Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
About the Composition
The Afternoon of a Faun (all the title the piece really needs) was in fact Debussy's first significant work for orchestra, undertaken at more or less the same time as his first important ones for the stage (the opera Pelléas et Mélisande ) and in the realm of chamber music (the String Quartet in G minor). It was to have profound effects on the generation of composers that followed, farther-reaching than those produced by any single piece of French orchestral music up to that time. The impact of the premiere (Paris, December 22, 1894) was hardly less shattering than that of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde had been nearly 30 years earlier. Debussy's American biographer Oscar Thompson compared it with the Prelude to Lohengrin , in that "at the time it was written nothing like it existed in music.” Here was an entirely new kind of tone poem which, in Debussy's words, "will no longer be professional rhetoric but will be given a more universal and essential psychic conception.” In its voluptuous harmonies and languorous, sinuous phrases "perfumes, colors, sounds correspond to one another.
For once, a revolutionary work's newness did not engender hostility: the premiere audience was so enthusiastic that Gustave Doret, who conducted, was obliged to repeat the performance. Only the critics were less impressed; it was to be several years before most of them caught up with what the public recognized at once, and they were not the only ones caught short by the piece. Following the second performance, given by the Colonne Orchestra early in 1895, a note in the Annales du Théâtre advised that the piece was "written after a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé so sadistic that M. Colonne did not dare to print the text; young girls attend his concerts.” Listeners interested in pursuing this matter are referred to Oscar Thompson's aforementioned biography, Debussy Man and Artist , in which Alexander Cohen's very sympathetic 1935 English translation of the poem is printed in full. As for the music's descriptive content, Debussy remarked that it was to correspond to "the successive scenes in which the longings and desires of the faun pass in the heat of the afternoon,” adding by way of afterthought (in a letter to the critic Henry Gauthier-Villars dated October 10, 1896), that it was "what remained of the dream in the recesses of the faun's flute. More precisely, it is the general impression of the poem, for in following it more closely the music would puff like a cab horse running against a thoroughbred for the Grand Prix...”
The flute, indeed, in one of the most celebrated solo passages in the orchestral literature, begins this work with an evocation of the opening lines of Mallarmé's poem:
I would perpetuate those nymphs.
Their rosy
Bloom's so light, it floats upon air drowsy
With heavy sleep.
Was it a dream?
Several years later, on March 25, 1910, Debussy wrote to his friend the writer Georges Jean-Aubry recalling Mallarmé's visit to him a short time before the premiere, to hear the Faun played on the piano:
I lived in a little furnished flat in the rue de Londres. . . . Mallarmé came in with his prophetic air and his Scotch plaid around him. After listening to it he remained silent for a long time, and then said, "I didn't expect anything like that. This music draws out the emotion of my poem and gives it a background of warmer colors.” And here are the lines Mallarmé wrote on a copy of L'Après-midi d'un faune which he sent me after the first performance:
Sylvain d'haleine première,
Si ta flute a reussi
Ouîs toute la lumière
Qu'y soufflerà Debussy.
(Sylvan of the first breath,
If your flute were successful
In hearing all the light,
It would exhale Debussy.)
In May 1912 Serge de Diaghilev presented Vaslav Nijinsky in the latter's ballet treatment of this music; it was the great dancer's first effort as a choreographer, and its primitive urgency made it both a bit of a scandal and a long enduring work, in which David Lichine and others enjoyed great success over the years. In 1953 the New York City Ballet introduced a new and totally unrelated choreographic version by Jerome Robbins which has remained a staple of that company's repertory.
