Debussy’s frequently-performed orchestral works need a reliable Urtext edition, one which also incorporates performing traditions. The editions by Douglas Woodfull-Harris for Bärenreiter fulfil this need.
When we hear Claude Debussy’s La Mer in the legendary recordings by Celibidache, de Sabata, Monteux, Münch, Cluytens, Ansermet, Mitropoulos, Pedrotti or even Karajan, a passage shortly before the end of the last movement (bars 237–244, see music example below) is always striking; in it, the trumpets and horns play a prominent chromatic counter melody which picks up on the preceding bars, and is missing in all the available editions of the score. Anyone who looks into this will discover that this part was only found in the first printed edition, and that it was cut in subsequent editions. Ernest Ansermet regarded this cut as a mistake and suspected a misunderstanding, and Celibidache, for instance, regarded this as a case of editorial sloppiness. I suspect that the effect was too heavy for Debussy – Molinari had it played by the third horn alone back then – but of course with a more restrained dynamic, the main part would not necessarily be obscured. Whichever way you look at it, Debussy did indeed agree to the alteration, but only dogmatic interpreters would be unable to recognize that the passage in the original version is not only more effective, but also contributes more coherently to the whole work. In the Bärenreiter Urtext edition, editor Douglas Woodfull-Harris has now reincorporated this passage into the text of the score for the first time (instead of relegating it to the Critical Report), and, in order to denote the contradictory source material and leave the choice up to the conductor, has placed the restored part in square brackets. Apart from generally working through the sources in meticulous detail, as is also the case in other new editions of this major work of Debussy, this is the crucial argument for encouraging conductors to perform from the Bärenreiter Urtext; with works which are so frequently examined and published in critical new editions the differences are seldom so strikingly evident; rather they mainly comprise finely weighed-up decisions, which are intended to combine clearly and unambiguously the interest in an unadulterated Urtext edition, as philologically flawless as possible, with the requirements of musical performance practice.
Bärenreiter’s Debussy Urtext Edition is continually progressing: in solo piano works, the early Arabesques, the Suite bergamasque, Pour le piano, the two volumes of Images, Children’s Corner and the first volume of the Préludes have been published, and chamber music for smaller forces includes his String Quartet, Syrinx for solo flute and the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano. His orchestral output, which is naturally more complicated to sift through, is represented by invaluable new editions of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La Mer to date, now to be joined by the Rhapsody for Orchestra with Solo Clarinet. A further key work from his orchestral music, Images, is at the editorial stage. This will certainly offer us exciting points for discussion, and possibly also discoveries, and it will be extremely interesting when a work such as Nocturnes, which partly exists in such unsatisfactory editions, is published in the new Urtext edition.
The Clarinet Rhapsody follows the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in its free-flowing form, and deserves to be included in concert programmes more than it has to date. It was composed in 1909 as a competition piece for clarinet and piano for the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1910 was orchestrated as was originally intended. It bears the misleading title “Première Rhapsodie”, added later, which not only contradicts the Saxophone Rhapsody composed earlier, the orchestration of which was never completed, but can also give rise to the false impression that Debussy intended to write a further Rhapsody for the clarinet. On the contrary, Debussy planned several larger cycles of works which he did not realize (his only String Quartet had been published in 1893 as “Premier quatuor”). In 1909 he planned a cycle of rhapsodies for all the major woodwind instruments, i.e. for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, however only the clarinet work was completed.
It was a similar case with the Cello Sonata of 1915 to the Rhapsody: here, in his late years, Debussy planned a cycle of six sonatas which were to pay homage to the new French classicism harking back to the baroque period. After completing the Cello Sonata he finished two further sonatas, albeit for different instrumentations (for flute, viola and harp, and for violin and piano), but he did not get as far as sketching out the three others (for oboe, horn and harpsichord; for trumpet, clarinet, bassoon and piano; as well as in a chamber concerto scoring).
In all editions in the Debussy Edition by Bärenreiter, the extensive forewords contain detailed discussions on the practical performing aspects of these works. In the case of Debussy this is not so straightforward, for the freedoms which he allowed are considerable, and above all, calling himself “Musicien français” with a wonderful lack of pretension, he relied on the intuitive sensitivity of the musicians. Douglas Woodfull-Harris says about this: “Every work by Debussy has a different history, and beyond the musical text there was a world of authorised interpreters who got to know his music and worked on it with him, performed with him and for him. A modern critical edition has to take these sources into account as well in order to understand the work in detail and as a whole. Debussy was not happy with most performances, and we know that his music was associated with a continual natural rubato which defies precise notation. When George Copeland asked him why so few musicians could play his music, Debussy answered: “I think because they try to impose themselves on the music. But it is necessary to give yourself completely to it and to allow the music to do what it wants with you – as if you are a vessel through which it flows.”
No innovator in the history of music, not even his contemporaries Strauss, Sibelius or Mahler, had such a widespread influence on future generations as Debussy. Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók, even Varèse and Ives are in many aspects unimaginable without his pioneering discoveries. But he always proceeded with complete freedom and unsystematically as far as the structure of his pieces is concerned. In his reluctance about everything academic he was in the habit of saying: “It is music, not architecture.” Looking at the way he exhausted the whole tone scale and the wandering world of the enharmonic associated with it in its correlative potential, or the way he enriched diatonicism by conquering the major second interval as consonance or luminous sequences of parallel fifths and perfect parallel fourths, integrated chromaticism as a melismatic, free, espressivo element instead of losing it in its condensed levelling out, as a truly alert creator of the moment he was always ready to form an unforseeable connection with a seemingly improvised freedom, which appears as a dream-like echo of the irregular laws of nature. He rejected Louis Leroy’s term “impressionist”, inspired in 1874 by Monet’s painting “Impression: Sunrise”, as he also did not want to be the head of a school of “Debussyism”: “Impressionism, an expression which is used as inappropriately as possible and which art critics attempt to apply to William Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole of art ...” Of course Debussy’s music, with its agility which rids itself of all constricting shackles, is impressionistic, if, like Celibidache we understand it as the “rapid, irregular, flowing alternation of colours”. At the same we need to understand that here we are talking of the delightful surface effect, which all-too-easily allows us to overlook the stretched or harmonic context, completely unorthodox in the background, the so wonderfully spontaneous-seeming organic formation of the whole. Woodfull-Harris says that Debussy “invites me to take part in a creative process; he almost asks me to consider not only the black notes and the lengths of the rests, but to examine everything which bustles around them: the clouds, the wind, the sea, the noise of the big city, the poetry”.
Christoph Schlüren
(Translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
(from [t]akte 2/2017)