PROGRAMME NOTES

written by AURÉLIE WALSCHAERT

Paul Dukas Fanfare pour précéder La Péri (1912)
Paul Dukas La Péri, poème dansé en un tableau (1912)
Claude Debussy Images pour orchestre, L. 122 (1912)

[all programme notes]

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14.11.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSELS

Two masters of sound and imagination

In a letter written in 1920, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) expressed his admiration for Ibéria, the middle section of Debussy's Images pour orchestre: ‘How is it possible that a Frenchman, who has barely set foot in Spain, can express our folk music so masterfully? Many Spanish composers cannot hold a candle to him. They will be seriously jealous!’

Debussy (1862–1918) picked up the Spanish atmosphere not in Andalusia but in Paris – at the 1889 world’s fair, among other places. At the end of the 19th century, the French capital fell under the spell of exotic cultures and so a lively cross-fertilisation flourished between French Impressionism and the colourful music from Spain and the East. La Péri, a ballet by Debussy’s contemporary and compatriot Paul Dukas (1865–1935), also followed this trend. The story comes straight from a Persian fairy tale and the orchestration is also steeped in oriental mysticism.

From Paris to Persia

To a large extent, Dukas’ career paralleled that of Debussy. Both studied with Ernest Guiraud at the Paris Conservatory, wrote about music in the press and took their chances with the coveted Prix de Rome (Debussy won the prize in 1884, but Dukas narrowly missed out four years later). Dukas was known as a brilliant orchestrator, but due to his perfectionism, he actually published few works. He even threatened to destroy La Péri, his last great composition, until some friends convinced him of its beauty.

Dukas saw music as an art form that springs from a poetic idea and is closely intertwined with other disciplines. For example, he wrote the screenplay for La Péri before composing the music. Originally, the ballet was created at the request of Sergei Diaghilev and his legendary Ballets Russes, starring Natalia Trouhanova and Vaslav Nijinsky. But because Diaghilev felt that Trouhanova could not compete with his star dancer Nijinsky, he decided to withdraw. Trouhanova didn’t let that stop her: she approached Ivan Clustine, maître de ballet of the Opéra Ballet de Paris. The production was given a new choreography, a new set and a new cast, this time with Alfred Bekefi as dancing partner. And so La Péri, Poème dansé en un tableau was created after all, on 22 April 1912 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with the Concerts Lamoureux conducted by Dukas himself.

The story is based on a Persian myth. Prince Iskender is looking for the Flower of Immortality and eventually finds it with a sleeping Péri, an oriental fairy. But as soon as he steals the flower from her, she wakes up. Unable to enter paradise without the flower, she enchants Iskender with a dance to reclaim her property. She disappears into the heavenly light, leaving him to die.

The style of Dukas’ score is typically French: delicately orchestrated, with a mixture of romantic stylistic features and Impressionist elements. The ballet opens modestly, with exotic timbres, swells during the dance of seduction, and then returns to the calm atmosphere of the beginning. After the premiere, critics praised the composition for its ‘brilliant’ and ‘breathtaking’ timbres. Dukas also composed a fanfare for brass, which precedes the ballet. Its function was largely practical: to silence the usually noisy audience before the actual ballet began.

Musical postcards

Images pour orchestre takes us from the Middle East to Britain, Spain and France. Debussy wrote this large-scale orchestral work over several years between 1905 and 1912. Each part premiered separately.

The first part he completed was Ibéria, an ode to Spanish culture. After only a few hours in Spain, Debussy managed to conjure up just the right atmosphere. And all this purely from what he had read, heard or seen about the southern country. Ibéria consists of three parts. Referring to the first part, ‘Par les Rues et par les Chemins’, he wrote: ‘At this moment I hear the sounds of the Catalan roads and at the same time the music from the streets of Granada’. He translated these impressions into lively music, with castanets and tambourine in the orchestra. For De Falla, the second part, ‘Les Parfums de la Nuit’, evoked the ‘intoxicating magic of Andalusian nights’. Here, the castanets make way for an intimate setting and sensual sound combinations. At the end, bells ring out in the dawn: after waking up, the party roar erupts in the lively ‘Le Matin d’un Jour de Fête’. A cheerful crowd dances to the harmonious chords of a banda de guitarras y bandurrias, horns whistle cheerful melodies and in the distance the violins play a tune.

In Gigues, Debussy paints a picture of the British countryside shrouded in fog. Above muted strings hovers a theme he borrowed from The Keel Row, a Northern England folk song. A little later, the cor anglais sings a melancholic melody, alternated with echoes of the first theme. The final part is an ode to spring and the French chanson. ‘Vive le Mai, bienvenue soit le Mai avec son gonfalon sauvage’, Debussy wrote as an epigraph. Two nursery rhymes – the lullaby ‘Do do l’enfant do’ and the dance song ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’ – were woven into a refined, light polyphony.

Debussy himself called his Images pour orchestre ‘auditory landscapes’ – created in his imagination and travelling on into that of the listener.