Among Debussy’s considerable output of piano music the two books of Préludes stand out as landmarks of the entire keyboard repertoire, not least because of their extraordinarily wide imaginative range. He composed the first book of twelve préludes between 7 December 1909 and 4 February 1910. Concerned that the music should take precedence over a pictorial image, Debussy deliberately placed the titles in brackets after each piece, but once these are seen it is difficult to hear the music without preconceptions. It is probably best to regard them as merely the composer’s initial ideas or starting-points.

In the manner of a sarabande, the dignified and statuesque Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi) is believed to refer to a Greek sculpture in the Louvre depicting three women performing a graceful ritualistic dance, or alternatively a column in the museum at Delphi.

Voiles may be translated as sails or veils. Although the general feeling of a seascape makes sails the more likely intention, there is also the mysterious veiled quality which is common to many passages in Debussy’s music. Here his preoccupation with the whole-tone scale is relieved by a 6-bar pentatonic passage, with not a single semitone throughout.

Le vent dans la plaine (The wind in the plain) is mostly restrained, basically pianissimo throughout, with sudden and brief forte explosions. The title is taken from the drama Ninette à la cour by the eighteenth-century playwright Charles-Simon Favart: 'Le vent dans la plaine suspend son haleine' (holds its breath). The celebrated pianist Alfred Cortot poetically expanded this idea (leaving little to the imagination!): 'Furtive and rapid … glides over the short grass, clings to the bushes, dishevels the hedges and sometimes, in the young heat of the morning, with a more sudden breath, bends the nascent wheat with a long quivering wave.'

In Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (The sounds and the scents swirl in the evening air), a line taken from Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir inspires one of Debussy’s most sensuous pieces, written in fluctuating tempo. The last four bars (Debussy writes 'like the distant sound of horns') are magically evocative.

Les collines d'Anacapri refers to the hills beyond one of the two small towns on the island of Capri. The initial evocation of bells (cowbells?) gives way to snatches of tarantella. In the middle, at the melody in octaves in the left hand, Debussy writes 'with the freedom of a popular song'. The dazzling final bars are marked 'lumineux'.

The sixth piece, Des pas sur la neige (Footprints in the snow), is sad and desolate yet deeply expressive, though there is only fragmented melody in the right hand. In powerful contrast, the virtuosic Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest (What the west wind has seen) conveys a turbulence spilling into frightening violence. Again the melodic element is fragmentary.

Again in extreme contrast, the eighth prélude, La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with the flaxen hair), is marked 'Very calm and sweetly expressive'. This is the most attractively lyrical of the préludes, its title that of a poem from Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes Antiques: Chansons écossaises (1852), verses which Debussy had set as a song in 1880. The lines 'I want to kiss your flaxen hair / and press the purple of your lips' suggest that the admiration is not as chaste as one might have imagined. This prélude is the only one inspired by an unnamed person, whereas the other character-sketches are either portraits of fictitious or legendary figures—Puck, Mr Pickwick, the water-nymph Ondine, etc.; many of the non-human préludes are evocations of nature, including wind, sounds and scents, and dead leaves.

Initially marked 'like a guitar', La sérénade interrompue (The interrupted serenade) is one of Debussy’s Spanish pieces. At first the sad lover is short of confidence and when he is brusquely rejected, vents his frustration on his guitar strings. He becomes expansive with a brief arabesque, but again there is a bad-tempered response (Debussy marks 'rageur'—angry). Finally, disheartened, he creeps away.

The potently atmospheric La cathédrale engloutie (The submerged cathedral) is easily the longest of the 24 Préludes. It is obvious why Debussy was attracted to this subject. An ancient Breton legend tells of a submerged cathedral off the island of Ys—sunk supposedly as a punishment for the sins of its inhabitants but allowed to temporarily rise from the sea on certain mornings at daybreak. Across the water we hear bells tolling, priests chanting and the deep pedal notes of the organ. Lalo’s opera Le roi d’Ys is loosely derived from the same legend.

Debussy was probably first inspired by the image of Puck when he saw illustrations by Arthur Rackham in a 1908 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. La danse de Puck (marked 'capricious and light') brings to life the mischievous sprite, his movements playful and mercurial, ideally characterised by the unpredictability of Debussy’s music.

The final prélude of Book One, Minstrels, inhabits the world of the music-hall. In front of the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne (where Debussy completed La Mer), play musicians in red jackets. Debussy’s initial marking is 'nerveux et avec humour', but in this piece he conveys the whole range of their act—cakewalk, sentiment, satire (a lyrical phrase is marked 'moqueur'—mocking), drum imitation, etc.

Book Two (dating from late 1912 to April 1913) begins with Brouillards (Mists or fog). No composer has surpassed Debussy in his capacity for evoking mysterious dreamscapes. The term 'impressionism', unfortunately over-used in reference to his music, is here completely apt. Marked pianissimo throughout, except for two momentary crescendi to forte, this piece is also notable for its bitonality—the left hand hovers around C major while the right hand drifts into unrelated regions.

Feuilles mortes (Dead leaves), marked 'slow and melancholy', could be interpreted as an elegy marking the passing of summer into autumn’s decay.

