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Claude Debussy : Feux d'artifice

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Debussy's cycle of twenty-four preludes for piano at the end of his career (1910-1913) essentially completed the development of the genre in Western European music, the most significant phenomenon of which were the preludes by Bach and Chopin. Debussy´s 24 preludes for piano occupy a special place in the composer's oeuvre. Rich in expression, varied in difficulty, these preludes sum up a style that revolutionised the musical language of the whole XXth century and represent a new writing style that ended III centuries of functional harmony.

Each prelude has a programme title, stated only at the end of the piece."To name an object is to kill three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem; to suggest its image is the dream". /Stéphane Mallarmé/ Poet of sound and wizard of freedom, Debussy set music on a new course:“There is no theory: it is enough to hear. Pleasure is the rule". According to Jean et Brigitte Massin, Debussy is a 'pioneer of contemporary art, he refuses to adopt a pre-existing form for his work, and seeks a form of writing that escapes to the tyranny of the tonal…´ Debussy aims more at exploiting the variety of colours and richness of sound possible in each of the musical motifs. As his incredible genius humbly said: “I have been called „revolutionary“, but I have not invented anything. At most, I have presented old things in a new way. There is nothing new in art. My musical sequences, which are so widely discussed, are not inventions. I have heard them all before. Not in churches. In myself. Music is everywhere. It is not locked up in books”. The composer hoped to be working on things that will only be understood by the grandchildren of the 20th century. „Only they will see that "clothes do not make the musician". What is your opinion on this point? Have we, as humankind, ever improved so greatly to meet his demanding expectations? Write your thoughts in the comments below.

He went further: “The best thing one could wish for French music is: to see the abolition of the study of harmony as it is practised in school, which is the most solemnly ridiculous way of assembling sounds. It has, moreover, the serious defect of unifying to such an extent that all musicians, with a few exceptions, harmonise in the same way.”

And just like that, his preludes for piano represent a unique opportunity to understand the new writing that ended three centuries of functional harmony. Yet this enormous breakthrough was not enough for his unstoppable talent: "I am becoming more and more convinced that music is not, in its essence, something that can be cast in a rigorous and traditional form. It is of colours and rhythms.”

Debussy's music is full of complex contrapuntal textures, written on three instead of typically two staves, furthermore, with two to three different sonorities at once with the same hand. Besides that, the improvised nature of Debussy´s preludes adds another interpretive difficulty: rubato, that legacy of Romanticism.

“It was also here that he was best able to free the melodic phrase from the tyranny of the bar line” /Harry Halbreich/

The stunning virtuosity of the passages in Fireworks (originally „Feux d´artifice) is wholly subservient to the pictorial task of creating the illusion of an aerial space illuminated by flashes of artificial lights. A little hint for motivated pianist: Feux d`artifice is classified as a the highest level 9 work by Henle, be ready to sweat a little;-) But the game is worth the candle, isn`t it?

With that combination of Debussy composition and Huppmann genius, Feux d’artifice seemed the natural place to start Anastasia’s NFT collection.