Pascal Roge's first complete Preludes recording and first CD in a complete Debussy cycle on ONYX

Pascal Rogé talks to Jeremy Siepmann about Debussy

Jeremy Siepmann: Has Debussy’s music been a major force in your life for as long as you can remember?
Pascal Rogé: Almost, yes. Certainly since I was eight - when I first heard Book I of the Préludes. What I discovered in Debussy was something much stronger than a musical emotion...it was a feeling of "creation", as if his music was a "canvas" to my own imagination. Suddenly, I could hear the "colours" I had in my mind, the piano ceased to be a percussive, mechanical instrument, it became like a painter's palette. For the first time I saw pictures, actual images, when I played. I smelt perfumes, felt breezes, rain, fog, all coming out of the keyboard. The word "technique" was replaced by the words “impressions” and “imagination."

JS: How did you first hear him? And who were the shaping forces on your perception of him (not just your teachers but other performers)?
PR: I know this probably sounds pretentious, but I honestly can’t remember anyone "teaching" me Debussy...or even any reference to another interpreter. It’s as though his music was forever a part of myself. I was thirteen when I played for the Spanish pianist José Iturbi ... I remember, after I played all the repertoire I was supposed to play for him, he said "We still have time...don't you have anything else you want to play?” I started a Debussy Prélude - and he stopped me after a few bars by saying "Oh no, not Debussy...I’m perfectly aware that nobody can play it better than you!!"

JS: Do you play him today (in terms of overall concept) in much the same way as you did, say, when you were twenty?
PR: Probably not. But I’ve never "thought" how to play Debussy - although I played him when I was very young to two teachers, Marguerite Long (1)and Lucette Descaves (2), who were the absolute benchmarks in this repertoire. But neither of them were "directive" in their suggestions to me - except to mention misprints or dynamics (some of which are not corrected even in the latest edition). Both were giving me images: Mme Long said about Les collines d'Anacapri..."yes, you are right, the middle section is sung by an Italian tenor, but you know...he was very handsome ... try it again! Or in Le vent d'ouest..: “You play too many notes. I want sounds! Harmonies! Colours!

JS: Is his piano music conceived with the concert hall listener in mind, or is it more intimately conceived - for the drawing room, or for the player alone?
PR: For the player alone! Absolutely! To tell you the truth, I can’t conceive what the listener can enjoy, compared to the voluptuous delight of creating all those sounds, perfumes - colours again! Sometimes I even feel guilty about experiencing so much pleasure in public. It’s almost indecent!
JS: Does the medium of recording enable you to do things with his music that the concert hall doesn’t? Is a ‘concert hall’ approach to the circumstance and acoustic environment of the home listener even aesthetically viable?
PR: Soundwise, recording enables you to go further into some dynamics and colouring than a large concert hall would allow. On the other hand, being in a concert hall might help concentration. It’s probably easier to get away into a dream in an unknown concert hall than in your usual home environment. I always ask the audience, in my all French programmes, not to applaud in between the pieces, but only at the end of each half, in order to keep that special atmosphere and quality of silence. Ideally, the audience shouldn’t know about the composer, the titles (Debussy himself put them at the end of the Préludes) but just let themselves go, into a colourful and timeless journey in imagination.

JS: Are there particular technical challenges that are typical of his piano writing?
PR: Pedalling is probably the first challenge, although it’s not really technical. It’s more to do with ears...and with harmonic sense. Too often, one hears Debussy with lots of pedal. This is totally wrong. Transparency and clarity are often the keywords of Debussy's essence. Drowning the harmonies in pedal effects works against a true understanding of Debussy's language. But dryness isn’t the answer either. It’s all tremendously subtle, and perhaps impossible to teach. It’s a question of hearing. Of feeling. Of sensation. And it’s never quite the same twice. Different pianos, different acoustics, different mind's eye … it’s a wonderful journey of endless discovery!

© ONYX 2005

(1) Marguerite Long (1874-1966), the most important French woman pianist of the 20th century who worked closely with Debussy, Fauré and particularly Ravel. See Marguerite Long – A Life in French Music 1874-1966 by Cecilia Dunoyer (Indiana University Press, 1993)

(2) Lucette Descaves (1906-1993) one of the most famous French pedagogues , pupil of Marguerite Long and teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, friend and collaborator of Ravel

DEBUSSY- 24 PRELUDES

It seems Debussy had been thinking of putting together a collection of Préludes for two or three years before his first book was published in April 1910. But the final elaboration was quick, taking place in a mere two months between December 1909 and February 1910. The twelve pieces can be roughly grouped into three categories: legend/mystery, nature and vulgar/modern.

