Page 103 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

turns around and spots the Germans, a battle breaks out, and everyone dies.
Guglielmo Marconi broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. It may have been that Debussy heard two radios playing different programs in separate apartments and realized that technology had fragmented the world. Cubism was a response to the time-lapse aspects of motion made possible by cameras, and Impressionism was a deliberate pushback against the clinical realism of photography. Monet deliberately painted with his glasses off, so he could see the world through the imperfections he was born with, rather than correcting it artificially with glasses.
As Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” of 1919:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The fragmentation of society since the beginning of the 20th century had led to dramatic adaptations in art. The double vision of myopia had been falsely rectified by glasses; the imperfect vision of painters had been fixed by cameras. The schizophrenia of double visions is reflected here in Debussy’s two contradictory voices.
War is about two people playing different melodies, speaking different languages, believing in different philosophies. Republicans and Democrats. He signed the score: “Claude Debussy—musicien français.”
This is then Debussy’s own response, begun in 1916, to the First World War, juxtaposing national harmonies into final chaos. The optimism of the ending was his hope for the
future; he wrote the last movement first, so the war was still going on at the time.
Most critics have thought this sonata represents the opposite: Debussy’s disregard of the world around him in favor of pure art. But they miss the deeper sign language in its conflicting modalities.
Debussy was dying, depressed by the increasing pain and difficulty of composing, and depressed as well by the global depression wrought by the war in his friends. He must have been feeling that the world was changing around him in terrible ways. This was his dying attempt to address modernism and conflict. It was the last piece he would ever write, and it was instrumental in codifying the way French composers faced the new century. With characteristic understatement, Debussy said:
I only wrote this sonata to be rid of the thing, spurred on by my dear publisher. This sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.
A few notes: The initial chords, G minor followed by C major, are the ones used by Rachmaninoff in his Barcarolle, the Op. 10 of 1893. This kind of “strangification,” a surreal juxtaposition of chords, is a very Russian thing.
In the waltz-like midsection of the first movement, fifths emerge from the almost unaccompanied piano in surreal chord changes (E, D, F, G; and C, B-flat, D-flat, E-flat) as the sonata briefly harks back to the old Debussy of "Sunken Cathedral" and the Sarabande.
2018 Summer Season 103