Claude Debussy: Clair de Lune (Moonlight), 1890, reworked 1905.

A Backwards History

Proust, speaking of World War I, writes of the "unchanged antique splendor of a moon cruelly, mysteriously serene, which poured the useless beauty of its light on monuments that were still intact." Note the similarity between this passage and Verlaine's poems below.

    In 1905 the impetus to war was building, the tensions palpable, especially to artists. So in the glimmer of Debussy's mysterious moon, borrowed from Verlaine and shining on outmoded monuments, a passé scene which exists to this day in Paris, can be found death, meaninglessness, and implacable human hatred, all of it tucked neatly away behind the serenity of the statuesque chords and moonbeam arpeggios, rolling in the bass the way they slant similarly in the trees, as if arpeggios are Debussy's shorthand for night filtered through leaves.

    Debussy is writing his old-fashioned harmonies in the face of Stravinsky, of armed juggernauts massing which will destroy the notion of universal good will, of national harmony, so it is no wonder that a catchy tune had become only a honkytonk tease for drunken sailors in Viennese brothels, not a truth which an intellectual could take seriously, as it had been earlier for Liszt, even for Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss' uncle.

    My teacher used to say you had to play Scriabin to understand Mozart. That is, you had to know what chain of diabolical creation Mozart inspired in order to understand what was, to the great minds that followed, silently obvious in his seemingly naive melodies. And so, suspecting what was coming, Debussy may have been aware that he was celebrating the past even as the world was losing it.

    Certainly he was accused of being a recidivist, someone who was dredging up melodramatic overwrought ancient techniques out of fear of the modernity which surrounded him. Stravinsky was writing music that would change the world as Debussy was writing old-fashioned forms like Sarabandes.

    Of course we now realize that Debussy's harmonies were unique, that geniuses often better the achievements of the past by redoing them with hindsight, and that a great macabre irony existed behind his music's childlike facade. You have to learn history and music backwards. Schubert's dances in his final sonatas, Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra are dances of death, as is Debussy's soft lunar wind stirring the trees of revolution, an emotion the French had after all invented.

    Clair de Lune comes at the beginning of the maelstrom. It hides Boulez and Schönberg under its marble skirts.

    Familiarity has overexposed Debussy's brief patch of moonlight like an infrared photograph, precisely because it is the premier example of silence in music, of the absolute stillness to be found in the pools of D-flat starlight, its opening thirds surrounded as they are by the space and calm of balmy summer night.

    Chords materialize out of the dark, that void which preexisted existence, so that we are conscious of life before unconsciousness, the underpinnings of all life. As Richard II says, "Nor I, nor any man that but man is, with nothing shall be pleased till he be eased with being nothing."

    That is, until we understand the nature of the void, the abyss, the gulf, the chasm, until we are content with perfect silence, we cannot begin to understand how precious each small drop of rain might be. It is like the short story by Algernon Blackwood, "The Reeds," where terrified hikers by the Danube try to make their minds a perfect blank so a monster cannot focus on their thoughts; they find it impossible.

    Paul Roberts additionally feels that Debussy must have had the dark moonlit landscapes of Watteau in mind as a texture which music might suggest.

    The chords hang in the void, clinging to each other for dear life, because there is nothing else. Debussy achieves this effect by linking the notes together by slurs and other tricks, such as shared "flags," the little lines that proceed blissfully up from the sullen notes themselves. The notes begin to linger even after the next chord has entered. If you listen closely, you can hear a prior note suspended over a newer arrival. Chords linger beyond their musical notation, represented only by a single note tied by a slur line into the following measure.

    The harmonies build until a small world of associations gathers like the shadows of dark branches on grey moonlit grass, and a crescendo is reached, but it is a reverse crescendo, because instead of a crashing climax, instead an immensely quiet vast octave echoes in the deep bass, suspended underneath the enormous chords tiptoeing down from the sky, like beams of light that light the sky quietly, vast but soundless.

    So these chords, which remind me of Marcel Duchamp's cubist Nude Descending a Staircase, photons and fragments of broken light scattered through trees which bump gently down the staircase of the sky, these chords are the sound of silence, the representation of what noiselessness might sound like.

    The low bass octave, called a pedal point, stands in for Debussy's primordial soup, for the first stirrings of life which have been invented by the phrases and cubist smatterings of noise which have come before, growing until they produce a real tone. Debussy has created something from nothing.

    When the drum strike of the bass sounds, the treble moon springs from it instantly, as if on the rebound, a kind of sprung rhythm, so the extreme bass seems to leap up into the heights, the high notes springing up from the low note, a kind of syncopation, where the second note follows the first too rapidly, as if part of it, Eve created from Adam's rib, the whole reach of the piano linked together by the staggered rhythm of these two notes.

    So two unique spaces, separated by the length of the piano, are joined together by time, by a kind of chronological slur, space and time in a pre-Einsteinian relativity, and indeed Debussy makes this clear by indicating that the two notes are to be played out of the time signature of the piece. By writing the number 2 above them, he indicates that the two notes are to occupy the space of one note.

    As the chords descend from the sky in groups of three, the way we trip downstairs, the last trip has a small skip in it, where the chord, instead of sinking down, leaps up briefly before going down to the next obvious note. The little skip up is like wind shaking the shadows on the ground, or like a sudden ripple on a pond, and Debussy indicates its presence again by writing the number 2 above two bracketed notes, lifting them out of the inevitable rhythm of the descent and creating a tiny cardiac arrhythmia, a small skip of a heartbeat. This skip has been present from the simple beginning, you might notice on re-listening, when about eight seconds in there is a little birdlike hop upwards.