Into the ‘legend/mystery’ category come the first two preludes and three others. ‘Danseuses de delphes’ evokes the calmly sensuous Ancient Greece beloved of French turn-of-the-century intellectuals, while ‘Voiles’, according to Edgard Varèse, referred to the veils of the dancer Loie Fuller, who combined them with subtle lighting to produce abstract, mysterious effects. ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) was inspired by a damsel of pre-Raphaelite features in a poem by Leconte de Lisle – an archetype that Debussy seems to have favoured – and his own character to some extent shows through in ‘La danse de Puck’: both Debussy and Puck were subversives and hard to pin down. The well-known ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ (The Submerged Cathedral) returns to the quasi-religious vision of ‘Danseuses de Delphes’, though on a larger scale and incorporating the bell sounds which had always been Debussy favourites.

The five ‘nature’ pieces are grouped together in the centre of the book – a symbol, if you like, of the centrality of nature in Debussy’s art – framed by the two wind pieces, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’, (The Wind in the Plain) and Ce qu’a vu le Vent d’Ouest’ (What the West Wind saw), which present pictures of a bracing breeze and a full-blown gale respectively. The title ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (Sounds and scents swirl in the evening air) is a line from Baudelaire’s poem Harmonie du soir, set by Debussy in 1889, and conjuring up a Symbolist correspondence of light, smell and sound. Possibly the most disturbing of all these Preludes, ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (Footsteps in the Snow’) explores areas of melancholy, immobility and impotence previously touched on only by the late piano pieces of Liszt.

The other ‘nature’ piece, ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’ (The Hills of Anacapri) has one foot in the vulgar/modern camp through its use of a pseudo-Neapolitan folksong. This field of sensibility is further explored in ‘La sérénade interrompue’, where art is interrupted by real life, and in the final piece, ‘Minstrels’, inspired by a group of musicians in red jackets who paraded through the streets of Eastbourne in 1905, while Debussy was staying there and orchestrating La Mer. Both of these pieces are a far cry from the polite, reverent, ‘poetic’ treatment of popular elements found in works like D’Indy’s Symphony on a French mountain Song.

For the most part, these three approximate groupings hold good in the second book of Préludes, published in 1913, though the ‘nature’ pieces are somewhat dispersed. Two of them, ‘Brouillards’ (Fog) and ‘Feuilles mortes’ (Dead Leaves) provide the same low-key beginning as in the first book, even if the harmonic language is more advanced. ‘Bruyères' (Heather) on the other hand is a relatively simple piece, possibly written some years earlier. But the only other candidate for the ‘nature’ category, ‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’ (The terrace of spectators by the light of the moon) spills over into other areas – imagination, and that of ‘legend/mystery’. Debussy took the title from a description in a French newspaper of George V as Emperor of India in 1912. It therefore carries resonances of the exotic, the imperial and even the religious, as well as that of moonlight.
Other in the ‘legend/mystery’ group include ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ (The fairies are exquisite dancers) inspired by an Arthur Rackham illustration for J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan; ‘Ondine’, a picture of the water nymph – deliberately simple, maybe, to debunk the far more elaborate one Ravel had painted a few years earlier in Gaspard de la nuit; and ‘Canope’, prompted by the two ancient Egyptian funerary jars from Canopus which Debussy kept on his worktable.

The final ‘vulgar/modern’ group is now expanded from two preludes to four, foreshadowing (or even provoking?) the increased number of ‘popular’ manifestations by Les Six and others in the 1920s. ‘La puerta del Vino’ (The Gate of Wine) evokes the Moorish gate by the Alhambra in Granada through what Debussy called ‘brusque oppositions of extreme violence and passionate tenderness’. On the edge of the group sits ‘ Hommage à Samuel Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C’ with its affectionate treatment of ‘God Save the King’, but firmly within it comes ‘General Lavine – eccentric’ a portrait of a music-hall artist, once described as a ‘comic juggler, half tramp and half warrior’. The final ‘Feux d’artifice’ (Fireworks) absorbs the vulgar/modern’ into a poetic atmosphere, with the Marseillaise disembodied and divested of the chauvinism that Debussy loathed so passionately and reduced to the condition of a memory – in which it strikes home with increased force. It may be worth noting that it was in November 1913, only seven months after the appearance of this second book, that Marcel Proust published the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu…

Roger Nichols