Preface

This collection of piano music by Claude Debussy contains a selection of pieces that are technically easy to play. A mosaic of highly contrasting works, the collection aims to enrich the literature of music that is accessible to the beginning pianist. Additions supplied by the editor are indicated as such. The spare fingerings are to be understood both as helpful tips and as a means of stimulating one's own fingering choices.

1. The Little Negro. This is a stylized cakewalk with syncopated rhythms in the style of the ragtime. The cakewalk, a lively dance of the North American blacks, originated around 1870 and spread to Europe as a stage and exhibition dance around 1900. Debussy composed this little piece for Théodore Lack's piano method, for which many composers supplied small works.

2. The Little Shepherd. This miniature depicts a shepherd improvising a melody on his shawm. The piece is drawn from the Children's Corner cycle, which Debussy wrote for his daughter. On the title page, the composer wrote the following dedication: "For my dear little Chouchou, with the most delicate apologies for what is about to follow...". What followed were pieces which Chouchou's dainty hands were in all likelihood unable to master at that time.

3. Danse de la poupée. This doll's dance was taken from the children's ballet La Boîte à Joujoux (The Toy Box). The ballet is about a boxful of old toys which take on a life of their own and enjoy all kinds of adventures. Bars 31ff and 73ff: The wide stretches in the accompaniment can be performed more easily through a careful use of the pedal; immediately after ending the staccato attack on the second quarter note, depress the right pedal and release it at the same time that you play the third quarter note.

4. Danse bohémienne. Debussy's earliest surviving piano composition was written when the 19-year-old composer was a guest at the home of Peter Tchaikovsky's patroness and friend Nadeshda von Meck in Russia.

5. Clair de lune. This lyrical "moonlight music" was probably inspired by the poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine which, incidentally, Debussy also set to music for voice and piano. The composer possibly derived the title of his Suite bergamasque, which contains Clair de lune, from a phrase in the first stanza of the poem ("...masques et bergamasques"). The title of the suite perhaps alludes to the masquerades of the Commedia dell'arte, which originated in Bergamo.

6. Page d'album. Debussy wrote this waltz-like album page so that the manuscript could be sold for charitable purposes at an auction held by the benevolent association Le Vêtement du Blessé during World War I.

7. Rêverie. In bar 48 of the Rêverie, the melody shifts from the left hand back to the right hand again (the supplementary line makes this clear). At bar 80, the melody note c", played by the left hand, should be taken over by the right hand at the end of the bar and held so that the note is not cut off at the pedal change at the beginning of bar 81; this would break the flow of the melody.

8. Arabesque. The title of this early work, which was published together with a fellow piece, could be taken as a kind of motto for all of Debussy's music, which is characterized by an ethereal, undulating, richly ornamental and vibrating quality.

9. Elégie. Debussy wrote this piano sketch tinged with mystery and filled with harmonic pungency toward the end of his life, during the oppressive years of the First World War.

10. Prélude (... Canope). Canopic vases are the four funeral urns in which the entrails of an embalmed body were buried next to the casket in ancient Egypt. Debussy himself owned two such vases.

Michael Töpel
(translated by Bradford J. Robinson)