Debussy: Cello Sonata (Prologue and Serenade)



It's slightly out of sync, but here's the late/great Maurice Gendron playing the first two movements of Debussy's late/great Cello Sonata (1915)*. Debussy's late music is an obsession of mine, and I hold pieces like these final sonatas, the piano Etudes and Jeux in what comes close to awe. While they have attracted much of the post-war avant-garde, most notably Boulez, for their obsession with novel timbres, austere emphasis on structural coherence through the most fragmentary and subtly complex rhythmic, harmonic and thematic material, I cannot be so cerebral to fall in love with this music just for its inversions of musical syntax and grammar on the page. If you have read my writing or better yet come into personal contact with me, you will see that I cannot be 'cerebral' much at all. I like Nascar, voluptuous women and explosions like every other American man as deemed so by one Tim Allen.**
Nevertheless, I have often thought of these late works of Debussy as my "ideal" music. Not even my 'favorite' music, or the 'greatest music' I know of, but in some way the most oddly perfect and fascinating music I have ever heard; I hear, I hear Ancient Greece, I hear Lully and Rameau and Couperin and Charpentier, I hear Stravinsky and Ravel and yet I hear, I hear nothing but this music, and nothing but the slowly dying and simultaneously dreamy and acerbic Claude Debussy. I return over and over again as I am haunted by certain pages, certain bars, certain harmonies, certain rests and notes and accentuations, that seem to have been put there by my dear Claude Achille for no one but the good friend he never met, being dead 67 years before the fact, a certain Patrick I call myself. Divining secrets and empathy beyond the grave the sly devil!

Something strange is at work as well right here in this Prologue and Serenade for cello and piano, that certain renewed interest in hardened and crystilline form, combined with the beautiful but cranky woolgathering of the master's mature style. When it comes together in a work like this and is performed by musicians with a real ear for the strange dream logic, it is some of the greatest art I know of.
Debussy thought of subtitling this Sonata Pierrot fâché avec la lune, 'Pierrot (the lovesick clown from Italian commedia dell'arte) furious with the moon'. It's a curious title, but in its profoundly deep Debussyan way "just right", like Goldilocks' third bed. Not only is it interesting for the Schoenberg connection, as many forms of circus imagery seem to have been particularly popular with artists in the first couple decades of our last clownish century, but mostly striking for the classic image of a sad clown cursing something he loves, hates and doesn't understand.
Basically, of course, you and me.

*The Finale is here.
**Joke. I hate Nascar, and all cars for that matter, am fond of all women no matter the obtuseness of their curves, and shudder at the thought of physical explosions (preferring abstract, and metaphoric explosions of invention and love and energy). In short, I am the young man who you most likely saw crying during dodgeball in ninth grade gym class.