Claude Debussy
Préludes, Books I & II
Walter Giseking
EMI Classics 67262
Dennis Bartel
I love the way French artists used to talk about their art. The Impressionists, for instance, often seized the chance to put words to their laissez vibrer wisps of pigment and chords, evoking in deliberate shadows the unmentioned object with allusive syllables, or some such smoke. Debussy, who stands with Monet when matters of influence among the Impressionists are measured, was one of the most vocal of chattering French artistes before the Great War. He went so far as to write under an alter ego’s nom de plume, Monsieur Croche, twenty articles in six months, for a pair of populist papers, La Revue Blance and Gil Blas, and the high tone pages of the International Society of Music, La Revue S.I.M. He, that is Monsieur Croche, wrote in declamatory absolutes (“Bach alone divined eternal truth”), and signed himself as an antidilettante.
Like Impressionists before him, he, that is Achille-Claude Debussy, enjoyed remarking not only on the music of other composers but also on his own. He was a most effective animater musique, often showing artful turns of phrase worthy of a dutiful student of Mallarmé. He wrote with artful plainness (“A touch of charm has never spoiled anything – Chopin proved that”), or with irony enough to pop your eyes open (“I am not sufficiently dead to be safe from comparisons”). He was also not above writing of music metaphorically (“Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes”). Debussy was not the writer that he was the composer, nor meant to be. In this way, when it came to writing, he played the dilettante – an irony Achille-Claude surely would have smirked at in his oft-reported biting way, but that did not stop him from indulging in artistic arenas in which he was not a master.
This particular kind of indulgence in more than one art at a time (an impulse Debussy carried over into his love life) is rarer now, as old-fashioned as the gentle pointillist, but no less interesting for being old. I was reminded of it was I listened again after all these years to the Préludes played by Gieseking, who in the 1930s and again in the early ’50s gave fullest voice to Debussy’s musique pour le piano. Gieseking’s two long playing 33 1/3 R.P.M records of Debussy’s Préludes which appear on this CD were aptly chosen by the Great Recordings of the Century panel as, well, among the great recordings of the 20th century. (1953-55, recorded at Abbey Road, London.)
Lyons-born of German parents, Gieseking claimed he could read by age five, and possessed a legendary skill for memorization. As a pianist, the Scholar says, “Gieseking had the tonal control to play the triple pianissimos in Debussy so that, delicate as they were, they could be heard throughout a large hall. Somehow, he had achieved complete identification with the music of Debussy, and here he was a master in his own world.”
In the first Prélude, Danseuses de Delphes, listen to Gieseking deftly draw a pillar in the Louvre, sculptured with three bacchants. Sit with Debussy on a sailboat at anchor in a sunlit French port as the boat rocks gently beneath you. Voiles. Is it me, or are you also intoxicated by the melancholy parfumes of a dying day? The fusion of odors, as the Poet says, “correct and sensual, subtle and obscene, which exudes from the very texture of the Paris life, the acrid and nostalgic fumes of French tobacco, the black coffee, the mysterious liquors, the luxurious flesh of scented women.” During the time Debussy composed his Préludes (published 1910-1913), the scented woman whose flesh he corrupted was Emma Bardac, for whom Achille-Claude had thrown over his wife Lily-Lilo, as the Great Composer had affectionately renamed her. When it comes to such a Prélude as the fifth, Les Collines d’Anacapri, Gieseking identifies with Debussy’s instruction, “with the liberté of a popular song.” The bells, the Neapolitan swing. Conversely, Des Pas sur la neige is painted with the gray silence of regret. It palpitates with doubts. Debussy’s friend (as much as Debussy had friends), André Suarès, spoke of this three-and-a-half minute exquisitely triste et lent masterpiece thusly: “The long, interminable road; the nostalgia for the light which is not there and for the warm caress: this solitude, infinite, in a word, the solitude of our soul, wandering along absorbed in itself, a solitude which all the deserts and all of the winters of earth never approach.”
With the dying chord of solitude, Debussy whips up a tumultueux storm at sea! Gieseking, with luminosity of tone, like a man remembering an illness he once had and from which he has fully recovered, obliges. Such drama from such a pastel art. Yet these are not Chopinesque melodramas played out in Achille-Claude’s Préludes. Debussy’s is an objective art. He seizes the delicate sensations of Nature like a clairvoyant. It is, how you say? Impressionniste. Take us down to the tolling of the bells, down to the watery depths of the past – organum! – the plainchant and swelling waves, the moving blocks of hollow chords. Is the cathedral really under water in the tenth Prélude, La cathédrale engloutie, or engulfed by antiquity? Debussy’s first great love, Mme. Marie-Blanche Vasnier, a singer and young wife of an elderly French architect, found the 19-year-old composer somewhat strange and “medieval” in appearance and manner.
While you ponder this, up pops arpeggiated Puck, in eleventh Prélude, La danse de Puck, dancing a mocking, mercurial danse. One thinks of Achille-Claude courting Lily-Lilo by mimicking her high, countrified voice. The final Prélude of the first book (which is held in higher regard than the second book for its organic spontaneity of genius), Minstrels, has Debussy sending in the clowns, American minstrels, circus performers (he loved the circus and used to attend wearing his cowboy hat). Oh, the droll homme d’esrit. The unhappy genius. The antidilettante. “I try to free music from the barren traditions that stifle it,” wrote Debussy.