The Nocturnes, if I had to choose, would probably rank as my favorite Debussy orchestral piece. Boulez's Debussy sounds much closer to Szell's than to Ansermet's. Yet it turns out that Szell's approach was prophetic – a revolution I saw in my lifetime. Performances by Ansermet, Ormandy, and Stokowski set the tonal image. Playing Impressionist music thirty or forty years ago meant a lush wash of orchestral sound.
In fact, Szell's recording of La Mer was generally known, even in Cleveland, as "Das Meer." At issue was the clarity of subsidiary lines. This CD is, I believe, the second album of Boulez's traversal through Debussy's orchestral music with the Cleveland Orchestra, an organization not heretofore known for its Debussy. While much of Boulez's conducting strikes me as literally superficial and led to some very disappointing Bartók with the Chicago, in Debussy, Boulez's concern with surface becomes a benefit. The texture and sonority is indeed largely the point. Debussy, however, constitutes a special case. Horenstein's Mahler Eighth, for example, has clams galore, but it matters less than his unsurpassed ability to capture the rhetorical and architectural thrust of the work. With the major sport of Pelléas and some of the late works to one side, almost all of Debussy's music deals in the physical sensation of the world and the shutting down of the brain overwhelmed by beauty.Ī lot of music forgives a loose performance. The impressionist usually says, without Mahler's irony, "Wird's nicht eine schoene Welt?" The world is often enough. Rather, the surface leads to pure sensation – often ecstasy in the presence of the beautiful. One doesn't "read" the surface to arrive at a metaphysical truth, truth of character, or dramatic conflict. Although one notes exceptions among individual painters, the interest of Impressionism isn't primarily psychological. One can find point in the analogy between the canvasses of Impressionists and Postimpressionists and the music of Debussy. However, the critics who used the term weren't necessarily fools. Debussy himself cared neither for the term as applied to his music nor for the painters of that school (his favorite painter was Botticelli). Recently, we've heard much talk about Debussy's music as non-Impressionist, although of course the term was adapted from painting to describe the type of music Debussy wrote. He doesn't modulate to new keys as much as he simply plunks down whatever new tonal center he wants. Even in works with relatively strong tonal centers, Debussy avoided the structural function of harmony with such devices as the old church modes, non-Germanic folk music, and whole-tone scales. Since classical forms depend on the establishment of key to mark their major sections, Debussy often couldn't use them and had to find something else. Indeed, Debussy was the composer most performed at Schoenberg's private subscription concerts. Harmonies are so chromatic and so strained in their relationships, they lose their progressive function and become "colors." Schoenberg may have theoretically proclaimed the birth of atonality, but he seldom got any further out than Debussy. After that, however, they almost disappear, replaced by essentially expanded songs and dances and by "narratives." A work like "Feux d'artifice" fulfills Ives' notion of a piece of music unfolding like a life. To some extent, they touch Debussy's own Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, his first major orchestral work. On the other hand, classical forms lurk even in the deep levels of Strauss's tone poems. He took the Romantic idea of "organic form" from people like Chopin and Schumann (he edited Chopin's piano music) to an extreme. He differs from most of the others in that he had no great interest, past relatively early work, in the classical forms. Summary for the Busy Executive: Ravishing.ĭebussy stands with Mussorgsky, Mahler, Reger, and Strauss among the great progenitors of Modernism.
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