallas' biography concludes: "The finale 'Sirens', which includes women's chorus though they sing without text, derives from [the poem] L'Homme et la Sirène by Henri de Régnier."[1]
Arrangements
The complete work was transcribed in 1910 for two pianos by Maurice Ravel in collaboration with Debussy's stepson and pupil Raoul Bardac, first performed in 1911.[10] Fêtes was arranged for solo piano by the English pianist Leonard Borwick, and the arrangement has been recorded by Emil Gilels, among others.[15] Fêtes has also been transcribed for large symphonic wind ensemble by Merlin Patterson and William Schaefer.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Richard E. Rodda (2019). "Nocturnes Nos. 1 and 2. About the Work. Composer: Claude Debussy". The Kennedy Center. Article also at Santa Barbara Symphony website. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
- ^ a b Geoff Kuenning (14 December 1996). "Debussy: Nocturnes". Program notes for Concerts by the Symphony of the Canyons. UCLA. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
- ^ Edward Lockspeiser (1978) [reprint of 1966 Second ed. (1st ed. 1962)]. Debussy: His Life and Mind, Volume 1 : 1862–1902. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-521-29341-9.
- ^ a b c Harvey Lee Snyder (2015). Afternoon of a Faun: How Debussy Created a New Music for the Modern World. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press. pp. 117–120. ISBN 978-1-574-67482-8.
- ^ a b Edward Lockspeiser ibid. pp. 168–169.
- ^ Robert Orledge (2003). "Debussy the Man". In Simon Trezise (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-65478-4.
- ^ Claude Samuel (1995). Rodrigue et Chimène, notes (Media notes). Erato Disques. pp. 12–13. Debussy: Rodrigue et Chimène (Kent Nagano, conductor), Erato 98508 (CD), 1995.
- ^ Paul Valéry (1933). "Stephane Mallarmé". Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 8: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé. Translated by Malcolm Cowley; James R. Lawler. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (published 1972). p. 263. ISBN 0-7100-7148-5.
- ^ Maurice Dumesnil (1979) [1940]. Claude Debussy : Master of Dreams. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-313-20775-4.
- ^ a b c d e f Peter Avis (1999). Trois Nocturnes, L98. composer: Claude Debussy (Media notes). Hyperion Records. Liner notes to Debussy : The complete music for two pianos (Stephen Coombs and Christian Scott, 2p), Helios CDH55014 (CD), May 1999 [1991 Hyperion]. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
- ^ a b c "Nocturnes". Los Angeles Philharmonic. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
- ^ IMSLP. "G. Hartmann". Petrucci Music Library. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
- ^ a b c d e f Mark DeVoto (16 May 2018) [Revised from Notes September 2001]. "Claude Debussy: Nocturnes. Édition de Denis Herlin. Paris: Durand, 1999 & Paris: Durand (T. Presser), 2000. Reviewed" (PDF). Tufts University. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
- ^ a b c d Donald Brook (1971) [1946]. Five great French composers: Berlioz, César Franck, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel: Their Lives and Works. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. p. 168.
- ^ Ates Tanin (1 August 2005). "Recorded Gilels". Doremi.
External links
- Nocturnes: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
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