Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy

Abstract

Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy. By Paul Roberts. Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1996. [xxi, 372 p. ISBN 0-931340-97-7. $39.95.] It has long been known that Claude Debussy generally preferred the company of painters and poets to that of musicians, and that the initial stimulus for much of his music came from a picture or a line of poetry. Paul Roberts, the British pianist and teacher, who also has strong lies to France, focuses largely on specific paintings, prints, posters, and book illustrations that are known to have set Debussy's creative impulses in motion. Visual imagery seems to behind even those pieces that are clearly the result of his fascination with the Javanese gamelan. When [he title of a piece was taken from a poem or fairy tale, a picture apparently formed itself in his mind, 'finis, the title of Roberts's book is particularly apt. The six chapters of Background make up part I, which begins with an informative discussion of the artistic scene in fin de Steele Paris. In painting, the catchwords were impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism, and realism. The first chapter discusses these terms and Debussy's relationship to them, Debussy, like most of the later nineteenth-century artistic community, was fascinated by the Orient, particularly the Japanese prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Roberts details how influential these prints were on painters (e.g., Edgar Degas) and how certain aspects of them can found in Debussy's piano music. Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Antoine Watteau, Paul Verlaine and the old commedia dell'arte form the substance of the next two chapters. Chapter 5 deals with Debussy's disdain for the term constantly associated with him: I'm trying to do 'something else'--in a way realities--what imbeciles call 'impressionism,' a term as misused as it could possibly be (Debussy in a 1908 letter to his publisher, Jacques Durand). The sixth chapter is a masterful discussion of the relationship between music and painting and poetry in Paris during the last part of the century. Roberts's extensive knowledge' of the world of painting and poetry in Paris of the late nineteenth century stands him in good stead throughout pan 1, and these first six chapters should he invaluable to all who have an interest in the cultural atmosphere in which Debussy lived, composed, and performed. The second pan of the book is addressed more specifically to musicians, especially pianists. Foreground, part 2 of the book, consists of five chapters. They provide more information on the creative stimulus for Debussy's most important piano works and also offer Roberts's thoughts on how those works should interpreted. He continues with a good deal of technical instruction on the best means for a pianist to achieve the desired interpretation, stressing varieties of tone color. An exact understanding of what Roberts intends for the Preludes Book I, the Images Book II, and the Estampes can ascertained from the compact disc that is offered as a companion to the book (The Classical Recording Company, CRC 501-2, $15.98). Roberts is indeed a marvelous interpreter of Debussy, carefully adhering to the authentic text as given in the new CEnvres completes, but always making the most of his sense of line and color, from the most delicate nuance of Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir to the violent assault of Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Ouest. …