Debussy's Vocal Music and Its Poetic Evocations

In fin-de-siecle Paris, composers encountered an artistic atmosphere that was crucially determined by a number of poets who met regularly in the famous cabaret "Le Chat Noir" and at Stephane Mallarme's Tuesday soirees. According to Paul Dukas, these poets conceived their texts like musicians or painters: "Verlaine, Mallarme, and Laforgue presented us with new tones, new sounds. They projected lights onto their words as had never been seen before," thus developing an aesthetics that Charles Baudelaire had termed "la correspondance des arts." Claude Debussy, an avid reader of contemporary poetry, became a member of these circles when still in his early twenties. While as a student at the Paris conservatoire he had primarily set texts by poets from the generation of his parents and grandparents, he now turned to the lyric works of his contemporaries. The vocal cycles he composed in the course of the 30 years between 1885 and 1915 trace the path of his compositional development, which particularly since his encounter with the poetry of Paul Verlaine was defined by the quest for liberation from conventions handed down for too long. This book, the first of two intended complements to Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music (Pendragon Press, 1997/2010), offers background information, analyses, and interpretations of his seminal cycles for voice and piano -- Ariettes oubliees (1885-1887), Cinq poemes de Charles Baudelaire (1887-1889), Trois melodies de Verlaine (1891), Fetes galantes I & II (1891-1892/1904), Proses lyriques (1892-1893), Trois chansons de Bilitis (1897-1898), Trois ballades de Francois Villon (1910), and Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme (1913) -- complemented by the cantata La damoiselle elue (1887-1888) and Debussy's only completed opera, Pelleas et Melisande (1902). SIGLIND BRUHN holds a PhD from the University of Vienna and is a music analyst, concert pianist, and interdisciplinary researcher.