Debussy, "Prelude a l'aprés-midi d'un faune"

 
In 1880, his composition teacher called the father of modern music, Claude Debussy, "of a strange but intelligent nature". In December of that year, just turned eighteen, Claude had enrolled in composition lessons at the Paris Conservatory. There, he would stand out as a highly gifted student but with a certain tendency to indiscipline, to the extent that his teachers would advise the need to "restrain" him.

A friend of symbolist poets, of Parisian cafes and impressionist painters, the young Claude would be difficult to be restrained. In 1888 he visited Bayreuth, in Bavaria, to attend the performance of Wagner's operas in the theater built by him to stage his own plays. He returned immersed in a sea of ​​doubt.

The following year, he went on pilgrimage again. And got convinced. The programmatic music lavished on Wagner's works and their explicit emotional content decided him to take exactly the opposite direction, distancing himself as far as possible from the German author and from what he called "excesses of romanticism."

Debussy, "impressionist"

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

From that moment on, Debussy would focus on the composition of music that, assisted only by sounds, is capable of creating in the listener mind an atmosphere similar to that which Impressionist painting and the Symbolist poets of those days could suggest with their pictures and poems. For this reason, his first compositions were described as "impressionists." In 1910, asked by a Viennese journalist on this matter and the school that it would have subsequently sown, Debussy just replied:

"There is no Debussy school. I have no disciples.  I am me."

Prelude a l'aprés-midi d'un faune
The triptych projected in 1892 included Prelude, interludes and final paraphrase for the afternoon of a faun. But the composer only finished the Prelude, premiered on December 22, 1894, at the Societé Nationale de Musique, to great acclaim, to the point that it had to be repeated.

The piece is loosely inspired by the bucolic poem Afternoon of a Faun, by Stéphane Mallarmé. To clarify his intentions, the author added some notes:

"The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé's beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature."

In order to achieve the subdued and vaporous sound pursued by Debussy, the orchestration of the work completely dispenses with trumpets, trombones and percussion. 

The rendition is by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The video has been beautifully constructed with the help of paintings by French creators.