In the misty moonlight!

DR. LUIS DIAS

According to the astronomy sites, there’s a full moon out tomorrow night. Too often, whether pedestrian or motorist, we are too busy keeping our eyes on the road, not to fall into a ‘Smart’ ditch or to become another depressing ‘road accident’ fatality, face-to-face with God (or with nobody if you’re atheist) that we forget to look up. But do take the time tomorrow night. And here’s a little something to think about when you do.

Why has moonlight captivated the human imagination so? In the most unromantic, “scientific” terms, it is just “reflected sunlight”, sunlight that has been reflected off the moon’s surface.

Those few of you who did come to Marouan Benabdallah’s concert in April 2024 themed around ‘Le Nuit’ in poetry, literature, art, and music would find that ‘la lune’ (the moon) and ‘clair de lune’ (moonlight) has a lot to do with the magic of the night.

‘Clair de lune’ has been within my auditory consciousness ever since our teenage son decided to spontaneously download the sheet music to Claude Debussy’s eponymous work, the third movement from his ‘Suite bergamasque’ (L. 75) and begin to learn to play it on our upright piano some weeks ago.

Its ravishing harmonies transport you not just into Debussy’s ‘Impressionist’ (he hated the term) sound-world, but into an ethereal sort of mind-space, where you linger long after the last note has died away.

Debussy wrote the piano suite in 1890, when he was 28 years old, but revised it significantly before its publication in 1905. How much is ‘original’ and how much ‘revised’ is difficult to say. What we do know is that the third movement was once titled ‘Promenade sentimentale’ (‘Sentimental stroll’ as a loose translation). The ‘old’ and ‘new’ are both titles of poems by French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896), indicating his powerful influence on Debussy. The word ‘bergamasque’ appears in the first line of the ‘Clair de lune’ poem.  (Bergamasque in this context most probably refers to a folk dance, often a clumsy rustic dance of the Bergamo region of northern Italy popular mainly in the 16th century).

It was a good pretext to read (and hear recitations, thanks to YouTube) some of Verlaine’s poetry, certainly the two just mentioned.

‘Promenade sentimentale’ is from Verlaine’s first book of poems ‘Poèmes saturniens’ (1866), in a section called ‘Paysages tristes’ (Sad Landscapes). French author Jacques Borel (1925 – 2002) wrote of “the musical quality of [Verlaine’s] art…the magic of a song inseparable from tactile or visual sensations, auditory or olfactory, finally confounded, integrated into the melody through which they are made known to us.”

That “musical quality”, “the magic of song” must have been apparent to Debussy as well. It is interesting that in Debussy’s switch from one Verlaine poem to another in this third movement of his Suite Bergamasque, there is the common reference to an emotional “landscape”.

‘Clair de lune’ belongs to Verlaine’s 1869 collection of poems ‘Fêtes galantes’.

If you have a working knowledge of the French language, I suggest reading the poems as written, as much gets lost in translation. But here is the English text (the translation by Norman R. Shapiro in his ‘One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine’ a bilingual edition, University of Chicago Press., 1998): “Your soul is a chosen landscape/ On which masks and Bergamasques cast enchantment as they go,/ Playing the lute, and dancing, and all but/ Sad beneath their fantasy-disguises./ Singing all the while, in the minor mode,/ Of all-conquering love and life so kind to them/ They do not seem to believe in their good fortune,/ And their song mingles with the moonlight,/ With the calm moonlight, sad and lovely,/ Which makes the birds dream in the trees,/ And the plumes of the fountains weep in ecstasy,/ The tall, slender plumes of the fountains among the marble sculptures.”

There is enchantment, but it hides sadness beneath the ‘fantasy’ disguises. Beneath the ‘mask’ of forced jollity that we all wear for the public gaze, we all have our own private sadness, something to sing about “in the minor mode” of “all-conquering love and life” (which can be interpreted in so many ways).

But there is good fortune (bonheur), music and dancing, that they (we?) “don’t believe in”, maybe take for granted, and the “song mingles with the moonlight”. Moonlight is personified as being “calm”, “sad and lovely”, making “the birds dream in the trees.”

If you live near a tree, as I do, (and I’ve written about ‘my’ tree before), you will, if you are observant, watch birds asleep on the higher branches at night. I don’t know how they don’t fall off, but it’s a beautiful sight.

And the last two lines are devoted to the visual imagery of tall slender “plumes of the fountains” (jet’s d’eau) “weeping in ecstasy” among marble sculptures.

That aqueous imagery is exploited at the climax of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ in tacky Las Vegas as Debussy’s music (arranged for orchestra by Lucien Cailliet; performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra; conducted by Eugene Ormandy) plays on the soundtrack.

Debussy also made two settings of the poem for voice and piano accompaniment (as did other composers such as Gabriel Fauré) but his piano composition is more popular by far.

‘Clair de lune’ is written in the key of D flat major, in which the flattened pitches correspond to the black keys of the piano.

American pianist-composer Nahre So ascribes some part of its appeal to the “unpredictable familiar”, i.e. how Debussy takes an idea, and then changes very subtle details when he brings that idea back that completely change one’s understanding of what one is hearing, as also the memory of what was heard before. She points to “ringing A flats” (the fifth or ‘dominant’ note in D flat major) at every important moment in the piece, a subtly “hidden constant”.

Its other feature is the gentle syncopation and rhythmic instability, tied notes across bar-lines giving a “wandering” quality. And, without getting too technical, Debussy’s genius with chord voicings and the way he ‘builds’ chords and progressions and ‘spreads’ them horizontally in time sometimes for effect, and then makes them ‘leap’ high in the register and sparkle like “plumes of fountains” in the moonlight.

It is no wonder that Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’ has featured in so many film soundtracks. The IMDb (Internet Movie Database) cited 23 examples.

In the words of musicologist Julian Haylock, “Debussy, at his most inimitable, revelled in loosening the bonds of conformity, of eleasticising melody, harmony and rhythm, in order to create intoxicating soundworlds in which the listen can float free of musical gravity.”

‘Claire de lune’ is certainly Debussy at his most inimitable. You can use the setting of an actual moonlight night if you wish, to savour his “intoxicating sound world” and “float free of musical gravity.” Bon voyage.