Written in a few weeks during 1915, at the end of a life cut short by cancer, the “Douze Etudes” are an astonishing summation of the composer’s artistry. At the very least, they count as an encyclopedic exploration of piano sonorities and in that sense parallel Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” which were begun nearly a century earlier.
Though I have no idea whether Debussy would have approved of this comparison, the reality is that both composers went above and beyond to find a new sonoric vocabulary for the piano. If, as musicologists suggest, Debussy had a bee in his bonnet about the older composer, it was the bee that Beethoven himself put there, with his ability to make musical patterns and textures serve structural functions. Surely, Variation 2 is nearly as much “Pour les tierces,” and Variation 28 nearly as much “Pour les accords” as Debussy’s etudes 2 and 12, respectively.
Regardless, both composers left no key unturned in their quest to stretch the boundaries of sonority. Nuances of touch, attack, texture, register and dynamics are laid out systematically, reminiscent of the way lepidopterists display their specimens in air tight shadow boxes. This category of composing is an egoless pursuit. Either composer could have written pieces to attract greater bravo-inducing attention with much less effort. Like JS Bach’s “Kunst Der Fuge”, works of this type sometimes sound more like an inner dialogue or, at most, a conversation between composers.
Fortunately, “Douze Etudes” is much more than that. It’s a vibrant collection of pieces that range from vivacious to delicate to satirical to ethereal to wistful and beyond. They are the product of the composer’s last period, a turn toward a personal brand of neoclassicism that bears no resemblance to the dozens of pieces usually associated with that epithet. As his three final sonatas suggest, he seemed to pursue whatever he considered the “essence” of classicism, rather than the musical attributes commonly associated with the phrase “The Classical Style.”
At the same time, these twelve pieces give more than a nod to piano etudes as a genre, most notably, the etudes of Chopin, a composer Debussy apparently revered. Like its predecessors, the set is laid out by category. Etude 1, “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’ — aprés Monsieur Czerny” even adds a touch of what we would call “meta” irony. He refers, of course, to Czerny’s well-known “Practical Exercises for Beginners.” But this touch of humor does nothing to undercut the thoroughness with which Debussy pursues his objectives.
That’s because Debussy’s reigning piano “sound” is a major departure from that of anyone before or since. And precisely for the reason that each Etude is fundamentally about sonority and nothing else. Themes? No more than a conductor’s whistling is the “theme” of a speeding train. Counterpoint? At most, a layering of contrasting sonorities, more likely to imitate natural phenomena than each other.
And yet, there is structure. Let’s pause to recognize that any attempt to describe the Etudes in terms of modes, scales, or any kind of pitch-centric tonality is utterly futile.
Just as surely as physicists have worked out the aerodynamics of a hawk in flight, reams of pages testify to efforts by music theorists to corral Debussy’s harmony into a cozy analytical pen. But neither a hawk nor the Etudes can be reduced to the sum of its “measurements.”
The structure I hear is of Debussy’s own making. It derives from a disciplined control of the interval content at every juncture. Very little is habitual, routine or formulaic. In Etude 2, “pour les tierces”, for instance, the harmony results from a discrete set of interlaced thirds, whose resemblance to traditional chord progressions is illusory. Now, for some, the urge to grab a Sharpie™ and scratch an array of Roman numeral chord symbols into the score will likely be irresistible. And yes, the specter of B-flat minor hovers over the piece from beginning to end. But like every other wraith-like apparition, it has no substance.
Certainly no B-flat minor work by Brahms would be so static, so tonally “flat.” But despite the fact that Debussy flits from one transposition of his core motif to another, there’s no sense of progression in the textbook sense. There isn’t even that stomach-churning feeling of being “at sea” that one gets from Wagner’s “Tristan.” Instead, Debussy simply moves from one static harmonic matrix to another. Nor are these nuanced shifts anything like a change in tonal “level” we sometimes encounter in a late Bartók string quartet.
Instead, “Pour les tierces” explores subtle fluctuations in a narrow band of sonority created by streams of parallel thirds. To call these fluctuations “modulations” would subject the definition of that word and of “tonality” to unrecognizable distortions.
But as with everything else under the sun, harmonic stasis wasn’t the exclusive property of Debussy. Think only of “Der Einsame im Herbst,” the second song of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”, where violins evoke both serene summer breezes and exhausted despair at the thought of lost youth. Here Debussy offers another sinuous scalar passage, often in thirds, going nowhere as slowly as possible.
The difference is Debussy’s commitment to make such stasis the very substance of the piece. Etude 12, “Pour les accords”, explores similar territory in much the same way. The passing resemblance that some moments bear to Bartók, as in the 2nd Piano Concerto or in later volumes of the “Mikrokosmos” series is superficial, for an important reason. Whereas Bartók fought hard to rope such sonorities into his own brand of synthetic tonality, Debussy is having nothing to do with tonality at all. His chords are static, exist for their own sake and seek no justification within any tonal hierarchy. In the etude’s middle section, a listless inertia supplants the opening’s aggressive assertions. It is the essence of numbing Purgatorial remorse, where hope turns to ash and release is always just out of reach.
In “Pour les huit doigts” and “Pour les degrés chromatiques”, high speed finger wiggling produces a wall of sound for sound’s sake. It’s the sonic experiment children delight in before a stern teacher tells them to get serious and learn discipline. While there’s no argument against acquiring artistic discipline, the instinct that music is primarily about sound is irrefutable. Here again, harmonic structure is relevant only as a convenience, a by-product of the composer’s conservatory training. The source, that is, for Debussy’s occasional fits of irritating, obsessive tidiness.
Throughout the Etudes, Debussy’s apparent goal is to create music as intrinsically pianistic as possible. Perhaps no greater manifestation of this intent is “Pour les notes répétées”, which fragments the aural landscape into flickering shards unattainable in any other Western musical medium. What key is the piece in? It’s hard to imagine a more irrelevant question. Yet, as with the other eleven etudes, this one has an undeniable structural integrity. It does more than merely “hang together” somehow. It carves structure out of pure sound.
What emerges from this collection of pieces is music founded not on note logic or any related concept of Western musical rhetoric. The Etudes are sound pieces: they achieve coherence by moving between sonoric landmarks that define an aural topography utterly different from any concept of “harmony.” Though they bear traces of the old order, sometimes quite ironically, they are essentially sound sculptures, whose meaning is entirely contextual, without reference to any traditional musical form.
On this basis, my personal opinion is that the Etudes deserve close attention by every serious composer and pianist at the very least. In the early years of the 20th century, here is Debussy mapping out esthetic territory that wouldn’t be explored again for decades and with much Minimalist fanfare. Intriguing as those later works sometimes are, none achieves the grace, elegance and true economy of twelve little pieces by a composer too many write off as a Late-Romantic curiosity.
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Mark Laporta is a musician, composer and novelist. His science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, is published by Chickadee Prince Books, and is available in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.