Celestial Conversations on Debussy's Clair de Lune
The Backstory
Suite bergamasque, L. 75: III. Clair de lune
I'm Debussy, and this is the backstory of my Clair de Lune. You'll learn how I started it around 1890 and then let it wait for years before it reached print in 1905, which is a surprising road for such a gentle piece. Here on this site, my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our music the moment it begins, so come and test yourself whenever you feel like it.
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Not Quite a Solo Act
People often treat Clair de Lune as a piece that wandered in alone, but it's the third of four movements in my Suite bergamasque. The whole suite is written for solo piano, so there's no orchestra hiding in the wings. It lasts roughly 14 to 18 minutes, and Clair de Lune is the quiet moment in the middle of it. I like to think of it as the slow, dreamy chapter in a book that has a few livelier ones around it.Meet the Neighbors
The four movements are called Prélude, Menuet, Clair de lune and Passepied, and each one has its own key. The Prélude is in F major, the Menuet in A minor, and the Passepied in F-sharp minor, while Clair de Lune settles into D-flat major. The last movement, the Passepied, wasn't always called that, because I first gave it the title Pavane. I changed my mind about names quite a lot with this suite, as you'll see.A Young Man With a Notebook
I started this suite around 1890, when I was 28 years old. At that age I was still finding my own voice, and I was trying out sounds that were entirely my own. I couldn't have known that one movement of it would follow me around for the rest of my life. At the time it was just music I was working on, and nobody was waiting for it.The Drawer Years
Once I'd written it, the manuscript simply sat there unpublished for years. Music does that sometimes, waiting quietly until somebody decides the time is right. In the end the publisher Fromont acquired the suite, and that opened the way to printing it. Looking back, it's a little funny that the piece everyone knows spent so long without an audience.Borrowing From a Poet
The title Clair de lune comes from a poem by Paul Verlaine, written in 1869 and published in his collection Fêtes galantes. The title is full of moonlight, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere I love. I should be clear that I only borrowed the title, because I never set the poem to music. Whether my notes actually paint his words is something nobody can say for certain.Guests in Masks
The first stanza of Verlaine's poem mentions bergamasks, which are masked dancers. That word is where the name of the whole suite comes from, even though you won't hear anyone dancing in this movement. I find that rather fitting, since a masked dancer is someone you can't quite make out, and my music likes to stay a little blurry too. So the poem gave me a title, a name for the suite, and a mood, all without a single sung word.What I Called It First
Before it was Clair de Lune, this movement had another name: Promenade sentimentale. That is also the title of a Verlaine poem, so I was clearly in a poetic mood either way. I only renamed it when I revised the suite in 1905. It's a lovely title, but I think the moonlight version suits the music better.The Big Tidy-Up
Before the suite reached its final form in 1905, I revised it deeply. That year it was published in Paris by E. Fromont, fifteen years after I had started. Nobody has worked out bar by bar how much of the final piece comes from 1890 and how much from my later changes. Nobody knows for sure when it was first played in public either, which is a strange gap for such a famous piece.The Piece That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone
Clair de Lune became popular, and I'll admit I found that irritating. My worry was that people would know this one gentle piano piece and ignore my more mature works, such as La Mer. It's a bit like being a chef famous only for the first dish you ever cooked. Still, I can see why listeners love it, because that calm is hard to resist.Cut From the Cartoon
Over the years other musicians have reimagined Clair de Lune for orchestra, including André Caplet, Leopold Stokowski and Lucien Cailliet. It was even planned for Disney's Fantasia in 1940, but it was cut to keep the film's running time under control. A Stokowski orchestration was later restored as a bonus feature, so it did find its way to the screen in the end. Today it is regarded as one of the most famous pieces ever written for piano, which is a long way from a manuscript waiting in a drawer.---
I began Clair de Lune around 1890, and by the time it reached the public in 1905, I had revised it deeply. It's a little humbling to think that something so quiet took so many years to find its final shape. Along the way it even had another name, Promenade sentimentale, which was also the title of a Verlaine poem. The name it carries now comes from another of his poems, though nobody can say for certain how closely the music follows it. Some people hear moonlight in it, and some hear a memory, and I'm happy to leave that to you. I'll admit that its great popularity irritated me a little, because I worried it would stand in front of works I considered more mature, like La Mer. Still, I understand why people hold on to it, since it asks for nothing except a few quiet minutes of your attention. Did you enjoy learning about the backstory of Clair de Lune? I hope it gives you a little more to listen for the next time the opening notes begin. There's still plenty more to explore, from the different orchestrations that other musicians made of it to its near appearance in Disney's Fantasia. If you'd like to keep going, please click on the links provided and see where they take you. Then come back, put the piece on once more, and see what you hear this time.