Debussy: Piano Edition / Thibaudet, Kocsis, Etc

Jean Yves Thibaudet, Zoltan Kocsis, Philippe Cassard, etc.

6 CD set!
When the eighteen-year-old Debussy set about writing the first piano piece of his that we know of, in the summer of 1880, there was very little in the French repertoire for the instrument that he could build on. Brief essays by Gounod and Massenet merely indicated that their real interest lay elsewhere, in the opera house. Berlioz was no pianist, while Bizet, wonderful keyboard player that he was (even Liszt admired him), left nothing for solo piano to match his set of duet pieces, Jeux d'enfants. Chabrier's piano music would soon become one of the young Claude's enthusiasms, but most of this was still to come in 1880, as were all but the first of Fauré's Nocturnes. The Danse bohémienne of 1880 does not give much in the way of promise of what lay ahead, nor does the movement of a symphony written at the same time which got no further than a version for piano duet. He composed these while acting as house pianist for Tchaikovsky's patroness Nadezhda von Meck, and in reply to her envoi of the Danse the Russian composer commented that it was "nice, but too short, with themes that don't go anywhere, and the form is bungled and not unified". Whether this harsh judgement put Debussy off writing piano music, we cannot know, but it is surprising that such a capable pianist should have written, or at least published, nothing for the instrument during the 1880s. He spent the most formative years of that decade first with an eye on the Prix de Rome, working at cantatas, choruses and fugues (the Cortège and Air de danse from his winning entry of 1884 show what a master of light music he could be when the mood took him). After that came the two years in Rome itself, where he began the struggle to free himself from the influences of Massenet and later of Wagner. Reports of Debussy's playing from his student years tell us that he erred on the side of bombast, accompanied by a certain amount of puffing and blowing. This was in direct contrast with his keyboard manner in later years, when critics complained that they couldn't always hear him. Certainly there's no bombast about the piano works that began to appear at the turn of the decade, beginning with the delightful Petite Suite for piano duet, with its implicit reverence towards the fêtes galantes of the eighteenth century, as described by Verlaine. The two Arabesques are examples of the way in which decoration in Debussy's music was increasingly doing the duty of more solid substance, and in this are echoed by the five other piano pieces that date from around 1890: Valse romantique suggests that he had now heard some Fauré, while the titles Ballade slave and Tarantelle styrienne exploit the French penchant for the exotic with very little that's Slavic or Styrian (whatever that might be) in the music itself. Even the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, completed in April 1890, treats the solo instrument as a concertante partner, although there is plenty of energy in the race to the final chord. Perhaps the first signs of Debussy's mature piano style appear in the Suite bergamasque which he gave to a publisher in 1890, but which for some reason did not appear until 1905. The famous "Clair de lune" was originally given the title "Promenade sentimentale" (which perhaps warns against turning the composer's Andante into an Adagio). Only in the 'Prélude' does Debussy assume the grand manner -- with a self-deprecating smile? Dating from 1891, the Marche écossaise was the composer's first commission, using a piper's tune provided by John Meredith Read, who had been US consul-general for France. But almost as a decade earlier, Debussy's attention was now largely given to vocal and orchestral works -- the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and the Nocturnes. The few piano pieces he did compose before 1903 -- the three Images oubliées (the epithet is not his) and the suite Pour le piano -- show him still searching for a coherent keyboard style and trying out pseudo-harpsichord figuration and, in the third Image, responses to visual stimuli. As these obviously bring in the whole question of Impressionism, it may be as well to mention the composer's only take on the movement. At work in 1908 on his orchestral Images, he told his publisher "I'm trying to write `something else' -- realities, in a manner of speaking -- what imbeciles call 'Impressionism', a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art!" Composing "realities" called for extreme technical accuracy, and this scientific approach did bring Debussy close to the Impressionist painters in the sense that their "atmospheric" canvases were profoundly influenced by the science of complementary colours. Nor was this all. As the novelist Edmond Duranty noted in 1879, while some new painters tried to render the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water and the vibration of sun-drenched air, others aimed to paint the walk, movement and hustle and bustle of passers-by in the modern city of Paris, in this evoking "the fleeting beauty" Baudelaire talked of in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life". These two subjects, Nature and the modern city, together with the historical and geographical exotic, now led Debussy to compose some of his most beautiful and inventive music. With the Estampes of 1903, he truly found his mature piano