Debussy, Suite Bergamasque & Other Selections

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

The poet of mists and fountains, clouds and rain; of dusk and of glints of sunlight through the leaves; he was moonstruck and seastruck and a lost soul under a sky bespent with stars. — Oscar Thompson

He [Debussy] was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of waves. — Henri Prunières

Most of the selections in this recording come from Debussy’s early and mid career—before and during his ten year process of writing the opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (c. 1892-1902). The mood of these works, when compared with Debussy’s more abstract later style, seems particularly warm and people-oriented. In the earlier music, the melodic material is more generous and the form more inclusive, as Debussy allows a broad spectrum of subjects—love, nature, society, the mysterious, living well, the fleeting moment—to weave together into a kind of romantic and often amorous impressionism. By the end of his career, Debussy had pared his subjects down to the mysterious, the imponderable, and the departed. Not surprisingly, his melodies became more motivic, and his forms more condensed. Debussy was not alone in this progression, however, as the arts in general at the turn of the century began to move away from human scale and toward greater formalism. Overall, Debussy began a la Renoir, the outdoor parties, the sensuous portraits, the peopled terraces, and ended a la later Monet, The Houses of Parliament, Waterlilies, The Japanese Bridge.