About this Piece

In 1911, Claude Debussy wrote in a letter to composer Edgard Varèse (1883–1965): “I love pictures almost as much as music.” This linking of his aural art to the graphic one calls to mind a similar connection made by Robert Schumann between music and a different creative discipline. In the mid-19th century, Schumann wrote: “The painter can learn from a symphony by Beethoven, just as the musician can learn from a work by [the great German writer] Goethe.”

Debussy sought to paint pictures with tones, to create visions as yet unrecorded in music; and to the extent that his music evolved in a manner consonant with such a painter as Monet, it was inevitable that he become associated with the painterly movement called Impressionism. But Debussy rejected that term just as he recoiled at being dubbed a Symbolist. It was not so much that he disdained the terms Impressionism and Symbolism as it was his intense desire not to be categorized.

Debussy’s contemporaries clearly recognized the musician’s desire to be allied to the visual arts. His close friend René Peter said, “To judge by his works, and by their titles, he is a painter and that is what he wants to be. He calls his compositions pictures, sketches, prints, arabesques, masques, studies in black and white. Plainly it is his delight to paint in music.” The painter Maurice Denis expressed it this way: “His music kindled strange resonances within us, awakened a need at the deepest level for a lyricism that only he could satisfy. What the Symbolist generation was searching for with such passion and anxiety—light, sonority, and color, the expression of the soul, and the frisson of mystery—was realized by him unerringly; almost, it seemed to us then, without effort. We perceived that here was something new.”

Like an inspired chef, Debussy created a ravishing new pianistic menu by reshaping, reordering, and adding distinctly new flavorings to the ingredients at hand, namely a heritage passed down by Chopin and Liszt. In the area of harmony, he conjured East Asia by exploiting the whole-tone and pentatonic (five-note) scales, and he broke down the traditional system of key relationships. Further in his quest for originality, he abandoned classical forms almost completely and freed rhythm from confining strictures. With all of these methods, he created music that served as a sensuous suggestion of poetry, nature, and a myriad variety of moods and atmospheres. And he accomplished all of this with such originality that the 20th century’s great innovator Igor Stravinsky said simply, “The musicians of my generation and myself owe the most to Debussy.”

In 1905 Debussy began three sets of compositions depicting or conveying a variety of pictures—Images—one set of three pieces for orchestra and two sets with three pieces each for piano.

Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells Through the Leaves)

Debussy first heard Javanese musicians at the Paris Universal Exposition, and the sounds of the gamelan stayed with him, surfacing in the allusions in this piece. The bells of the title are initiated in the first two measures by way of a whole-tone scale, from which the entire piece is constructed. The simplicity of this opening belies a complexity of intertwining parts that requires the music to be written on three staves. A middle episode of pianistic brilliance contrasts strongly with the otherworldly sonorities of the first and last sections.

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was)

Debussy dedicated this piece to his good friend and biographer Louis Laloy, an authority on Eastern and ancient Greek music. The poetic wording of the title, the fragmentary melodic structure, the pungent dissonances, and the almost floating nature of the sonorities confirm what Debussy referred to as the search by the Symbolists for “the inexpressible, which is the ideal of all art.”

Poissons d’or (Goldfish)

This piece, along with “Reflections in the Water” from Book 1, is probably the most frequently performed of the Images. And no wonder, since it is both brilliant and evocative. It is said that a painting of two gold-colored fish on a small Japanese lacquer panel that Debussy owned inspired this work. To suggest the darting movements of the tiny creatures, a pianist must at once master grace, elegance, and freedom of expression.

—Orrin Howard