Free The Ellington Century by David Schiff Page A

Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray , at the famous “Tuesdays” at Mallarmé's apartment and, onFridays at the Chat Noir. 61 In the 1880s Debussy set poems by Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, developing a richly allusive idiom of musical symbolism. Sounds became symbols.
    In his songs Debussy often employed a symbolic sonority in the accompaniment to “read” the text. In “En Sourdine,” the first song in the Verlaine cycle Fêtes galantes , composed in 1891, a leitmotif beginning with three repeated notes sounds throughout the first section; it disappears and then returns at the end where the singer names its symbolic role: “Voix de notre désespoir, /Le rossignol chantera” (Voice of our despair, /the nightingale shall sing). In retrospect, we realize that the motive represents the nightingale's call, but as a symbol of despair, not a scenic effect. The repeated note itself is a double metaphor: the piano sounds like a flute that sounds like a nightingale. But the song has grander, even more esoteric echoes. The voice of despair springs from a forbidden love; the poem depicts Verlaine and Rimbaud hiding amorously in the bushes. The poem, mirroring a mirror, also replicates in a very condensed form the entire second act of Tristan , the lovers' tryst, in which Brangäne, the voice of despair, warns of the inevitable intrusion of the real world. The nightingale's motive frames the central intimacy just as Brangäne's admonitions form a kind of protective wall around the great love duet. In case we might miss this tone parallel, Debussy launched the song with the famous “Tristan chord,” the exact pitches heard at the opening of Wagner's opera but transposed an octave higher, one sound symbol evoking another.
    Debussy tried his hand at writing Symbolist poetry, or rather prose, in his Proses lyriques , published in 1895. Here he pushed the piano-as–orchestra to an extreme, so that the second song, “De grève…” (Of the Shore…), forecasts the sound of La Mer composed a decade later. In terms of sound-as-symbol, however, the most interesting song is the last, “De soir…” (Of the Evening…). We might retitle it “Sunday in Paris with Claude,” for, like Seurat's contemporary “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” it is a painting of “modern life”—the earliest piece of music depicting the hustling “leisure” of the weekend city, including an excursion by train to the suburbs. 62
    In “De soir…” the piano sounds less like an orchestral reduction than an imaginary superorchestra. The contrapuntal moto perpetuo accompaniment rolls out a ceaseless stream of sound evocations all drawn from a short motive. As the motive evolves, its visual correlatives change as well. At first it evokes a clamor of church bells. Then, augmented in a dotted rhythm, it suggests the rattling bounce of a suburban train. Asthe train is “devoured” by a tunnel a new contrapuntal texture appears, waves of sixteenth notes in the right hand against a grandly rising and falling arch in the left, all played on the black keys of the piano. Though the black keys may indicate the darkness of the tunnel, they also produce a pentatonic scale. The scale and rhythmic counterpoint sound like gamelan music. The significance of this occidental/oriental double image becomes clear when Debussy inverts the counterpoint, lifting the slow arch motive to the upper register of the piano as the words speak of “Dimanche, dans le bleu de mes rêves” (Sunday in the blue of my dreams), as if the day trip to the outskirts of Paris were just a poor substitute for more exotic travel. (Des Esseintes, the hero of A Rebours , preferred imaginary travel to the real thing.) As evening settles on the city the arch motive turns back into bell sounds, no longer clangorous but distant, nostalgic, slowly fading