Claude Debussy – Preludes

Description

Debussy`s Preludes

Piano Preludes were written at the apogee of the composer’s creative capacity: Book 1 in 1910, Book 2 in ting and refining his previous experience in this field – mark the ultimate of his piano style. They were preceded by numerous single pieces and cycles, of which Images were the most important, and followed by two sets of Etudes and a suite for two pianos En blanc et noir. The 24 Preludes are the quintessence of Debussy’s music. They contain the most important features of personal style in the piano sound medium (similar concentrations occur in his other works: the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, orchestral Games and the chamber Sonata for flute, viola and harp). These features are: tonal language and harmonic in a unique synthesis, harmony of Romantic major and minor key with modalities, pentatonic scale and impressional atonality; basically small-motive melodic form, which often seems to be a harmonic function, at the same time marked with peculiarly French melodiousness, not avoiding subtle archaism and folkloristic stylization; a great variety of rhythms and tempos, from reflective and contemplative to orgiastic dance ones; consequently – a narration between the extremes of free flow and sharp, pulsating rhythm; and a maximum of texture variety, rich in piano music forms and figures. This style, so expressive, though it had developed quite long to reach its full individuality, the idioms of which we recognize immediately by a single motive, cadence or colour nuance, strikes one with a specific dialectics in moulding the form, characteristic of French art and mentality in general and substantially intensified in Debussy’s music: that of freedom and precision, fantasy and discipline, asymmetry and proportion, variety and uniformity, multiplicity and singularity. Let us pay a special attention to the truly classical economy in the composer’s dealing with motive as the basic form-building unit in the Preludes.