One of the great peaks of the prelude literature for piano, alongside Chopin’s, Rachmaninoff’s and Scriabin’s (late) prelude sets. These works are consistently ingenious in the deployment of those devices that are now consistently associated with impressionism - modal colour, exotic scales (whole-tone, pentatonic, double harmonic, Hungarian), non-functional harmony (planing chords, purely colouristic intervals, hanging and extended chords), pedal points, timbral figuration. Interestingly, Book 2 is very different from Book 1: it’s far more pessimistic and abstract, so much so that it was greeted upon publication with some disappointment. Book 1’s fantasy has been replaced by a certain weary or ominous realism, and you get the feeling that Book 1 was more explicitly imagistic in nature, while Book 2 is symbolic - it’s going for what certain images and objects *mean*, rather than trying to depict them per se. Book 2 is also completely written on 3 staves - its sound is a bit more expansive and less propulsive, more delicately tiered.
Book 1
1: Dancers of Delphi - A languorous melody embedded in a chordal texture.
2: Sails/Veils - Whole-tone scale, then the pentatonic, then whole-tone scales again. Sailing-boats stuck to a pedal-point
3: The wind in the plain - A displaced trill trembling like grass on a plain. Flashes of lightning in the middle.
4: "The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air" - Harmonically rich, disfigured waltz
5: The hills of Anacapri - Luminous bells introduce an ecstatic tarantella
6: Footsteps in the snow - Possibly the bleakest soundscape in the preludes. Trudging footsteps form an ostinato in the LH. Ends in emptiness.
7: What the West Wind has seen - The frozen landscape descends into a maelstrom.
8: The girl with the flaxen hair - The most tonal prelude, recalling Debussy’s early style.
9: Interrupted serenade - A guitarist tries to serenade a potential lover, but is interrupted.
10: The submerged cathedral - First, bells stifled by the depths of the sea (given mixolydian, lydian, and then phrygian colour); as the cathedral begins to rise, full chiming bells, a sustained plainchant, then a booming organ pedal-point.
11: Puck’s dance - The mischief-maker from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A loose gigue (in sonata form?) stuck through with dorian colour.
12: Minstrels - Banjo imitations interrupted by surprisingly blatant dominant-tonic pedals in G. A warmly sentimental lyric is introduced, as well as a drum-like theme.
Book 2
1: Mists - Fleeting shadows in the RH over a mystic, stunned chorale in the LH. The second theme is played in octaves separated by a desolate gulf in the middle of the keyboard.
2: Dead leaves - Dejected, inbent.
3: Wine door - Inspired a postcard Debussy received from De Falla of a Moorish wine-gate in Grenada. A playful evocation of an archaic habanera, underlaid with supressed violence.
4: The fairies are exquisite dancers - A fluttering dance alternatives with lyric passages.
5: Bruyères - Pastoral, with improvisatory figures that mimic birdcalls. Nostalgic and a bit lonely.
6: General Lavine - eccentric - Alternately comic and sentimental, crude and refined.
7: The terraces of moonlit audiences - Aching, rapt. Possibly inspired by a newspaper article about the coronation of George V as King of India, which concluded with the words: “…the audience was observing the events in a shimmering moonlight.”
8: Ondine - Ravel’s water nymph was hushed and candescent; Debussy’s is evasive, even, at points, slightly threatening.
9: Homage to S. Pickwick - Opening with a forceful but absurd parody of ‘God Save the Queen’, this prelude presents a sequence of contrasting musical styles, all linked only by their humour. Debussy was, for reasons only he will know, awfully fond of the British (see the little jig tune that the character whistles at 1:14:43 while walking into the distance).
10: Canopic jar - Debussy’s desk was occupied by two Egyptian canopic jars: this prelude is a meditation on death, but death held at a great distance, still and somehow hermetic. Even the sudden tonal shift in the fourth bar sounds inevitable, and the recurrent chromatic phrase centred on C# has the character of an incantation.
11: Alternating thirds - An etude, bone-dry.
12: Fireworks - A dazzle through which a deformed recollection of the Marsellaise is heard. Virtuosic and brilliant, but in a brutal way, like light too bright to look at directly.