Debussy's Clair de lune: Verlaine, masks and night light

Claude Debussy's most famous piece takes its name from a poem. Clair de lune, the third movement of the Suite bergamasque for piano, owes its title to a poem by Paul Verlaine, and through it connects to a world of masks, gardens and eighteenth-century melancholy. Composed around 1890 and published only in 1905, after revision, the suite reveals a still young Debussy, poised between tradition and experiment.

Verlaine's Fêtes galantes

In 1869 Verlaine published the collection Fêtes galantes, inspired by the scenes of Watteau and the painters of the French eighteenth century, with their outdoor parties peopled by ladies, gentlemen and characters from the commedia dell'arte. The opening poem, Clair de lune, compares the beloved's soul to a chosen landscape, crossed by masks and Bergamasks who play the lute and dance, almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

Everything resolves into a final image: the song of the masks merges «au calme clair de lune triste et beau», into the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful, which makes the birds dream in the trees and the jets of the fountains sob with ecstasy. It is a cold, enchanted Moon, lighting a party in which gaiety hides a vein of melancholy.

The suite and the moonlight

The word bergamasque, found in the poem, refers to Bergamo and to the bergamasca, an old folk dance, but also to the commedia dell'arte masks of Lombard origin. Debussy took up the word for the title of the suite, made up of a Prélude, a Menuet, Clair de lune and a Passepied. According to various sources, the third piece was originally called Promenade sentimentale and took Verlaine's title only in the published version.

Written in D flat major, Clair de lune opens with slow, suspended chords, played pianissimo, which seem to spread a soft light. The central section comes alive with undulating arpeggios before the return of the opening mood. The harmony, rich yet clear, avoids sharp contrasts and favours shadings and resonances, anticipating the composer's mature style.

Debussy's other moons

Verlaine's poem had already attracted Debussy: he set it for voice and piano as a young man, and again in the early 1890s in the first set of his Fêtes galantes. The same text also inspired Gabriel Fauré, who in 1887 drew from it a much admired mélodie, with a piano accompaniment evoking a minuet.

The Moon returned once more in the second book of Préludes for piano, published in 1913, with La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, the terrace of audiences by moonlight. The title, with its oriental flavour, is said to have been suggested by a newspaper article on the ceremonies for the coronation of George V as Emperor of India, held in Delhi in 1911.

Thanks to cinema, advertising and countless transcriptions, Clair de lune has become one of the best-known piano pieces in the world. Its charm arises from the meeting of Verlaine's words and Debussy's ear: a Moon that is not described but suggested, like a reflection trembling on the water of a fountain.