Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

1. 0:00
   Opening flute solo

   The flute plays alone, marked doux et expressif. It starts on C♯, descends to G and rises again, outlining a tritone, an interval that belongs to no key. Nothing sounds beneath it for three bars; in bar 4 the harp plays a glissando and the horns enter on an unresolved chord.

2. 1:16
   Debussy’s programme note, 1894

   Debussy’s note for the first audience called the piece “a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem … a succession of scenes through which the desires and dreams of the faun pass in the heat of the afternoon.” In Mallarmé’s poem the faun wakes unsure whether the two nymphs he remembers were real.

3. 2:30
   Orchestration without trumpets

   For much of the piece the strings play muted and divided into many parts around the woodwinds. There are no trumpets, trombones or timpani, and the only brass are four horns. The brightest colours come from three flutes, oboes, cor anglais, clarinets and two harps.

4. 3:07
   First performance, 22 December 1894

   At the première, in the Salle d’Harcourt on 22 December 1894, the eighteen-year-old Georges Barrère played the flute solo. The audience demanded the whole piece again, and Gustave Doret conducted it a second time.

5. 4:05
   Middle section in D♭ major

   The middle section is in D♭ major. Here the piece has its first long, broad melody. The woodwinds play it together over syncopated strings, then the strings take it over and carry it to the climax.

6. 4:50
   Nijinsky’s ballet, 1912

   In May 1912 Nijinsky made the piece into a ballet for the Ballets Russes, with his dancers moving in profile like figures on a Greek vase; he danced the faun himself. The final gesture caused a scandal. The editor of Le Figaro spiked his own critic’s review and denounced the ballet on the front page.

7. 5:24
   Return of the flute theme

   At Mouvement du début (rehearsal 8, bar 79) the opening tempo returns, and the solo flute plays its opening phrase again. At the start the flute played alone. Here the harps play beneath it.

8. 6:02
   The conductor, Paul Paray

   Paul Paray, the conductor here, won the Prix de Rome in 1911, twenty-seven years after Debussy. He was music director of the Detroit Symphony from 1952 and made this recording there for Mercury’s Living Presence series.

9. 6:35
   Antique cymbals

   The flute phrase returns at a slower tempo, and the score asks for “more languor”. Two antique cymbals play here for the first time. These are small tuned brass discs, struck softly, sounding E and B.

10. 7:25
    Mallarmé to Debussy, December 1894

    Mallarmé wrote to Debussy straight from the concert in December 1894: “The marvel! Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun, which presents no dissonance with my text, but goes much further, really, into nostalgia and into light.”

11. 8:02
    Final cadence in E major

    The cadence and final chord in bars 105–⁠110 are in E major, a key the opening tritone avoids. The piece ends as quietly as it began.

Joins

1. 4:02
   Into D♭ major

   Four bars on an A♭ chord, the dominant of D♭, prepare the change of key. At bar 55 the woodwinds begin the long D♭ melody together, over strings playing off the beat. The melody is laid out in long phrases, where the opening theme was short and winding.

2. 5:24
   The opening tempo returns

   The D♭ melody thins out in the strings and slows. At rehearsal 8, marked Mouvement du début, the solo flute plays its first phrase again, now over harp arpeggios and held string chords.

3. 6:30
   Slower, with antique cymbals

   The score returns to the first tempo “with more languor” at rehearsal 10 (bar 94). The flute’s phrase comes back once more, the antique cymbals enter in E and B, and the harmony moves towards E major.