Artist: Steven osborne
Title: Debussy: Études & Pour le piano
Year Of Release: 2023
Label: Hyperion
Genre: Classical Piano
Quality: flac 24bits - 192.0kHz +Booklet
Total Time: 01:07:49
Total Size: 2.39 gb

Tracklist


01. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 1, Pour les cinq doigts (d'après M. Czerny)
02. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 2, Pour les tierces
03. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 3, Pour les quartes
04. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 4, Pour les sixtes
05. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 5, Pour les octaves
06. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 6, Pour les huit doigts
07. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 7, Pour les degrés chromatiques
08. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 8, Pour les agréments
09. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 9, Pour les notes répétées
10. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 10, Pour les sonorités opposées
11. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 11, Pour les arpèges composés
12. 12 Études, CD 143: No. 12, Pour les accords
13. Pour le piano, CD 95: I. Prélude
14. Pour le piano, CD 95: II. Sarabande
15. Pour le piano, CD 95: III. Toccata
16. Debussy: La plus que lente, CD 128
17. Debussy: Berceuse héroïque, CD 140
18. Debussy: Étude retrouvée (Reconstr. Howat)

The germ of the suite Pour le piano was the central ‘Sarabande’, an early version of which was included in three pieces since published as Images oubliées. Debussy wrote these in the winter of 1894, around the time of the first performance of L’après-midi d’un faune, and dedicated them to the seventeen-year-old Yvonne Lerolle—the daughter of the painter Henri Lerolle—who was immortalized by Renoir at the piano both with her sister and alone. The pieces were intended, Debussy wrote, not for ‘brilliantly lit salons, generally attended by people who don’t like music’, but as ‘conversations between the piano and oneself’. In re-working the ‘Sarabande’ for publication as part of Pour le piano in 1901, he took out some slightly obtrusive chromaticisms, thus preserving a dreamy, modal atmosphere of ‘far away and long ago’.
Around the ‘Sarabande’ Debussy placed two pieces that reflect another aspect of eighteenth-century music, as does so much else on this album, namely the harpsichord writing of composers such as François Couperin and Rameau. Debussy’s harmonies are of course his own, with long stretches of whole-tone chords in the ‘Prélude’, while the ‘trumpet’ fanfares here and in the last movement look forward to those in L’isle joyeuse and Berceuse héroïque. The ‘Toccata’ is if anything even more Baroque in feeling and requires a high degree of digital dexterity. Only in the middle section, where the left thumb is instructed to make its inner tune ‘expressive and slightly predominant’, do we begin to hear the mature Debussy’s piano sound. Three months after the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes gave the first performance of the suite in January 1902, he premiered Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, and Ravel undoubtedly had a point when, defending the novelty of his own piece, he claimed that, for all that he admired Pour le piano, from the pianistic point of view it said nothing new. But what it does say, it says with utter authority and conviction.

Ravel claimed that every composer wanted to write a really good waltz, but that unfortunately it was very difficult. The word ‘valse’ does appear on the contract Debussy signed for 1,000 francs in April 1910 for a piano piece called La plus que lente, so we must assume ‘valse’ is the missing feminine noun—the kind of elision, as Roy Howat points out, that one finds in titles of harpsichord pieces by Couperin. Howat reasonably offers as a translation ‘The slow waltz outwaltzed’. Unpretentious as it is, it needs no scholastic analysis, but the historical background is not without interest. The American violinist Arthur Hartmann was a friend of Debussy’s around this time and later remembered the composer enthusing about ‘those gentlemen who wear red jackets’, playing as a so-called Hungarian Gypsy Band at the Carlton Hotel in Paris. La plus que lente, which Debussy would later arrange for a small band including cimbalom, was inspired by their playing, and Hartmann noticed that the composer played it ‘with considerable amusement’. Less amused was Mme Debussy who, while her husband’s back was turned, murmured to Hartmann: ‘The production of an entire summer …’ Whether Ravel ever heard the piece, or liked it, we don’t know.

Berceuse héroïque was a contribution to a collection of piano pieces published by The Daily Telegraph in 1914 in support of the Belgian king and his people, to which other contributors were Elgar, Stanford, Saint-Saëns, Arthur Rackham and Arnold Bennett. Debussy chose to base it on the Belgian national anthem, but came to regret this decision when he found the going ‘very hard, especially as La Brabançonne doesn’t inspire heroism in the hearts of those who were not brought up with it’. The anthem is quoted in the middle of the piece, surrounded by music of gloom and desolation from which the only respite is some of Debussy’s favourite distant fanfares.

Debussy’s relationship with the piano had not always been smooth: his father had had dreams of turning him into a profitable virtuoso, but he never won a first prize at the Paris Conservatoire. At the same time, many of those who heard him play agreed that he made a sound like no one else—Milhaud’s wife Madeleine remembered his hands as ‘sinking, deep, deep down into the keys’, according to Debussy’s wish that players should make him forget the piano had hammers. His warning therefore that anyone attempting his Études must have ‘mains formidables’ may not have been free of a certain bravado, perhaps even of a spirit of revenge on the race of virtuosos with their glittering prizes. His slightly testy (and entertaining) preface tells them to find their own fingering—not always easy when the music at times departs so far from nineteenth-century formulae.

In 1915 Debussy was working on an edition of Chopin’s piano music to replace the German ones no longer available because of the war, and looking again at the Études sparked his own creative urge. His set of twelve was written in the astonishingly productive summer of that year which also saw the composition of the Cello Sonata and the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos. While he had Chopin very much in mind, his inventive habits meant that he would also, in some of his own Études, explore areas that Chopin had neglected.

