Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - French Music (II): Berlioz and Debussy
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Michael Oravitz
Debussy’s early orchestral masterpiece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, as is well known, comprises a work inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s eponymous poem. The poem reinvokes the ancient mythological figure Pan as a first-person protagonist who reminisces upon whether or not an erotic experience was dreamed or real. Given the work’s use of similar but continuously evolving thematic material, and given certain scholars’ desires to find correspondences between the poem and the musical work, a number of variant formal readings exist. Debussy himself suggested a non-literal congruence between the poetry and the music, and this study does likewise, combining particular pitch-structural facets of the work with more general musical topics that are suggested in the work’s gestures, topics that loosely complement the Attic and erotic themes of the poem (Bellman: 2014).
Unique resolutions of the C-sharp to G tritone, a dissonant interval experienced at key junctures in the work (see Austin: 1970), correspond with a loose narrative that is formed by a strand of contrasting extramusical topics that complement the work’s larger sections. Previous studies generally agree on the locations of the larger sections, but do not attempt to read a broader structural narrative into the work, perhaps because of Debussy’s own implicitly voiced distaste for literal, tone-poem-esque depictions in his 1903 critique of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Debussy manages to create a less specific narrative that transcends the play-by-play attributes of the traditional tone poem, but one that implants in the listener an unmistakable sense of coherence.
