THE STORY BEHIND: Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun"

On January 21, Tania Miller and the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra will present ROMANTIC CHOPIN with pianist Sara Davis Buechner.

Title: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Composer: Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Last time performed by the Rhode Island Philharmonic: Last performed May 6, 2017 with Larry Rachleff conducting. This piece is scored for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, percussion, two harps and strings.

The Story:

Between 1892 and 1894, contemporaneously with his evolution of the Quartet, Debussy composed L’Après-midi d’une faune, a masterpiece so personal, so free of the ordinary indices of derivation, so distinctive in feeling and coloring, so unlike any music of the past or of its own era. . . .

 
Thus begins Oscar Thompson’s commentary on the piece that introduced the world to Debussy’s mature, “impressionistic” style. Originally, the work was to be in three movements: “Prelude,” “Interlude,” and “Paraphrase Finale.” However, when Claude Debussy made his final revision of the Prelude, he discarded sketches for the last two movements, and on December 22, 1894, the audience of the Société Nationale heard the premiere of a one-movement symphonic poem.
       
Similar to concurrent “symbolist” poetry and “impressionist” painting, Debussy deals deliberately in vagueness; his music suggests rather than depicts. With its unusual combinations of tone color, the Prelude is something of a study in the play of light and shadow. Its general form is clear (A-B-C-A), but the design is characteristically non-symphonic, and its outlines are hazy.
       
The diffused storyline of Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous eclogue, L’Après-midi d’une faune, concerns a mythological faun (half man, half goat). The faun is playing a double reed flute and falls asleep. He dreams sensuously of two nymphs, but when he awakens, he finds reality the same as before. He then tries to re-live the dream in his mind:

I would perpetuate those nymphs.
Their rosy
Bloom’s so light, it floats upon air drowsy
With heavy sleep.
Was it a dream?

Debussy described his Prelude as “a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s poem . . . to evoke the successive scenes in which the longings and desires of the faun pass in the heat of the afternoon.”

Program Notes by Dr. Michael Fink © 2023 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED



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