Product Description
Contains Le Roi Lear: Prélude,Première Fanfare, and La Mort de Cordélia,Toomai des éléphants, Rodrigue et Chimène: Prélude à lacte 1p. Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien: La Passion , and No-ja-li ou Le Palais du Silence
From Robert Orledge's notes:
My interest in the wonderful music
of Claude Debussy began in the 1980s when I researched and published a
book with Cambridge University Press entitled Debussy and the Theatre.
During the course of my studies in Paris, I was amazed to discover that
Debussy planned over 50 theatrical works but only finished two of these
entirely by himself (the opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 18931902 and the
ballet Jeux for Diaghilevs Ballets Russes in 191213). Of the rest,
many were never started musically (like Siddartha and Orphée-roi with
the Oriental scholar Victor Segalen, 1907); some had a few tantalising
sketches (like the Edgar Allan Poe opera Le Diable dans le beffroi,
190203); some were half-finished (like his other Poe opera La Chute de
la Maison Usher, 190817); while others were musically complete but had
their orchestrations completed by other composers (like Khamma, by
Charles Koechlin, 191213; or Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and La Boîte
à joujoux by his angel of corrections [lange des Corrections]
André Caplet in 1911 and 1919 respectively).
For it has to be
admitted that what some scholars call Debussys compulsive achievement
could equally well be viewed as laziness, especially as far as the
minute detail required for calligraphing his orchestral scores was
concerned. It was as if creating the music itself was of greater
importance than controlling its final sound, even if Debussy was an
imaginative orchestrator when he found the time and energy to do it. It
also seems true that Debussy also preferred inventing ideas to turning
them into complete pieces. However, despite the lack of detail in many
of his sketches (missing clefs, key signatures, dynamics, phrasing,
etc.) the notes themselves are surprisingly accurate, whether or not
they can be compared with a later draft. Thus, a large number of
sketches exist for his Chinese ballet No-ja-li ou Le Palais du Silence
and it is not too difficult to see which parts of Georges de Feures
1913 scenario (see below) inspired which ideas. But Debussy hardly made
any attempt to join them together after the first few bars.
It
was usually up to his publisher, Jacques Durand, to find solutions when
Debussy risked a breach of contract. Debussy was supposed to supervise
the orchestrations completed by others, but this supervision was usually
very light and restricted to quiet, sensitive moments in which problems
were easier to spot. Far from jealously guarding every one of his
created notes, as Ravel did, Debussy once even went as far as to ask
Koechlin to write a ballet for him that he would sign on 26 March 1914
when he was hard-pressed to fulfil his lucrative contract for No-ja-li
with André Charlot at the Alhambra Theatre in London. In the end,
Debussy (through Durand) sent Charlot the symphonic suite Printemps
instead, whose orchestration had been completed by Henri Busser in the
Spring of 1912.
So, when I was offered early retirement as
Professor of Music at Liverpool University in 2004, I seized the
opportunity it would give me to spend time trying to reconstruct some of
Debussys lost potential masterpieces from his existing sketches and
draftsthen orchestrating them in Debussys style when this was
appropriate. I had begun this mission in 2001 with the most promising
project, the missing parts of Scene 2 of La Chute de la Maison Usher and
the sheer joy it gave me at every stage persuaded me to tackle other
projects, especially when Debussy experts were unable to identify
exactly where I took over from Debussy (and vice versa) in
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