Debussy: Preludes Books 1 & 2

In 1909, when Claude Debussy began work on his Préludes for piano, he could look back on a number of recent successes, not least the British premiere of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande. He published these 24 pieces, in two books of 12 each, in 1910 and 1913; they thus date from the watershed between the composer’s impressionistic middle period and the striking neo-Classicism of his later years. The Préludes are immensely varied in character, from the tender ‘Fille aux cheveux de lin’ to the impassioned, brilliant ‘Feux d’artifice’. Moreover, Debussy creates a quite new aesthetic by dispensing with motivic and thematic development. Instead, individual sections and melodic fragments seem merely juxtaposed or else pass seamlessly one into another. Time and again a synaesthesis of sense and impression is found in Debussy’s works; here, the very title of ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ combines the senses of hearing and smell. The music’s associative nature is clear from a contemporary description of ‘Feux d’artifice’: ‘Motionless clouds of Bengal lights, from which a few sparks break free like rockets, crackling, before slowly descending like stars, whirring suns, dazzling, multicoloured rays of light, all that shimmers and gleams in the night – the whole magic of light lies in this music.’