Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, L. 86

Program notes

About the Work

When Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was first heard in Paris on 22 December 1894, few in the hall can have grasped that they were present at one of the genuine turning points in the history of music. The conductor Pierre Boulez would later claim, with only mild exaggeration, that modern music was awakened by this Prélude, and it is easy to hear why: here, in barely ten minutes of shimmering sound, the rigid grammar of nineteenth-century harmony quietly dissolved and something new began. The piece is short, languid, and apparently effortless, yet almost nothing in it behaves as a textbook would predict: keys melt into one another, the beat floats free of any insistent pulse, and the orchestra is treated less as a machine for building climaxes than as a palette of colours to be blended and dissolved.

Debussy wrote the work as a response to a poem, Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune (1876), a dense and sensuous piece of Symbolist verse in which a faun, drowsing in the heat of a Sicilian afternoon, half-remembers (or perhaps only dreams) an erotic encounter with fleeing nymphs, unsure where reverie ends and reality begins. Debussy originally conceived a larger triptych (a Prélude, an Interlude, and a Paraphrase finale) but in the end distilled everything into the single Prélude. He insisted that the music was not a literal narration of the poem but rather ‘a very free illustration’ of it, ‘a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon.’ Mallarmé, initially wary of having his poem set to music at all, was won over at the premiere: he wrote to Debussy that he had come out of the concert ‘deeply moved’, and that the music went further than his text, ‘into nostalgia and into light’.

The sound world Debussy summoned was new. He drew on a modest orchestra, woodwinds prominent, brass restrained, with antique cymbals and two harps lending an antique, dappled glow, and he asked the players for a transparency and suppleness of phrasing that few European orchestras of the day could provide. The exotic whole-tone and modal inflections, the parallel chords moving in defiance of conventional voice-leading, the refusal of a strong cadence until the very end: all of this gave the music a sensuous ambiguity that listeners had not encountered before. Within a generation it was recognised as a landmark, and it remains, perhaps, the single most influential short work of the modern orchestral repertoire.

What to Listen For

Everything begins with the flute. Alone and unaccompanied, it traces a sinuous, chromatic line that slips downward and curls back on itself, suspended over silence with no clear sense of key or metre: the faun stirring in the afternoon heat. This melody is the seed of the whole piece; listen for how it returns again and again, each time reharmonised, recoloured, handed to different instruments, never quite the same twice.

Notice how Debussy avoids momentum of the old kind. There are no driving sequences, no hammered climaxes building inexorably to a peak; instead the music drifts, pools, and evaporates, its phrases ending in soft exhalations rather than firm cadences. The harp glissandos and the antique cymbals’ delicate, ringing strokes add a glint of cool light to the warm woodwind colours.

There is one moment of fuller feeling: roughly midway, the strings rise into a broad, ardent melody, the closest the piece comes to passion, before it too subsides back into reverie. Toward the end, the muted horns and a last appearance of the flute theme bring the music to a hushed, suspended close, the antique cymbals chiming faintly as the faun sinks back into sleep. Let the piece wash over you rather than tracking signposts; its whole art lies in seeming to have no edges at all.