Debussy in Performance.(Review)

Debussy in Performance. Edited by James R. Briscoe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. [xi, 301 p. ISBN 0-300-07626-6. $35.]

A number of performers who had enjoyed professional contact with Claude Debussy believed that his music was so special, so different from that of other composers, so difficult to understand and interpret, and so often badly performed, that they were moved to publish instructions for its "proper" performance--performance, that is (whether or not they stated it explicitly), in accordance with what they understood to be the composer's intentions. This attitude seems to underlie a number of the stimulating essays that constitute Debussy in Performance, but their lack of unanimity, on this and other key issues, proves in the end to be one of the collection's great strengths.

The eleven chapters are divided into four parts, the first of which comprises three attempts to locate the "esprit debussyste." In the highly nuanced and richly detailed opening essay, Richard Langham Smith analyzes recordings by Debussy and musicians in his orbit in order to bolster the argument that the performance ideals the composer articulated--above all, his insistence on strict adherence to the letter of his scores--should be understood both in the context of and as reactive to the prevailing performance style of his time, which embraced what we now regard as expressive liberties. Claude Abravanel, writing more "impressionistically," contrasts Debussy's "symbolist" music with "traditional" music and encourages performers to approach it with an ascetic emotionalism and a sensitivity to sonority consistent with the symbolist aesthetic. Louis-Marc Suter explores the role of "silence" in Pelleas et Melisande and faults singers who fail to observe the notated rests. Displaying a discretion rare among music ologists, he declines to identify the offenders, but in contrast to many of the contributors to this collection, he favors the most recent, rather than the earliest, recordings.

Each of the four chapters of part 2 takes up a different genre: orchestral music, piano music, ballet, and song. James R. Briscoe usefully documents Debussy's expectations of orchestral performances, drawing from a variety of sources, including reports of the composer's own unsteady conducting. He compares the tempos of selected recordings made between the late 1920s and early 1960s, notes generally slower tempos after 1950, and prefers the earlier recordings for their combination of nuance and structural projection. Cecilia Dunoyer explores the apparent contradiction between the recorded evidence of Debussy's "highly personal pianistic style" (p. 92) and his insistence that interpreters scrupulously comply with his scores. She gathers his opinions on some topics relevant to pianists--fingering, pedaling, and metronome markings--and, in analyzing speculative realizations of his 1913 piano rolls, disregards wrong notes and rationalizes rhythmic clumsiness to praise the "improvisatory feeling," "velvety touch, " "subtleties in pedaling, a remarkable lightness of touch, and tempo flexibility" (pp. 93- 94). She then uses this standard to evaluate recordings by some early Debussystes: Walter Rummel, Marguerite Long, Ricardo Vines, Alfred Cortot, George Copeland, and E. Robert Schmitz. Choreographic performance is the subject of Stephanie Jordan's intriguing discussion of the ballets. She finds aspects of both symbolism and modernism in Vaslav Nijinsky's geometric choreography for Debussy's sinuous Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, music that Nijinsky selected only after he had determined the dance style. In contrast, Jeux was a genuine collaboration, and as a result, the musical rhythm seemed to generate the sport-inspired choreographic movement. Brooks Toliver seeks an authentic song ...