Hear Debussy Play Debussy’s Most Famous Piece, “Clair de lune” (1913)

Claude Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55: still quite young for a com­pos­er, and still quite ear­ly in the his­to­ry of sound record­ing. This means that, a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we have a great many record­ings of Debussy’s music, but pre­cious few record­ings of Debussy’s music played by the man him­self. Once he accom­pa­nied opera singer Mary Gar­den in the per­for­mance of three mélodies from Ari­ettes oubliées, his cycle based on the poet­ry of Paul Ver­laine. Those record­ings were made in 1904, and sound it. But in his final years, Debussy also pre­served his play­ing with an out­ward­ly more prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy that nev­er­the­less sounds much more pleas­ing today: the piano roll.

Designed to be fed into and auto­mat­i­cal­ly repro­duced by spe­cial­ly engi­neered instru­ments, the piano roll — an ear­ly form of the music media we’ve enjoyed over the past few gen­er­a­tions — was com­mer­cial­ly pio­neered by the Amer­i­can com­pa­ny M. Welte & Sons. “It is impos­si­ble to attain a greater per­fec­tion of repro­duc­tion than that of the Welte appa­ra­tus,” Debussy once wrote to Edwin Welte, co-inven­tor of the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny’s Welte-Mignon Repro­duc­ing Piano.

The four­teen pieces Debussy record­ed for Welte include the Sym­bol­ist- and Impres­sion­ist-inspired “La soirée dans Grenade,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, as well as his most beloved and wide­ly heard work, “Clair de lune.”

Imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able in iso­la­tion, the also Ver­laine-based “Clair de lune” con­sti­tutes one of the four move­ments of the Suite berga­masque. The entire piece was first pub­lished in 1905, but Debussy had actu­al­ly begun its com­po­si­tion fif­teen years before that. The still-fre­quent use of the third move­ment in pop­u­lar cul­ture has, at this point, made it dif­fi­cult to hear the essen­tial qual­i­ties of the piece itself; under such cir­cum­stances, who bet­ter to bring those qual­i­ties out than the com­pos­er him­self? The video at the top of the post presents a repro­duc­tion of “Clair de lune” from the piano roll that Debussy made 109 years ago, the next best thing to hav­ing him at the piano. Enthu­si­asts won­der what Debussy would have writ­ten had he lived longer; hear­ing this, they may also won­der what he would have record­ed had he stuck around for the hi-fi age.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Debussy’s “Clair de lune”: The Clas­si­cal Music Visu­al­iza­tion with 21 Mil­lion Views

A Dancer Pays a Grav­i­ty-Defy­ing Trib­ute to Claude Debussy

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1913

Rach­mani­noff Plays Rach­mani­noff: Three Famous Pieces, 1919–1929

Hear Rav­el Play Rav­el in 1922

Gersh­win Plays Gersh­win: Hear the Orig­i­nal Record­ing of Rhap­sody in Blue, with the Com­pos­er Him­self at the Piano (1924)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.