Debussy's Pianism: a Consideration of Resonance

Debussy’s Pianism: a Consideration of Resonance

by Edward Campbell-Rowntree

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, April 2020. https://pianotuner.org.uk

Achille-Claude Debussy was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire in 1872 at the age of ten, and there are various and conflicting accounts of his time there; he excelled at solfège and was a notoriously ferocious sight-reader, but his potential to forge a career as a virtuoso pianist, as his father Manuel had sincerely hoped for, was never fully realised. He had certainly shown promising signs early on—a review of the twelve-year old Achille in performance described him as “a prodigy who promises to be a virtuoso of the first order”—his teacher Antoine Marmontel eventually concluded that the young boy “doesn’t care much for the piano, but he does like music.”[1]

It is now difficult to imagine how this remark applied to Debussy, a composer who went on to pen so many genre-defining works for the instrument, but bare in mind the type of pianism championed at the Conservatoire; technical virtuosity was regarded above all else, the type of which could only be achieved through the most severe technical training. It is fair to imagine that a mind such as the young Achille’s found the curriculum to be artistically and creatively stifling; he would later reflect upon his alma mater as “a dark and dirty place where the dust of old traditions sticks to the fingers.”[2]

The scholastic restrictions placed on him as student led Debussy to neglect the piano after leaving the Conservatoire, focussing his energies towards operatic and orchestral composition instead. While some of his most illustrious essays for the piano were written during this period, such as the Deux arabesques or the Suite bergamasque, these pieces were not so remarkably different from those of his Parisian contemporaries, built on the stylistic legacy of Chopin and Liszt and expressing a romantic sensibility with only a faint glow of the harmonic originality that would come to characterise his later works. Debussy’s peculiar mode of expression through the piano was yet to come.

Former Conservatoire building (until 1911) in the 9th arrondissement of Paris © Wikimedia commons

Debussy’s taste for keyboard composition was reinvigorated around the turn of the twentieth century when, as Roy Howat suggests in The Art of French Piano Music, his (re)exposure to the sonorities of the Javanese gamelan at the Parisian Expositions universelles of 1900—Debussy had also been present at the 1889 fair— reconfigured his understanding of the piano as a percussive rather than purely melodic instrument, its expressive capabilities achieved through resonance and vibration rather than the nineteenth-century textural conventions established before him.[3] Reflecting on the connection between Debussy’s pianism and the Balinese gamelan ensemble, the Franco-American pianist E. Robert Schmitz wrote that Debussy “was interested not so much in the single tone...as in the patterns of resonance which that tone set up around itself”[4]

The shimmering timbres and glistening sonorities of the Balinese gamelan informed Debussy’s new approach to the piano as a source of audible resonance rather than a vehicle for virtuosity. In his recent study, Debussy: A Painter in Sound, Stephen Walsh notes how the first series of Images (1905), and the concept of the pieces more generally, “had been born at the piano...and was tied up with the exploration of particular harmonic and textural colourings peculiar to that instrument, with its special resonances and integrated sonorities.”[5] The opening piece of the suite, ’Reflets dans l’eau’,—written in accordance with Debussy’s “most recent findings in harmonic chemistry”—is a masterful essay in harmonic resonance and equilibrium, punctuated with imitations of Javanese bells and gongs and interwoven with the pentatonic arabesques conventionally associated with the orient.

Portrait of Claude Debussy by Marcel Baschet (1884)

Like many of Debussy’s later piano works, ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ is written so idiomatically for the instrument that it seems to emerge from the keys as if it were a spontaneous improvisation—but be sure, behind every casual gesture in this music there are performance directions in the score which approach an almost scientific level of detail. The technical challenges for the pianist in these pieces, difficult as they are, never seem to be at odds with the formal design of the instrument nor the physiology of the hand. In stark contrast with his formative years at the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy had developed an intimacy and understanding of his instrument that was truly pianistic, and which few others would achieve throughout the twentieth century.

Our attention to resonance in Debussy’s music is further illuminated when we consider his preference of instruments; his love of Bechstein and Pleyel pianos is well-known, but he was especially fond of the ‘aliquot’ fourth string system patented by Blüthner in 1872.* His own Blüthner boudoir grand—purchased in

England sometime between 1904-1905—was outfitted with additional aliquot strings in the top three octaves which allowed for an enriched overtone spectrum through the miracle of sympathetic resonance. Debussy even developed his own technique of playing the instrument, insisting on a particular manner of striking the keys that would result in the optimum vibration of the upper harmonics.

It seems intuitive that Debussy would have preferred an instrument with an intensified harmonic resonance; so many of his pieces rely on the progressive synthesis and eventual subtraction of upper harmonics in or to elevate a musical idea, like the multiple eaves of a pagoda in Estampes, or to submerge something beneath the ocean, like the sunken cathedral of the Preludes.

Edward Campbell-Rowntree

*The Aliquot tuning system will be explored in more detail throughout the Blüthner Instrument Preparation at the AGM & Convention, led by Niklas Enzenauer on Tuesday, May 5th 2020.

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Edward Campbell-Rowntree read Music at King’s College, London and went on to complete his Masters in Musicology at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Now pursuing the career of a concert pianist, he has been awarded an entrance scholarship to study for an MMus in Piano Performance at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2020. He is passionate about the music of eighteenth-century France, particularly that of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Citations

[1] Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, Volume 1862-1902 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), 29.

[2] Claude Debussy, Correspondance, 1872-1918, ed. François Lesure et Denis Herlin, 1224, letter to André Caplet, November 25, 1909.

[3] Roy Howat, The Art of French Piano Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 115. [4] E. Robert Schmitz, “A Plea for the Real Debussy”, Etude (December 1937), in Debussy Remembered, ed.

Roger Nichols, (London: Faber, 1992), 171.
[5] Stephen Walsh, Debussy: A Painter in Sound, (London, Faber & Faber, 2018), 196.