La Puerta del Vino is believed to have been inspired by a postcard of a Moorish gateway to the Alhambra in Granada, sent to Debussy by Manuel de Falla. The surprising words 'avec de brusque oppositions d’extrême violence et de passionée douceur' (with sudden contrasts between extreme violence and passionate tenderness) appear at the head of this volatile piece, with the obsessive habanera rhythm absent from only a few bars. As always in his Spanish-influenced pieces, Debussy—who never set foot in Spain—captures the essential earthiness and pungency of the national culture.

Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses (The fairies are exquisite dancers) abounds in trills and rapid but delicate figuration. Debussy admired the work of Arthur Rackham ('ce vieux Rackham', as he referred to him), one of whose illustrations for J M Barrie’s 1906 book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens inspired this composition. The brief passage at which the fairies dance a slow waltz gives way to an extended trill on an A. In the final bars Debussy quotes a horn-call from the Oberon Overture by his beloved Weber.

In its simplicity and diatonic character—in common with The girl with the flaxen hair in Book One—Bruyères (Heather) is exceptional in the context of these twenty-four preludes. Debussy described the piece as 'a visual evocation of the simple flowers'.

«General Lavine»—excentric ('in the style and movement of a cakewalk') refers to an American comic juggler Edward La Vine, internationally popular. Debussy’s attraction to music-hall, vaudeville and the circus is manifest in several of his pieces. The burlesque trumpet-call at the beginning, the cakewalk style, the wooden stiffness of Lavine’s puppet impersonation—Debussy characterises each with equal vividness.

La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune (The terrace of moonlit audiences) is one of the most delicate and refined of the préludes, marked pianissimo throughout. Here the inspiration was a newspaper article describing the ceremony at which George V was crowned Emperor of India. The music is poetic, sensuous and wonderfully atmospheric.

Ondine (marked 'Scherzando') is a water nymph from Nordic folklore, portrayed many times in various art-forms. Sometimes a malevolent spirit is present but Debussy’s interpretation is more alluring than menacing. In this prélude some of the sounds he conjures from the piano are very advanced, but then the Second Book in general is more modern than Book One in its musical language.

In Hommage à S Pickwick Esq PPMPC (Perpetual President-Member Pickwick Club—in the French translation) Debussy illustrates his knowledge and love of Dickens. He characterises Pickwick’s self-importance and self-satisfaction—the God Save the King quotations suggest his pomposity—but there is also warmth and affection. Thus, at a lyrical phrase Debussy writes 'aimable' (genial or amiable). No mere caricature, this portrait equally conveys gaiety and humour.

Two Egyptian funerary urns or canopic jars which stood on Debussy’s desk gave rise to his Canope (Canopus was an ancient Egyptian city to the west of the Nile delta). The dynamic rises to a mere piano from the basic pianissimo in a prélude imbued with profound calm, sadness and mystery.

Les tierces alternées (Alternating thirds) anticipates the various technical challenges of Debussy’s Études of 1915. His inclusion of this piece—the only one which is neither a character-study nor inspired by a specific poetic image—is incongruous, making one wonder whether Debussy deliberately intended this purely technical focus on keyboard-writing to be humorous. Whatever his intention, his innately poetic temperament creates beauty even from a technical study.

Feux d’artifice, the final piece, retains its contemporary feeling, as Debussy miraculously conjures up a public firework display on Bastille Day in a fantastic range of inventive piano-writing. Contrasting aspects of fireworks are suggested—sprays of sparks, gyration, smoke, spluttering, combined with the humour of unpredictability. The subdued ending includes distant snatches of La Marseillaise. Stravinsky’s early piece Fireworks (1908), though it employs the much wider palette of a large orchestra, is less imaginative.

Phillip Borg-Wheeler © 2024

I was 5 years old when my mother introduced the music of Claude Debussy to me by playing Prélude No 8, Book 1: 'The girl with the flaxen hair'. With her sophisticated elegance and light blonde hair, she played this music so beautifully, and I was totally enchanted by it.

I didn’t know then that I would choose music as a profession, I just fell into an escapable lifelong love affair with music—and particularly with this music that I felt was meant especially for my mother.

It has been a long time since that magical moment, and my own path to Debussy was not always easy. At first, it was difficult to understand how to even begin translating the written score into reality—just where and how to reflect the wind, light, ship signals, splashes of water and the singing of Ondine on the piano … I have been searching for this knowledge for many years, seeking answers to questions like 'What did the west wind see?', 'What was the ‘sunken cathedral’?', 'Who interrupted the serenade?' …

Thanks to my beloved teachers Lyudmila Roshchina and Claudio Martinez, I eventually found a way to step into the world of Debussy without fear, and without feeling the boundaries of the instrument and space. Freedom—in mind and body—helped me remember crucial feelings from childhood: observation, surprise, and admiration, without the critical judgement that comes with adult life.

I have always loved watching nature and people—their smiles, their looks … When I play Debussy, I seek to capture the feeling of wind, of squinting in the shining sun, of the goosebumps from 'the sounds and aromas floating in the evening air', with my hands. I feel so grateful that thanks to Debussy, and the magical instrument that is the piano, I get to touch these moments of magic at any given time.

Many thanks to Yamaha Pianos, Signum Classics, and my beloved team at Knight Classical, for bringing this project to life (you can also watch our music videos of these Préludes on YouTube).

And most of all, thank you to that very first Prélude 'The girl with the flaxen hair': my dear mother looks at me through these sounds, even though she is no longer alive.

I dedicate this album to her bright memory.

Anna Tsybuleva © 2024