Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Pierre Boulez said that modern music was born the moment the flute played the opening phrase of the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. He was being dramatic, but he wasn't wrong. That opening — a solo flute playing a chromatic melody that seems to begin in the middle of a thought, wandering through whole-tone and chromatic territory without settling on a key — broke every rule that nineteenth-century music held sacred. There is no clear tonic. There is no development in the Beethovenian sense. There is no drama. There is only atmosphere, color, and the sensation of heat.

Debussy based the piece on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about a faun — half-man, half-goat — who wakes from a nap on a hot afternoon and tries to remember whether the nymphs he encountered were real or a dream. The music captures that drowsy uncertainty perfectly. Nothing is definite. The harmonies suggest keys without committing to them. The orchestration shimmers — muted strings, divided into as many as twelve parts, create a haze of sound that the solo instruments drift through like figures in fog.

The premiere in 1894 was a sensation. The audience demanded an immediate encore, which for a ten-minute orchestral piece was unprecedented. Mallarmé told Debussy: 'I did not expect anything like this. The music extends the emotion of my poem and sets the scene more vividly than color.' Given that Mallarmé was the most obscure poet in France, a man whose idea of clarity was a sentence with only four subordinate clauses, this was high praise.

The Prélude is ten minutes long and contains more ideas per minute than most symphonies. Every phrase leads somewhere unexpected. Every orchestral color is unprecedented. Debussy was thirty-two when he wrote it, and he essentially invented a new musical language in the process — one that would influence Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, and through them, virtually every composer of the twentieth century. Ten minutes. A sleepy goat-man. And the entire history of modern music pivoting on a flute solo.

Recording: Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski (Victor 6481, 1924). Public domain. Source: https://archive.org/details/78_afternoon-of-a-faun-part-1-laprs-midi-dun-faune_philadelphia-symphony-orchestr_gbia0489440a