Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was Claude Debussy’s first masterpiece and, in many ways, can be seen as the first masterpiece of 20th-century music — even though it predates the new century by six years.

It is at times difficult to comprehend how a mere 10 minutes of music for small orchestra can serve as a cornerstone for so much that came after. But whenever we hear this music, its magic is immediately apparent, as it was indeed to its first audience in 1894. It is even harder to realize that these few pages, with their mysteriously improvisatory air, took Debussy two years of patient toil to put together. He was still relatively unknown in Paris and had not written anything close to the visionary step into the unknown that the Prelude represents.

In a sense, Debussy was simply writing a symphonic poem on a literary text. But Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) was no conventional narrative poem, and it left no scope for the direct matching of music and words. In the note given out at the first performance, Debussy explained: “The music of the Prelude is a very free illustration of ... Mallarmé’s fine poem. It is not meant to be a synthesis of it but rather a series of settings across which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon.”

Many symphonic poems merely evoke a tableau or a mood, but Debussy not only avoided any precision of character and action, he allowed his music to develop freely. From the very first bar, the music evolves without clear-cut notions of thematic balance or tonal precision. The famous opening flute solo sounds like an improvisation, not a theme, and its musical key is far from clear. Each time this melody comes back, its shape and its harmonic background are different, like a continuous variation.

Once the flute solo has run its course, the clarinet, over a sharp horn chord, moves into a different atmosphere, laden with the whole-tone scales that Debussy had already marked as his own. When the oboe takes melodic charge, the warmth of the music grows from within.

The middle section, over oscillating string chords, betrays the faun’s unmistakable passion, and the flute returns transfigured for the creature’s languid intoxication in the forest heat, interrupted by impulsive little movements and sudden charges of feeling. The closing pages have an epic dimension, as if a curtain is being closed on a whole world of poetic mystery.

The orchestration throughout is extraordinarily delicate, with divided strings (Debussy’s preferred string sound), solo violin and solo cello for added sweetness, and two harps. No heavy brass is needed, nor timpani. The only percussion is a pair of small antique cymbals, whose spare notes sparkle like light in the forest.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.