by The flute’s gentle siren call emerges, solitary and alluring. It wanders freely from C-sharp down to G-natural and back again, drifting hazily into our consciousness, and beckoning us forward with quiet, seductive power.
This is how we enter the sensuous dreamscape of Claude Debussy’s colorful and fleeting 1894 tone poem, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Debussy’s inspiration arose from a poem by the French symbolist, Stéphane Mallarmé. It depicts a faun who, after awakening from a nap on a sultry summer afternoon, contemplates his encounter with a group of nymphs. The scene occupies a blurry world somewhere between dreaming and waking. There is a sense of chasing and attempting to grasp the ephemeral. Memory becomes illusive. Perhaps what seemed concrete was just a dream?
Debussy offered this description:
The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature.
The Listener’s Club
