RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: DEBUSSY

1 6 7 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R Claude Debussy’s music is usually heard in visual terms. That is, it is perceived as depicting images or series of images, largely because of the titles the composer gave to his pieces: Images, Estampes , Nocturnes, Esquisses, piano preludes titled to evoke pictures . Music, of course, cannot depict, comprised as it is of sounds in time; it can only stimulate associations. If we did not know that La mer was about the sea, would we automatically associate that with the sounds Debussy provides? Despite the prominence of these ersatz-pictorial scores, Debussy throughout his career wrote a sizable body of other, largely lessknown works attached to narratives, specific dramatic texts and scenarios. Opera success was always the path of choice to fame and fortune in Paris, especially the latter, and Debussy was always in need of money. With the arrival of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909 Paris, ballets began to be set to significant music, not just the melodic wallpaper that most balletomanes preferred (and still do). And of special interest to Debussy, Diaghilev paid well. As a finalist in the annual Prix de Rome competitions of 1883 and 1884, Debussy was required to show proficiency in operatic composition. Each competitor was provided with a brief libretto 1 6 8 F A U L K N E R Y and required to set it, preferably in a pleasing and conventional manner. In 1883 the set text was Le Gladiateur, in which the imprisoned Nicias awaits his fate in the arena but is saved by Fulvia, daughter of his hated captor, Marcellus. The text alternated arias and ensembles with recitatives. Debussy set it all adequately if unmemorably. In 1884 the drama was L’Enfant Prodigue , in which Azaël, the prodigal son, returns penitently to his grieving mother, Lia, and his loving but possibly hesitant father, Simeon. This time Debussy did everything right: an evocative prelude, a big grieving aria for Lia, an atmospheric little ballet, and pleasing stu√ for the rest. He won the prize and was o√ to Italy in January 1885. Debussy lasted two years there instead of the expected four and then created little music until April 1890, when he received a libretto from Catulle Mendès based on the legend of El Cid, titled Rodrigue et Chimène. Mendès is remembered operatically today primarily for the text to Emmanuel Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1886), and Rodrigue is a lesser work than that. Debussy worked at setting it through 1892 and finished most of the text’s first three acts, in some form or other. In many places stylistically it is merely a continuation of L’Enfant Prodigue. In others, where Mendès descends into bluster and bombast, the discontinuity between its scenery-chewing text and Debussy’s subtle and restrained realization of it is astonishing. This radical incompatibility of text and composer proved to be more than Debussy could tolerate, and he broke o√ work on Rodrigue, although he kept tinkering with it into 1893. This left Debussy without an operatic project until 17 May 1893, when a group of enthusiasts for the dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck gave a single performance in Paris of his new Pelléas et Mélisande. In preparation, Debussy read the play and became obsessed with it. With its oblique, conversational speeches separated by silences, its gloom-filled setting, its action’s deliberate countering of the plot of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Pelléas was the text Debussy had long sought. As in Tristan, duty confronts passion and ends in violence and death, with the heroine willing herself to death in the last act. But in Pelléas duty wins until the end of the fourth act, and there is an infant (whose?) who will take R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 6 9 R her mother’s place and continue the cycle. There is no final...