Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (arr. Sachs)

‘Was it a dream I loved?’ A dream-like flute welcomes the listener in to Debussy’s fantastical world where tonality is a hazy memory and time floats away on the hot summer breeze. What key is the music in? Is it in a key? Debussy and the flute of the faun lead us through a dizzying maze of lush chromaticism – a glimpse of traditional tonality here and there, but never certain – seen only through the fog of your afternoon drowsiness. Mallarmé writes: ‘Ouvrir ma bouche à l’astre efficace des vins’, ‘Open my mouth to wine’s potent star’. You are drunk on chromaticism, as unsteady on your feet as a young faun. This faun is an agent of chaos, his harmonically ambiguous music hints at the endless possibilities of unanchored music. And the warm summer air will help you forget the terrors of chaos…

Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune opens with a now-iconic solo flute melody, a melody which prompted the 20th-century composer Pierre Boulez to say: “the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music”.

The Prelude was written in 1894 and was inspired by a poem by the French symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarmé. Almost impossible to translate, Mallarmé’s poem attempts to capture the thoughts, feelings and desires of a faun – a mythical creature – on a hot afternoon on a Sicilian hillside.

From the very beginning, Debussy’s piece denies the structures of traditional tonality. The opening flute melody moves between the notes C-sharp and G, creating a tritone, the interval which Leonard Bernstein called ‘the most unstable interval there is, the absolute negation of tonality’. A tritone has no ‘home key’, it can’t resolve and doesn’t fit comfortably into the Western system of tonality: for that reason it was named ‘diabolus in musica’ by the early Christian church and banned from use in music.

The tritone was the perfect musical symbol, and Mallarmé’s poem the perfect setting for Debussy to push the boundaries of traditional tonality further than ever before. The famous opening is followed by a pause – six beats of silence, perhaps for the audience to wonder which key the music is in!

The melody moves between different woodwind instruments as the accompaniment travels through an array of different tonalities, just as Mallarmé’s poem provides fleeting glimpses of the thoughts of the faun (it’s interesting to note that Debussy’s piece contains 110 bars of music, corresponding exactly to the 110 lines in Mallarme’s poem). The version in tonight’s concert is an arrangement for chamber ensemble by Benno Sachs – a pupil of Schoenberg – who created this version to be performed at Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. The most notable differences are the absence of harps and horns, and the addition of parts for piano and harmonium (played tonight on celesta).

Only in the final moments does Debussy reveal that the home piece of the key is E major. But as Bernstein said: ‘It’s an essay in E major, actually. [But] the faun was pointing… toward total ambiguity, one more step and you’re there, in senseless chromaticism.’

(Programme Notes: Elizabeth Davis)

Chamber version by Benno Sachs (1882 - 1968)
Instrumentation:
Flute, oboe, clarinet, crotales, piano, celesta, first violin, second violin, viola, cello, double bass

Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Kahchun Wong, conductor
Jin Ta, Principal Flute

Recorded at the Esplanade Concert Hall, 24 Aug 2020.

Photo by Dan Blackburn on Unsplash

[davismiller]

Perfect. Utterly perfect. Such unexpected power and clarity -- without diminishing the dream -- in this performance and in the chamber transcription itself.

[wanlai]

Debussy's music is truly one of its kind.