preludes

Debussy’s “Feuilles Mortes”: A Desolate Landscape

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Feuilles mortes (“Dead Leaves”) is the second piece in Book II of Claude Debussy’s Préludes for solo piano. Composed in 1913, the music suggests the vivid colors and atmosphere of an impressionistic painting. It evokes a bleak and desolate late autumn landscape—perhaps one in which a frost has already descended. Debussy’s interpretive marking is Lent et mélancolique. Filled with jazzy parallel chords, the music inhabits a haunting dreamscape. Quiet, ghostly ostinatos emerge …

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Debussy’s “Brouillards”: A Journey into Pantonality

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On Wednesday, we explored Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, a piece which ends, unresolved, in two radically unrelated keys (C and B). When the brash, outspoken Claude Debussy heard another Strauss tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel, he compared it to “an hour of original music in a lunatic asylum.” Yet, in the early years of the twentieth century, Debussy pushed the dense chromaticism of Strauss and Wagner into even more adventurous harmonic territory. We …

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Debussy’s “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” Krystian Zimerman

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La fille aux cheveux de lin (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) is the eighth piece in Book I of Claude Debussy’s solo piano Préludes, written around 1910. The title was inspired by an 1852 poem by Leconte de Lisle. A single, meandering line pulls us into the ephemeral, dreamlike world this music inhabits. Listen to the way the harmony, built largely on the floating, static pentatonic scale, shifts around this melody in unexpected ways. Listening …

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The Sunken Cathedral

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Last week Google celebrated the 151st birthday of French impressionist composer Claude Debussy with one of its clever Google Doodle logo animations. If you’re like me and you happened to see it, you probably clicked on the link expecting to linger for a few seconds and ended up watching all the way through, fascinated with its cinematic beauty. Accompanying the animation’s magical nighttime Parisian river scene is an excerpt of one of …

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