Listen to the way he makes interesting use of the pedal in the opening lines – “With the pedal you can really create that sense of space,” he suggests. Lang Lang says the opening of Debussy’s ‘Clair De Lune’ is like glimpsing the moon through the trees, “perhaps a half moon”, gaining clarity now and then. In particular, we need to pay attention to the quality of touch and sound and the subtle gradations of dynamics within those mainly muted colours. In terms of piano technique ‘Clair De Lune’ is simpler than many of Debussy’s other pieces, but it does have complications of its own. Can I play it? – featuring a lesson with Lang Lang A reminiscence of the middle section forms a short coda, and the piece closes in the upward-gazing contemplation in which it began. First there’s the whispered melody that breaks into freely rhapsodic triplets and rich yet quiet harmonies, then a middle section with a new melody characterised by that ‘blue’ note over a rippling accompaniment this builds up to a gentle climax before the music subsides towards the return of the first theme, high in the treble register.
#Calair de lune movie#
In his introductory video, Lang Lang emphasises ‘Clair De Lune’s’ pictorial nature and likens it to Debussy “creating the most beautiful, artistic movie in the world”. The work shares the poem’s delicacy, its plangent yet subtle suggestions of mingled sorrow and beauty, and the ‘blue note’ in the middle section – which seems almost to evoke those weeping fountains – encapsulates a certain atmosphere that permeates the entire piece. But when Debussy decided to switch to the more descriptive and precise ‘Clair De Lune’, he probably had a good reason to do so. That, too, is from Verlaine, after verses from his Poèmes Saturniens. Only to a certain degree, perhaps – because originally the piece had a completely different title, which was ‘Promenade Sentimentale’. What does that mean? As we listen, it’s up to each of us to decide.
Their songs mingle with the calm moonlight, “sad and beautiful”, while the birds dream in the trees and between marble statues great fountains sob with ecstasy.īy the end of the poem, we may have forgotten the implication of its first line: this entire exquisite, languid scene is actually within the soul of the poet’s beloved. They sing “in the minor mode”, he writes, about the victories of life and love, while never seeming to believe in their own happiness. “Your soul is a choice landscape, in which there roam charming maskers and bergamaskers, playing the lute and dancing, as if sad beneath their fantastical disguises,” Verlaine writes in ‘Clair De Lune’ (you’ve probably already noticed that the title of Debussy’s entire piano suite comes from this). Everything we perceive becomes a symbol or concealment for something else our own minds must make subconscious connections to reach the heart of the matter. Verlaine took up this atmosphere of disguise and implied hidden desires and carried it into the late 19th century’s Symbolist era, an artistic and literary movement in which nothing can be taken at face value. Watteau’s paintings are stylised, delicate portrayals of courtly life and love in idyllic pastoral settings, the protagonists sometimes costumed for masquerades as Commedia Dell’Arte characters (Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine, et al).
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