Prélude à L'après-midi d'un faune

Debussy‘s orchestral Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), completed in 1894, is one of classical music’s small miracles. Only 10 minutes long, the work presented its first audiences with an enthralling new world of atmospheric sonority and feeling, magically poised between passionate sensuality and wistful regret. The music came about through its composer’s friendship with the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poem “L’après-midi d’un faune” had begun life as a verse-drama in three scenes. Mallarmé had heard and liked Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (Five Poems of Charles Baudelaire, 1887-89) for voice and piano; recognising a kindred spirit, he asked Debussy to compose music to introduce and accompany a staged version of “L’après-midi d’un faune”. A producer could not be found, and the idea lapsed. Debussy then finalised the music he had already written as a kind of overture, converting this into a self-contained orchestral Prélude. And Mallarmé published a shorter version of his poem as a lyrical monologue, set in an imaginary Greek landscape: playing his pan pipe, the faun muses on the desirability of some passing nymphs, pursues them unsuccessfully, and lies down to sleep. Prélude à l’après-midi is written for a reduced orchestra, with no trumpets or trombones; the faun’s pan-pipe is represented by the solo flute, whose languid phrases wind their way through a sound-world that marvellously conjures the drowsy glow and shimmering heat-haze depicted in the poem.