Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Debussy completed his Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire in 1889. Impressed by this collection of mélodies, Mallarmé suggested that he write the incidental music to accompany a reciting of L’Après-midi d’un faune. But the project, intended for Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art, was abandoned. Of the planned triptych (Prélude, Interludes and Paraphrase finale pour L’Après-midi d’un faune, only the Prélude was completed (probably condensing all three parts of the original idea). Debussy’s first orchestral masterpiece was encored at the premiere on 22 December 1894, in Paris, at the Société Nationale de Musique, conducted by Gustave Doret. Although Apparition (an 1884 song), the Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune and the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) are his only works directly inspired by Mallarmé, the composer seems to have sought an equivalent to the poet’s syntactic innovations and symbolist aesthetics in all of his music. In the Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune, the flute melody has a rhythmic flexibility and an improvisatory character unparalleled at the end of the nineteenth century. The themes are no longer developed, but repeated in a constantly renewed harmonic and orchestral environment. Reflecting the uniqueness of the moment whose fragility it captures, the music blossoms in an atmosphere by turns evanescent and translucent, ablaze with sensuality and voluptuousness. Amazed by this Prélude that transposed his poem so well, Mallarmé offered Debussy a copy of his eclogue with a dedication in the form of a quatrain: “Sylvain d’haleine première/ Si la flûte a réussi/ Ouïs toute la lumière/ Qu’y soufflerra Debussy.” (“Sylvan of primal breath/ If the flute has succeeded,/ Hear all the light/ Infused there by Debussy.”)