You really don’t want it to end, but it does, followed by a sparkling rendition of Debussy’s poignant Berceuse heroique, which I would program not last, but second, after Järvi’s luscious yet delicate Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. For the first time, classical music was experiencing the rise of a permanent repertoire of older works by eminent figures such as Mozart and Beethoven. Common for all modernist composers was the act of defying traditional aspects of the language of classical music. Unlike the first oscillating idea, this second image remains relatively intact each time it appears, and is always played by the English horn. Arrangement in Grey: Portrait of the Painter, 1872 by James McNeill Whistler. This challenge, a paradox of creating new sounds while still respecting the classics, became the defining feature of modernist music at the fin de siècle. Prelude to the afternoon of a faun 1894. Debussy’s music focuses more on color and texture, rather than form and harmony. A term that is often heard in conjunction with Debussy’s name is “Impressionism,” a style of painting centered in Paris that concentrated on depicting the effects of light and color of a scene rather than clear and exact detail. The three movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes are shrouded in shadow, like the way Whistler’s paintings evoke hazy scenes in the absence of direct light. Debussy also heavily drew from non-musical sources, including Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry. (Artists from the original Impressionist circle of the 1860s and 70s included Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Sisley, but Debussy was actually a contemporary of later painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, known now as the Post-Impressionists). false Impressionist composers often made use of a strongly accented meter. Symbolists were interested not in representing or describing reality, but in exploring the intangible and inexpressible truths hiding behind external appearances. Each composer found their own individual solutions to this challenge, leading to a proliferation of diverse styles and approaches in classical music. The Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” is considered by many as the beginning of modern music. preference for muted string sounds and "nonheroic" brass, importance of melody over harmonic progression and rhythm, harmony as a dimension of melody instead of as accompaniment, use of modes and scales such as the whole-tone and pentatonic, mixture of functional and non-functional progressions, overall concern for private communication, ranks as one of the finest operas of the 20th century, voices engage in recitative-like singing style that is conversational Debussy was also significantly influenced by the writers of the French Symbolist poetry movement. You merely have to listen. chromatic and freely flowing Which best describes the character of the opening theme of Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of […] The work that ushers Debussy into his second (Impressionistic) period is "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" (1894). The piece requires a different way of listening – as you follow where the sounds take you, and enter a dream-like state much like the faun himself. The oscillating cloud image encompasses a B-minor scale, contrasting with an octatonic scale outlining a tritone in the second English horn image. Web. For the first movement Nuages (Clouds), Debussy wrote that he sought to capture “the unchanging appearance of the sky with the slow and melancholy progress of the clouds, ending in a gray dissolution gently tinged with white,” and he commented to a friend that he was thinking of the play of clouds over the Seine in Paris. Mallarme is considered to be one of the most difficult to understand French symbolist poets. Recorded live from Festival international de musique de Wissembourg: It is well-known that Debussy created his symphonic prelude L’Apres Midi D’un Faun (The Afternoon of a Faun) under the impression of the eclogue written by Stephane Mallarme. Concert programs, filled with repeat performances of staple classics, left less room for contemporary pieces. Like Mallarmé’s poem, Debussy’s Prelude is fluid and mysterious. The interplay between the two “images” and the contrasting episodes in Nuages are set apart by contrasting keys. Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune known in English as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration.It was first performed in Paris on 22 December 1894, conducted by Gustave Doret. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-symbolists, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/symbolist-movement. How did Debussy come to reach these new territories of sound? Debussy’s Nocturnes is comprised of three movements: Nuages (Clouds), Fêtes (Festivals), and Sirènes (Sirens). Like his music, the waves of the sea form a powerful Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Oftentimes one instrument will be associated with a particular motive. Of course, each of the fine arts has a unifying principle specific to that art. Throughout the piece and especially at the end when the opening flute melody returns again, there are hints of E major being the tonic or home key. Like Mallarmé’s poem, Debussy’s Prelude is fluid and mysterious. The episodes take on other tonal worlds, such as the pentatonic melody centered on a D# Dorian scale. One experiences a profound sense of dreamlike improvisation and wandering when listening to Debussy’s music. The piece begins with the music the faun plays in the poem, a lugubrious melody on the flute that descends a tritone (an interval equivalent of a diminished fifth or augmented fourth) before rising back up. Instead, in Debussy’s music, the listener is invited to enjoy each moment as it comes. Debussy and Impressionist Painting: Trois Nocturnes, Claude Monet’s impressionist painting Charing Cross Bridge, 1903. There is a mildness and luxury of midday heat in it, together with the high level of strain, inner conflicts and animal passions that combines with the shrill yearning for the nymph Syrinx, that special person who did not allow him to catch her but turned into a flute in his hands. Rather, Debussy uses different pitch collections to distinguish different blocks of sound that aimlessly merge from one to another, like drifting clouds on a gray day. An analogy might be drawn from one of Debussy's own musical Mallarme is considered to be one of the most difficult to understand French symbolist poets. These alternating intervals suggest movement without a clear sense of direction, akin to drifting clouds. Superimposed upon this first image is a second idea, a motive in the English horn that rises and descends in a different time meter than the other instruments (4/4 time against 6/4 time). The flute solo was played by Georges Barrère.This version is for solo flute with piano accompaniment. Unlike established practices in Western music which create a sense of tension and resolution through goal-oriented motion towards a tonic key, Debussy’s music undermines the need to resolve entirely. Symbolism sprang from literary roots, gaining inspiration from writers including Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. This tritone becomes a sort of unifying element of the piece, and it is also notable in that it outlines a whole-tone scale. Debussy and Symbolist Poetry: Prélude à “L’apres-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”). Were they but a creation of his own desire? In the early 1890s, Debussy regularly attended the influential mardis (Tuesday) gatherings of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, along with poets Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and other painters and intellectuals. Similar to Impressionism, Debussy’s works typically suggest a mood or atmosphere, rather than expressing a strong emotion or depicting a narrative or story. Debussy’s legacy on classical composers still looms large to this day. They are: Pleasure is the law.” For Debussy, music was, above all, an art of sound. A defining feature of both the poem and the musical piece is a lack of discrete sections, seamlessly flowing the listener through one idea into the next. In a way, the variations of the melody could be said to represent the faun, cycling through different conjectures about the nymphs: Were they real? In Mallarmé’s poem, a faun (a man with the legs of a goat) contemplates a memory, or possibly a dream, he has of two nymphs he encountered in the forest on a warm, lazy afternoon. The faun plays his pan-pipes, but, upon realizing that his music fails to capture the viscerality of his experience with the nymphs, he abandons his pursuits to a sleep filled with dreams and visions. Others went on to explore new “post-tonal” ways of organizing pitch, eventually leading to practices such as atonality (music that lacks a key or tonal center) and serialism (music based on formulaic orderings of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale). In Nuages, we hear Debussy’s use of “images” come to the fore. Later, a calmer-sounding section recalls Asian influences, with sustained strings underpinning a pentatonic melody in the flute and harp, possibly in reference to a Japanese flute melody or Javanese gamelan music.