Classical Music | Piano Music

Claude Debussy

Images, Book II  Play

Mei-Ting Sun Piano

Recorded on 01/16/2013, uploaded on 07/02/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

 

Composed in the middle of Debussy’s mature period, the second volume of Images represents the epitome of his usage of imagery in music. This work, along with his Children’s Corner, are his last major works to include visual imagery in their titles. The Preludes use postscripts rather than titles, and the Etudes are labeled with practical description. 

Like Images Book I, Book II begins with two slow movements: Cloches à travers les feuilles (“Bells heard through the leaves”) and Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”). The first movement begins with a section constructed out of a whole-tone scale, which is gradually transformed into a diatonic scale, perhaps signifying the bells in the title. The second movement is a mystical hymn, slow moving, and follows a gentle and never-ending melodic line.

The third movement, Poisson d’or (“Gold fish”) was inspired by a panel of Japanese lacquer, illustrating one goldfish and its reflection in the water. This movement was written for the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, the dedicatee of the piece. Debussy had become disillusioned with Viñes’s playing, feeling that it was too technical and harsh, unsuitable for the more nuanced murmurs in much of his music, and as a result created one of his most scintillating and sparkly jewels for the pianist.       Mei-Ting Sun

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Images, Set II   Claude Debussy

Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells Through the Leaves)

Debussy first heard Javanese musicians at the Paris Universal Exposition and the sounds of the gamelan they played stayed with him, surfacing in the allusions to the instrument in the present piece. Writing about Java in 1913, he said, “There was once, and there still is, despite the evils of civilization, a race of delightful people who learnt music as easily as we learn to breathe. Their academy is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, thousands of tiny sounds which they listen to attentively without ever consulting arbitrary treatises.” The bells of the title are initiated in the first two measures by way of a whole tone scale, from which the entire piece is constructed. The simplicity of this opening belies a predominant complexity of intertwining parts that requires the music be written on three staves. A middle episode of pianistic brilliance contrasts strongly with the exotic, otherworldly sonorities of the first and last sections.

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was)

Debussy dedicated this piece to his good friend and biographer Louis Laloy, an authority on oriental and ancient Greek music. The poetic wording of the title, the fragmentary melodic structure, the pungent dissonances, and the almost floating nature of the sonorities all confirm what Debussy referred to as the search by the poets and painters of the Symbolist movement for “the inexpressible, which is the ideal of all art.”

Poissons d’or (Goldfish)

This piece, along with Reflections on the Water, is probably the most frequently performed of the Images sets. And no wonder, since it is both brilliant and evocative. Obviously, goldfish are inextricably associated with water, but here, unlike Reflections, the imagery is concrete. It is said that a painting of two gold-colored fish on a small Japanese lacquer panel that Debussy owned was the inspiration for this work. In order to suggest the darting movements of these tiny water creatures, a pianist must be at once the master of grace and elegance as well as of freedom of expression. Debussy’s images, whatever the subject, have a fantasy that is as closely related to mental images as to the physical reality of pianistic bravura.        - Note by Orrin Howard