Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp

The Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp is one of three instrumental sonatas that Claude Debussy (1862–1918) composed towards the end of his life—the others are the Sonatas for Cello and Piano (1915) and Violin and Piano (1917). They belong to a general tendency in his late works towards abstract forms, a tendency that also includes the piano Études and the two-piano suite En blanc et noir (both 1915).

Introduction

Debussy had been commissioned in 1915 by his Paris publisher, Jacques Durand, to edit a number of J.S. Bach sonatas, including the six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (BWV 1014–19), the six Flute Sonatas (BWV 1030–35), and the three Trio Sonatas (BWV 1037–39). Instead of carrying out this task, however, he presented Durand with a plan of his own for “Six sonatas for various instruments composed by Claude Debussy, musicien français,” a plan clearly prompted by the thought (though not the style) of the Bach sets. As his self-description implies, he was in no mood to respond well to anything German; after all, there was a war on, and when he did eventually get round to the Bach project, he found what he called “several hundred pages where we have to walk down a hedgerow of joyless bars that process without mercy and with always the same little rascal of a ‘subject,’ then ‘counter-subject.’”

No doubt it didn’t help his mood that he himself was ill and in pain with terminal rectal cancer. And yet his Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, especially, is one of his most radiant works—certainly not joyless—and its modest hedgerows glow with a kind of Attic warmth that at times recalls the transparent light of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) from two decades before (1894).

History

Too old and ill for war service, Debussy spent the summer of 1915 with his wife Emma Bardac and their nine-year-old daughter, Claude-Emma (“Chouchou”), at Pourville, on the Normandy coast. He loved the sea, tolerated the bucket-and-spade aspect of beach life, and disliked only the general population he had to share it with. In any case it inspired an annus mirabilis: by the time the little family returned to Paris in October, he had completed the Cello Sonata, En blanc et noir, a dozen piano Études (in two books), and most, if not all, of the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. The Violin Sonata followed two years later, and that—as far as the intended six sonatas were concerned—was that.

Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp

The first public performance of the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp was in November 1916 at Jordan Hall (the New England Conservatory of Music), in Boston; the first public European performance was in March 1917 at a war-relief concert in Paris, but there had already been a private performance the previous December at Durand’s office, played, Debussy remarked, “by a lady from Munich who resembled one of those priestess-musicians you see on Egyptian tombs.” She played a chromatic harp: an instrument for which Debussy had composed his Danse sacrée et danse profane in 1904, but which had never superseded the standard pedal harp as its inventor had hoped. The sonata was actually written for pedal harp, which plays chromatically (C, C#, D, etc.) by means of a foot mechanism that can raise or lower each of the seven notes of the white-note (C-major) scale by one semitone.

Form

Notwithstanding the assumed Bach connection, the work itself owes nothing to Baroque form, and only minor generic details to Baroque style. There are three movements: “Pastorale,” a title that hints not at rusticity, but at an Arcadian—or possibly Watteau-esque—landscape inhabited by well-washed aristocrats in peasant costume; “Interlude,” a decorative minuet in, however, variable tempos; and “Final,” a kind of discreet bacchanale, ending (almost) with a brief reference back to the “Pastorale.” The personality of the individual instruments is crucial. The flute always has a flirtatious femininity, balanced by the more androgynous tone of the viola. (Debussy originally intended the part for an oboe—more authentically rustic, but perhaps too suggestive of actual shepherds piping.) The harp supplies an environment of extreme delicacy—imagine the effect of a piano in this music, and the point is clear: the music will remain, the radiance depart.

Analysis

Although the trio sonata belongs to an abstract tendency in Debussy’s late works, there is, in its discourse, a certain cinematic element: a sort of montage of musical images, marked by changing tempos and textures. We seem to be eavesdropping on a miniature ballet of three instrumental characters engaged in a polyphony of movement in a sunlit landscape. In the six minutes or so of the first movement, there are no fewer than 16 marked changes of tempo (including ritenuto, or slowing down), but even these are not the extent of the variation, which is enhanced by an intricate dialogue of bravura flourishes—the musical equivalents of pirouettes, jetés, or entrechats in ballet. The movement is braced into a ternary (three-part) form, in F major, by the return of the lyrical flute theme first heard about a minute in, and by a series of clear cadences (phrase endings), where the characters seem to pause and smile before continuing their dialogue. In the middle is a quick dance, marked “Vif et joyeux” (“lively and joyful”), whose rhythm recalls Debussy’s longstanding enthusiasm for the music of the Russian kuchka (the so-called “Five”).

The “Interlude” second movement, in a Phrygian-mode F minor (i.e., with G-flats), is more stable and songlike. The opening flute melody is taken up by the viola, then continued by the two instruments in unison. Again the form is ternary, the reprise marked by the main theme on the solo harp, which also dominates the start of the middle section (“Poco più animato”), with delicate figurations against long flute and viola notes.

The “Allegro moderato ma risoluto” finale (still in F minor) brings more consistent movement towards the work’s climax. Here the music is sustained for long stretches by ostinato figures, mainly on the harp, punctuated by brief flourishes, or melodic exchanges, between the flute and viola. There is again a hint of ternary form and, just before the end, a momentary, varied reprise of the opening bars of the whole work. The atmosphere of this “Final” has been more urgent—less sunny—but the fragment of “Pastorale” seems to expose the shadows as just another piece of theater, and the sonata ends in an exuberant F-major flourish and bow.

Critical thoughts

Debussy seems to have been mildly embarrassed at having written such idyllic music at the seaside in the midst of a horrific world war. “All present-day life,” he told Durand, “was far away, harmonious [musical] periods unfolded, oblivious of the tumult so near, and it all ended up so beautiful that I almost have to apologize for it.” Later he wrote to a friend that “it’s by a Debussy I no longer know! It’s frightfully melancholy, and I don’t know if one should laugh at it or cry. Perhaps both?”

But he had never been a composer who particularly reacted to the world around him in any social or political sense. It was typical of him that his Prélude about a faun—half human, half goat, dreaming of naked nymphs in a Greek meadow—had its first performance on the same day as Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction for espionage: the greatest political scandal of its day. His cello and violin sonatas were admittedly more austere, arguably more modern, and En blanc et noir even included a harsh satire of the German chorale “Ein feste Burg” and bits of the French national anthem “La Marseilleise.” But, in its own way, the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is musically of its time, harmonically sophisticated and exquisitely subtle in its blending of mixed sonorities (in the spirit, though certainly not the style, of Arnold Schoenberg’s hypermodern Pierrot lunaire of three years earlier). It was hardly Debussy’s fault that, when the war was over, Jean Cocteau would himself declare war on what he called the “beautiful octopuses” of Romanticism and call for “a music of every day… a music I can live in like a house.” By then Debussy was history.

Legacy

For all these reasons it’s useless to look for a direct influence of Debussy’s late music on the music composed in France—or anywhere else—in the decade or so after the war. Many years later Igor Stravinsky would maintain (not altogether truthfully) that “the musicians of my generation and I myself owe the most to Debussy,” and the composer-conductor Pierre Boulez would elevate his French predecessor into a major influence on the advanced serialist techniques of composition in the post-World War II period. There was certainly an element of Gallic solidarity in this view. (Boulez’s other modernist heroes, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and painter Paul Cézanne, were also French.) But it was also true that, in his emphasis on sonority and the astonishing precision of his harmonic and textural ear, Debussy did to some extent foreshadow those Boulez works, such as Le marteau sans maître (1953–55) and Pli selon pli (1961–62), in which instrumental color is part of the music’s grammar. In its way, the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp is itself such a work.

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Article by Stephen Walsh