    Later, when bass arpeggios appear under the melody to strengthen and emphasize that the moon has arrived at an identity, this same skip will appear again, now part of the main rhythm, not just a throwaway line, showing that, for Debussy as for Beethoven, a small overlooked motivic tic in the beginning of a piece can metamorphose into a full-blown incident within a page or two.

    That is, music has a deep, unconscious structure which becomes more than a scaffolding on which the meaning of a piece is hung: the scaffolding dictates and becomes the meaning, as the accidental events of our lives often become elements which shape our ends. A haphazard kiss becomes a marriage, a gesture becomes a lawsuit, a flick of the wheel kills. By describing such random coincidence musically, and by demonstrating how its importance emerges, music is telling us a story as much as any Greek drama: it is setting us a parable from which we can derive wisdom, understanding of how life works, if we can only understand the language.

    Rather than a tale told by an idiot, it is a clue hidden by a genius, and these hints are there to change our lives, if we can find them. They pass in the music in a second, but the pianist has to memorize them and understand why the rhythm changes, so days may be spent on such transient detail, and we have to ask ourselves why Debussy should have written it that way, and gradually a philosophy unfolds, disguised over the years in simple notations, like a dead language.

    Note that when the piece seems to speed up and turn a bit harsh, it is because the key has changed briefly to E major, a more trumpet-like tonality, before disillusioned steely thirds sidle down the sky to come to rest on a quiet spot, maybe a pond, and the bass becomes soothing, a steady oscillation back and forth. The arpeggios diminish and the initial theme returns, this time with fragments of the arpeggios present, a reminder of its arpeggiated days of frenzied glory.

    The arpeggios return, really without a melody, until you realize that the harmony is the melody, that the cascading moonlight is the point, not the pathetic fallacy of love it falsely inspires: our joys and despairs have nothing to do with the calm, cold workings of the warm world. The fragments subside, and the simple chords reach poignantly for the sky, lost moon rays trying to beam up. Here the sense of sadness is most obvious, at least to me, and the swan song for lost love under the moonlight becomes most articulate.

    The notes rise and disappear: but one lone chord remains after the arpeggiated beams have dissipated as the moon sets. Something has been said, something has been created, something remains, as in the Harmonies du Soir (track 9, page 60).

    I am reminded of Noam Chomsky's grammatical residue: if St. Paul said, "Do not fear that one of Thebes is damned, do not presume that one of Thebes is saved," mathematically the negative statement cancels out the positive one, the verbs cancel, the adjectives cancel, so nothing has been said, strictly speaking, but of course, St. Paul has said that we should walk gingerly and hope humbly, a kind of golden mean, which may or may not include the La Toya Jackson psychic hot line.

    So the river flows, the moon glows, and only your hairdresser knows for sure.

    Debussy found Verlaine's poem, Clair de Lune, to be the verbal epitome of his composition, and so adopted its title. Here is the poem:

Clair de Lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Moonlight

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where there are charming masks and masques
Playing the lute and dancing and half
Sad under their fantastical disguises.

All in chanting in the minor mode
Of conquering love and the fortunate life,
They don't have the air of believing in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the calm light of the moon, sad and good,
Which makes the birds dream in the trees
And the fountains sob with ecstasy,
The huge, svelte fountains among the statues.

Hydrants

Our whole life is a forged pastel
Of make-believe actors and grinning frauds
Humming and twisting with made-up broads
In their fake, fantastic Copa from hell,

Lip-syncing disco by Donna Summer
About safer sex and the happier hour,
Where beer is bitter and faces are sour,
And nothing matters as long as it's summer,

The long silent summer, sad and bright
Which makes the squirrels dream in the trees
And the open hydrants hiss in the breeze,
The big public hydrants in the moonlight.

Promenade Sentimentale

Le couchant dardait ses rayons suprêmes
Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes;
Les grands nénuphars entre les roseaux
Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux.
Moi j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie
Au long de l'étang, parmi la saulaie
Où la brume vague évoquait un grand
Fantôme laiteux se désespérant
Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles
Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes
Parmi la saulaie où j'errais tout seul
Promenant ma plaie; et l'épais linceul
Des ténèbres vint noyer les suprêmes
Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blêmes
Et les nénuphars, parmi les roseaux,
Les grands nénuphars sur les calmes eaux.

A Sentimental Walk

Sunset darts its supreme rays
And wind rocks the pale lilies,
The huge lilies between the roses
Sadly shining on the calm waters.
Me, I wander alone, walking my wounds
Along the lagoon, among the willow groves
Where the vague fog evokes a huge
Milky phantom despairing
And weeping with the voice of the river ducks
Who remember it too while beating their wings
Among the willows where I wander alone
Walking my wound; and the thick shroud
Of the dark drowns the supreme
Rays of sunset in the pale waves
And the lilies, among the roses,
The huge lilies on the calm waters.

Lagoon

At last the sunlight
Cradles the night
On the enormous lagoon,
Pale night with the moon
On the glinting lagoon
In the moon where I stalk
With the world in my walk
The vague shadows creeping
On willow groves weeping
Like river ducks flying
As they fly away crying
Over the lilies' refrain,
Where shrouded in pain
And embalmed in the dark
I walk in the park
By lilies and roses
Where the moon dozes
On the enormous lagoon,
The moon that encloses
Huge lilies and roses
On the enormous lagoon.