PROGRAMME NOTES

written by AURÉLIE WALSCHAERT

Claude Debussy Images pour orchestre, L. 122 (1912)

[all programme notes]

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16.11.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSELS

a master 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.

Images pour orchestre takes us 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.