Nocturnes, and: Nocturnes: 1898-1899 (review)

Claude Debussy. Nocturnes. Édition de Denis Herlin. (Œuvres complètes, ser. V, vol. 3.) Paris: Durand, c1999. [Gen. pref. in Fr., Eng., p. ix; foreword, p. xi-xxv; select bibliog., p. xxvii; score, 137 p.; abbrevs., p. 139-41; crit. notes, p. 143-53; variants, p. 155-211; appendix, p. 213-22; facsims., p. 223-39. Cloth. D. & F. 15217. Fr 995.]

Claude Debussy. Nocturnes: I. Nuages - II. Fêtes - III. Sirènes, 1898- 1899. Édition de Denis Herlin. Paris: Durand (T. Presser), c2000. [Foreword in Fr., Eng., 1 p.; nomenclature, 1 p.; score, p. 1-135. D. & F. 15235. Fr 199.]

Claude Debussy's Nocturnes for orchestra (1898-99) are arguably this composer's farthest-reaching forward leap into the future of music, and, especially in Nuages, his single most radical exploration of previously unknown realms of tonality--a resplendent beginning to the new twentieth century that Debussy's art did so much to change. And in the realm of pure sound, no less than in tonality, the Nocturnes proclaim a new world. Certainly it is true that in the Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune (1894), Debussy made genuinely new discoveries in timbre; but the pathbreaking originality of that work lies principally in its art nouveau melody and form, and in its orchestration. Faune more than anything else shows Debussy's transforming mastery of a kind of sound that Richard Wagner had perfected in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.

It was in the Nocturnes that Debussy, building upon some tentative earlier attempts in La damoiselle élue and the Fantaisie, invented the heterophonic orchestra that dominates the character of all his later orchestral works. The invention was fully successful, but the Nocturnes reveal that it was a continuing struggle. Revisions of the Nocturnes occupied Debussy at various times even up to his final years. As a result, and because of a complex history of publication, the score of the Nocturnes has presented more varied and minutely difficult editorial problems than any other major work published in the twentieth century.

One hundred and two years after Debussy finished the score (probably for the first time), some documentary questions still remain. It will never be possible to arrive at a definitive, final version of the score of the Nocturnes as Debussy would have wanted it, because, as now seems clear, Debussy himself did not know what this would be. But in this new critical edition for the Debussy Œuvres complètes, all of the most important questions concerning the establishment of a text of the Nocturnes for practical performance have been confidently answered. Denis Herlin, whose doctoral research at the École pratique des Hautes-Études in Paris was a comprehensive study of the Nocturnes, and whose publications on the subject go back to 1988, has made this edition as authoritative as possible. His effort has been enormous; the list of corrections and variant readings, fifty-seven pages in double columns, is testimony to his painstaking precision.

The problems of the Nocturnes begin with the genesis of the work, which is still mysterious, continue through its long gestation and birth, and endure for years afterward. Most writers, taking their cues from Debussy's early biographer Léon Vallas and from more or less vague clues in Debussy's published correspondence, assume that what Debussy referred to in 1892 as Trois scènes au crépuscule, based on poems by Henri de Régnier, was an early version of the Nocturnes, and that a violin concerto for Eugène Ysaÿe that Debussy claimed to have "nearly finished" was a later manifestation. Unfortunately, neither of these supposed versions survives--at least not in a form that can in any way be connected with the Nocturnes as we now have them, which date from 1897 at the earliest. Thus, although Debussy may well have had the idea of composing three orchestral pieces at the same time that he was deep into his never-finished Rodrigue et Chimène...