Images - Série II - 1 Cloches à travers les feuilles (4:55)

John Anderson performs “Cloches à travers les feuilles”, the first of Debussy’s second book of Images.

Debussy dedicated “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (“Bells sounding across the leaves”) to his friend, the sculptor Alexandre Charpentier, who was a master of miniature reliefs and was part of the movement towards the Art Nouveau. The piece, entirely understated, is a like a miniature landscape itself, or a bas-relief in sound. There is only one bar marked forte, of which only three notes are fortissimo. The rest of the piece never rises above mezzo piano. According to the critic Laloy (to whom the second of this series was dedicated), the piece suggests the “deathknell resounding from Vespers on All Saints’ Day to the funeral mass on All Soul’s Day and traversing, from village to village, the yellowing autumnal forests in the silence of eventide” (trans. from preface of Henle edition). The opening bars present to us these melancholic tolling bells, calling and responding from three different directions it seems.

The opening four bars are basically geometric in construction and the music is abstracted entirely from a research into pure tone quality itself, with the timbre of each note carefully articulated with a unique combination of marks in the score. We have four strata of entirely independent sonorities, but all constrained within a pianissimo. Such rarefied textures, finding means of expression on the very edge of silence, would become very frequent characteristics in much of the music following for the rest of the 20th century.