Debussy’s Keen Emotional Ear In his book of translations of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery— himself a renowned poet, scion of the New York School—holds that if anything is, in fact modern, it is because Rimbaud, in essence, granted us permission; for toilers in music, the name Claude Debussy is our permission-granter, the one who paved the way. Leaving aside every major and strictly musical advancement for which his keen and singular ear was responsible (pandiatonicism, for one, which, arguably, is the root of a certain mode of Jazz music, or his genuinely revolutionary incorporation of the “Eastern” Whole Tone scale), and also leaving aside his very specific gifts with the orchestra, Debussy, the greatest and most innovative composer for the piano since Chopin, offers for us in his pieces for his instrument glimpses into his subterranean self. For composers with a specific and visionary orchestral ear, the piano can function as a quiet, intimate, and immediate version of the louder and larger orchestra, a safe place for the composing out of new musical notions far from the often-infuriating industrial latticework of the “music world”—unions, managers, of large egos and a ticket-buying public. It can also be a mode of confession, an inward glance, and with the carefully-chosen pieces on this disc we get a sense of some of Debussy’s personal—and therefore musical— obsessions: water, childhood, and dancing. The word “impressionism” (a movement to which Debussy, like it or not, is forever yoked) implies images of reflection, of colorful contemplation, of the blurred-butbeautiful. Perhaps because Paris featured storied rivers, but water—it’s sound, its presence, its abstract magnificence, its reflected mysteries—was an important, even eternal, topic. Debussy returned to the water again and again, ranging from his grand, even orotund orchestral essay La Mer down to his “Reflets dans l’eau” from the first book of his Images or “Jardins sous la pluie” (“Gardens in the Rain”) from Estampes. Even his extended L’Isle joyeuse, putatively about a patch of land (but we all know that an “island” is more than just a patch of land), and meant to be part of a large water trilogy, was about so much more than the place: it was about not only a painting by Antoine Watteau but also about the very real Emma Bardac, Debussy’s paramour. These waters are hardly frozen or inert—they are a hotspring of grace and passion, metaphors within metaphors couched in the inscrutable but deeply coded messages of the composer’s music. In his suite of six pieces called Children’s Corner (written for the composer’s three-year- old daughter), Debussy allows us a return, as sophisticated adults, to some of the “delights” of childhood, but through the eyes (and fingers: these are virtuoso works) of the experienced. Contained within this suite—after we’ve climbed the musical Parnassus of “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” had truck with an Elephant, a doll, the snow and a shepherd—is perhaps the composer’s most famous work, “Goliwogg’s Cakewalk,” which dancily (and prefiguring postmodernism) superimposes a putative dance of a popular blackface doll with the opening motive Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a piece beloved by Debussy. And while this suite aims for wry, laugh-out-loud reminiscences of childhood, they are not far from his more elusive water works in that there’s a surface sheen beneath which cavernous and treacherous depths lurk. Childhood is an essential and elemental experience—like the natural world, like the inner world. As was the case with Debussy’s contemporaries Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, dancing—not just cakewalking, but glorious men and women leaping across stages, into each other’s arms—mattered to Debussy, for his Paris was in the midst of the belle époque for ballet. But dancing as spectacle—as in his ballets Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Jeux—can also lead to a kind of introspective dancing, much like Bach’s Partitas or Chopin’s Mazurkas, and this is the case of the Deux Arabesques and Danse Bohemiene, both of which are early works (one can hear the influence of, of all people, Tchaikovsky on the latter), private places where one can hear the youthful composer honing not only his craft but also his own personal sound—and experiencing the raw joy of youthful abstract dancing. But like the water pieces or the childhood pieces, these works are not intended for dancing in the physical sense but rather as comments upon the dangerous ideas of dance—the mysteries, the bodily realities, the melding of the athletic and the intellectual—which give us not only permission to be modern but to be human. ... Daniel Felsenfeld