One of these was the five-finger exercise. ‘Pour les cinq doigts’, subtitled ‘after Monsieur Czerny’, starts from the image of the child practising, which for some reason seems to have held a special place in his affections (see ‘Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum’ from Children’s Corner); here the ‘good’, white keys are attacked by the ‘naughty’ black ones, the two hands taking turns. The battle between white and black is summed up in the final bars, where the five flats of B flat minor are trumped by C major. In ‘Pour les tierces’, intervals that Chopin did explore, Debussy had also to find something different from his penultimate Prélude, ‘Les tierces alternées’, and succeeded superbly. What a treasure house of textures here, from the echoes of Pelléas’s sea and love music to the starkly triumphant final chords!

Debussy was justifiably proud of the ‘special sonorities … unheard-of things’ in ‘Pour les quartes’, the whole of which is an extraordinary compendium of sounds, new to French piano music at least. We have no record that he knew any of Scriabin’s piano music, although by this time it seems probable that he had heard Schoenberg’s Three piano pieces, Op 11. Even so, the prevailing interval of the fourth entailed a re-thinking of traditional third-based harmony, to the point that it’s not clear in what key the piece ends … C major, F major, perhaps even B flat major?

In ‘Pour les sixtes’ Debussy most obviously acknowledges his debt to Chopin, setting it in D flat major, the same key as Chopin’s ‘study in sixths’ Op 25 No 8, starting with the same pair of notes in the right hand, and soon breaking into Chopinesque triplets. The whole étude, while being a tour de force in finding new sonorities built on simultaneous sixths in both hands, satisfies Debussy’s general request that music display ‘emotion without epilepsy’, in the manner of Couperin and Rameau. ‘Pour les octaves’ returns to the powerful, dramatic mood heard at the end of ‘Pour les tierces’, in which ‘mains formidables’ are for the first time a priority, the composer’s marking ‘strepitoso’ (‘noisily’) appearing here and at the end of ‘Pour les cinq doigts’ for the only times in his music. For ‘Pour les huit doigts’, which concludes the first book, Debussy warns: ‘In this study, the changing position of the hands makes use of the thumbs uncomfortable, and including them would entail acrobatics.’ Avoiding the thumb also makes another link with an eighteenth-century practice. Roy Howat makes the point that, with duplets later becoming triplets, followed by a final accelerando, it’s as well not to begin too quickly—advice duly observed by Steven Osborne.

‘Pour les degrés chromatiques’, opening the second book of Études, employs full or partial chromatic scales to ‘drown the tonality’, as Debussy had put it many years earlier. Against these, we feel the steadying influence of a tonal, chordal tag, the dotted rhythm of which steadies the implacable demi-semiquavers, but even this soon becomes chromatically inflected. ‘Pour les agréments’ is yet another nod in the direction of eighteenth-century French pianism, and possibly beyond that to the commedia dell’arte: Catherine Kautsky has suggested of the Études in general that ‘they are such a striking musical incarnation of the commedia temperament that they sum up an entire lifetime of Debussy and Pierrot in cohabitation’. In ‘Pour les agréments’, delicacy and bumptiousness dance together. The same goes to some extent for ‘Pour les notes répétées’, where tonality is immediately called into question with the aid of major and minor seconds and of tritones. This latter interval may cause us to think of Messiaen, who said of these Études: ‘They’re particularly extraordinary for their elusive formal qualities. Things are left unsaid, implied, fleeting. All that was very new.’

In writing a study called ‘Pour les sonorités opposées’, Debussy was not only starting a trend in piano music that would occupy composers up to the present day, he was writing for his own brand of pianism. As Alfredo Casella wrote of his playing of his Préludes: ‘Not that he had actual virtuosity, but his sensibility of touch was incomparable.’ This can be intuited from some of the markings in this study: ‘dolente’ (‘with melancholy’), ‘expressif et pénétrant’ (‘expressive and penetrating’), ‘lointain, mais clair et joyeux’ (‘distant, but clear and cheerful’), where a barely audible fanfare joins others on this recording. The meaning of the final word in the title of the study ‘Pour les arpèges composés’ has been much discussed, but one interpretation may be that these arpeggios have been ‘put together’ from various sources, like a ‘salade composée’—traditional triadic shapes certainly form part of them, but in combination with Debussy’s usual sevenths and ninths as well as intermediate intervals. Their notation both in ordinary and in small type suggests that they inhabit the same border country as agréments, somewhere between the primary and the secondary. The final ‘Pour les accords’ is, in the words of E Robert Schmitz, ‘straightforward and direct in its coloring, bringing a relief from the complexities which have previously been presented, debated, developed, serving then as a form of resolution or answer to the questions of form, melody, harmony, counterpoint, which have made great demands on intellectual processes’. It is also viscerally exciting.

Rounding off this album is Dr Howat’s realization of a six-page sketch for the eleventh étude, ‘Pour les arpèges composés’ (Étude retrouvée in the track listing of this booklet and its publication by the Theodore Presser Company). As he points out, the only similarities between the two are ‘the presence of arpeggios and their tonality of A flat major’. Beyond that, the two versions accentuate Debussy’s ability to doubt himself, as in his quandary over whether to dedicate these pieces to the memory of Couperin or, as he finally decided, of Chopin.