Claude Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894)

Program Note by Jeffrey Tucker

The calendar might not agree, but musically the 20th Century began on the evening of Saturday, December 22, 1894, in the Salle Berlioz of the Société nationale de musique in Paris, with the premiere performance of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Although popularly associated with the artistic school of Impressionism in painting, Debussy felt personally and intellectually closer to the poetic/cultural/philosophical movement known as Symbolism and was closely connected to Symbolism’s leading poet, Stephane Mallarmé, one of whose greatest works is The Afternoon of a Faun (L’après-midi d’un faune). In the poem, to the extent it can be said to present a comprehensible narrative thread, a faun (a half-human, half-goat creature appearing in both Greek and Roman mythology, generally symbols of peace and fertility) playing his pan-pipes alone in the woods becomes intrigued by passing nymphs and naiads (minor female nature deities, typically presiding over fountains and streams), pursues them half-heartedly and ultimately unsuccessfully, then wearily abandons himself to a sleep filled with visions. 

Debussy, a gifted writer with a real flair for arresting imagery in words as well as music, himself wrote the program notes for the first performance. The work, he declared, “is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s poem. It does not in any way claim to be a synthesis of the poem but is, rather, a series of successive scenes through which the desires and dreams of the faun move in the heat of the afternoon. Tired of pursuing the frenzied flight of these nymphs and naiads, he at last succumbs to intoxicating sleep, full of dreams which, finally realized, tell of total possession of universalized Nature.” Though Mallarmé was initially resistant to granting permission to Debussy to employ the poem as the basis of a purely instrumental musical work, the poet attended the premiere and was astonished at the magic of the score. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to Debussy, “I have just come out of the concert, deeply moved. The marvel! Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun, which presents no dissonance with my text, but goes much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness. This music extends the emotional range of my poem, and sets its scene more vividly than color.”

A work of around 10 minutes’ languid duration, Debussy scores the Prelude for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets in A and B♭, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, two crotales (small antique cymbals) and strings. The solo flute opens the work, evoking the faun’s solitary pipe-playing in the forest. The flute melody chromatically decorates the descent and reascent of the tritone interval from C-sharp down to G-natural and back again, hitting most of the intervening pitches along the way; and this melody recurs five times during the course of the work. Sometimes the mood is more peaceful and sometimes more agitated, but the general mood of archaic dreaminess is maintained throughout. On each occasion, the underlying harmonies are different, suggesting the faun’s undulating, free-floating consciousness as he slowly wanders about playing his pipes. The middle section of the work becomes substantially more animated as he encounters and chases after the nymphs and naiads, finally tiring or losing interest in the game and at last drifting back into somnolence. The shifting harmonies constantly play havoc with the listener’s sense of tonal orientation, but the final few bars quietly anchor the work in its ever-present though veiled tonal center, E major. 

Few composers of any period may legitimately be claimed to present an instantly-recognizable compositional idiom. Claude Debussy is one of that minuscule group. As the great French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez commented, “The flute of [Debussy’s] faun brought new breath to the art of music.”