style. They were written just after he had seen an exhibition of Turner's paintings in London, and they certainly contain their share of artistic mystery, whether in the gamelan-influenced textures of "Pagodes", the slightly acidulous Hispanicisms of "La soirée dans Grenade" (a nod here to Ravel's "Habanera" of 1895) or the refeshing showers of "Jardins sous la pluie" amid which a voice intones the composer's favourite popular song: "Nous n'irons plus au bois". Mystery abounds in Masques, which Debussy said was "the tragic expression of existence" -- a remark that might seem to go against the piece's dancing spirit, except that there are also disconcerting moments when logic seems to be in peril. In contrast, L'Isle joyeuse is one of the composer's most life-affirming works, rhythmically more stable than Masques and giving hints that La Mer lay just round the headland. Just as Debussy was never happy to be given any kind of label, so the titles of his pieces are, as with Masques, at times puzzling and even contradictory. Thus two of the three pieces in the first series of Images do not correspond explicitly with any painting or view of Nature. Instead, Debussy uses the word 'image' in a more symbolic sense. "Hommage à Rameau", perhaps inspired by hearing the opera Castor et Pollux conducted by Vincent d'Indy in 1903, contains no reference that has ever been discovered to any work by Rameau, but is emblematic of that restrained dignity, free of heaviness or self-advertisement, that Debussy so treasured in the music of his predecessor. Likewise, "Mouvement" is an abstract piece, perhaps sharing with Edgar Degas, a painter Debussy knew and admired, a fascination with moving figures. "Reflets dans l'eau" and the three pieces of the second series are all pictures in music, whether imagined or, as in the case of "Poissons d'or", real: we hear the swoops and twitches of two large carp as featured on a Japanese plaque in black lacquer, touched up with mother-of-pearl and gold, that hung on the wall in the composer's study. The six delightful vignettes of Children's Corner, dedicated to his daughter Chouchou "with her father's tender apologies for what follows", end with the first of Debussy's popular or city pieces, "Golliwogg's Cake- Walk", and he continued the genre in the two books of Préludes, published in 1910 and 1913. 'Minstrels' depicts a group of red-jacketed musicians who played saxophones and guitars outside the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne when Debussy stayed there in 1905, and "General Lavine -- excentric" (Debussy's spelling) a music hall artist once described as "a comic juggler, half tramp and half warrior", hence the trumpet calls. A milder eccentric appears in the shape of Mr Pickwick, adorned with the initials that Debussy found so amusing and standing for "Perpetual President-Member Pickwick Club" -- a patriot too, as the opening bars proclaim. Elsewhere Nature is given full rein (wind, the evening air, hills, snow, fog, leaves, heather) together with bells, Spanish lovers, sails, dancers from Ancient Greece and Shakespeare, and finally fireworks. Ravel was not the only musician to immerse himself in 'these admirable masterpieces' of the first book in April 1910; and if the second book took longer to establish itself, that may be owing to its more advanced language -- by then Debussy had heard and been amazed by Stravinsky's Petrouchka. His last two major piano works both date from the summer and autumn of 1915. The war weighed heavily on him, all the more so because age and incipient cancer made him feel so helpless. The three movements of En blanc et noir all carry epigraphs that refer, directly or indirectly, to the "realities" of the war. In the first, all men are adjured to "dance" -- that is, to take part in the hostilities -- and the music sweeps along with irresistible brio. In the second, the enemies of France are portrayed by what Debussy called "the poisonous fumes" of "Ein' feste Burg", finally despatched by the "Marseillaise". The epigraph to the third, "Yver, vous n'estes qu'un villain" (Winter, you're nothing more than a criminal), maybe suggests a winter of the spirit, brought on by war. At all events there's no triumphalism here. Bleak chords sound out, energy dissipates, leaving mere ashes of optimism. The piano parts of the two sonatas, with violin and cello, are spare, precisely judged and a world away from reflections in the water and the sounds of bells through leaves, recalling his near-final words to a young composer: "Distrust the exceptional". If the twelve Études are exceptional (and they are), it is not through any desire to astonish the bourgeois, but simply through Debussy's scientific analyses and "composition" (in the literal sense of "putting together") of his chosen data. Editing volumes of Chopin was the spur, as we can tell from the study in sixths, retaining Chopin's key of D flat major. But the one in fourths breaks wholly new ground, departing from the hallowed imposition of thirds on which harmony had been based for centuries. For years after Debussy's death these pieces were neglected: weird, driven by strange logic... and ferociously difficult to play. They look forward to the piano works of Boulez, Ligeti, Griffes and many others, not entirely renouncing sonorous luxury, but enlivening it with passages of wild energy and searching chromaticism -- music of the future, but minus the Wagnerian publicity.

Price: $52.98