Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Program notes

About the Work

Debussy was 32 and little known outside a small Parisian circle when the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was first played, at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on 22 December 1894. The Swiss conductor Gustave Doret had spent hours going through the score with him beforehand, and Debussy went on making changes until almost the last minute. Critics were divided, but the audience was not: the piece was encored on the spot. It was his first real success with an orchestra, and it has never left the repertoire.

The starting point was a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Debussy knew well by the early 1890s. L’après-midi d’un faune, published in 1876, is a monologue for a faun who wakes in the heat of the afternoon and tries to recall an encounter with nymphs, unsure whether it happened or whether he dreamed it. Debussy started work in 1892 and finished the score in the autumn of 1894. At one stage the project was announced as a ‘Prélude, Interludes et Paraphrase finale’, which suggests music to go with a reading or staging of the poem, but only the Prélude was ever written. Debussy was careful to call it a very free illustration and not a summary: a series of scenes through which the faun’s desires and dreams pass before he gives in to sleep. Mallarmé, who had been wary of having his verse set to music at all, was won over, and told Debussy that the music prolonged the emotion of the poem.

In 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky danced the faun in his own choreography for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a production that scandalised Paris. Musicians have tended to see the scandal elsewhere. Pierre Boulez dated modern music from this score, writing that the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music: ten minutes in which melody, harmony and orchestral colour drift free of the forward drive that had governed symphonic music for a century.

What to Listen For

The piece begins with a flute alone. Its melody slides down by half-steps and climbs back again, covering the awkward interval of a tritone, so that for the first few bars there is no telling what key the music is in. A harp glissando and soft horns reply, and then there is a bar of silence. Debussy brings the flute melody back again and again, and almost every time the harmony underneath it is different: the tune stays put while the light on it changes.

The orchestra is small and chosen for softness. There are no trumpets, no trombones and no drums; in their place are three flutes, a cor anglais, four horns and two harps. Listen to how often the strings are divided or muted, and how the oboe and clarinet take over from the flute to quicken the pulse in the first part.

At the centre the music turns to a broad, warm melody in D-flat major, sung first by the woodwind and then by all the strings in unison, the one passage where the piece swells to a full-throated climax. It subsides, and the flute theme returns in longer notes, interrupted by skittish little figures in the woodwind.

In the closing bars two tiny antique cymbals sound for the first time, bright pinpricks over the strings. Muted horns and violins play the theme once more, and the piece ends on a few plucked notes.