Though Debussy was often regarded as personally aloof, few great composers have cultivated their links with writers, artists and other composers more assiduously than he did. Mallarmé attended the premiere of the Prélude with misgivings about the idea of his poetry becoming the starting point for music, but he was overwhelmed, and sent his congratulations to the composer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian … and times Magdalena Kožená as Mélisande and Christian Gerhaher as Pelléas in a semi-staging of Debussy’s opera at the Barbican in 2016 with the LSO and Simon Rattle. ![]() (He’d already made several attempts to compose an opera, all abandoned, and only one, Rodrigue et Chimène, is left as any more than a fragment.) By the end of 1894 the first act of Pelléas was drafted, but the decisive event that year was the first performance of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the 10-minute orchestral evocation of the languorous eroticism of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé that’s now regarded as one of the most significant moments in the history of modern music. Debussy’s only string quartet was first performed in 1893, the same year he attended the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, and immediately saw its operatic potential. The sound of the ensemble and also the scales and rhythms it used left a profound impression, as the movement Pagodes from his piano suite Estampes, which eventually appeared in 1903, showed. Rimsky-Korsakov’s music left its mark, too, but perhaps the most persistent influence from that period came from Debussy’s visit to the 1889 Paris Exhibition, where he heard a Javanese gamelan. But he did meet Liszt, and composed another cantata, La Demoiselle élue, as well as his first substantial orchestral piece, the symphonic suite Printemps, and several of the settings of poetry by Verlaine that eventually became part of the Ariettes oubliées song cycle.īack in Paris, Debussy heard Tristan und Isolde for the first time and went to the Bayreuth festival, and for a while Wagner’s music profoundly shaped his own, though he would come to regard it as marking the end of an era rather than the start of something new – “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn”, as he later put it. The prize allowed him to study in the Italian capital, but he hated the two years he spent there. ![]() ![]() In 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome with a cantata, L’Enfant prodigue, even though he regularly ignored the “rules” of composition laid down by his teachers. He originally wanted to be a concert pianist, but by the time he was 18 his attention had switched to composing – mostly songs at that stage. His lifeīorn on the northern outskirts of Paris, Debussy’s early family life was chaotic, and it wasn’t until he began studying at the Paris Conservatoire aged 10 that he received any formal music education. Another piano piece, the first of the two Arabesques, is almost as ubiquitous, and was sampled by Alicia Keys for Like the Sea while Rêverie, also from the early 1890s, is heard in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull in the form of My Reverie, as recorded by Ella Fitzgerald in 1938.
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