Ex. 14-14: La flûte de Pan

No. 1 from Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis (L. 90), composed 1897–98 to poems by Pierre Louÿs. Premiered on 17 March 1900, with soprano Blanche Marot and Debussy himself at the piano.

The poem describes a girl, Bilitis, with a boy on a festival day. He gives her a pan flute — a row of pipes cut from reeds (tall water plants with hollow stems), each a different length and blown across the top — and teaches her to play it as she sits on his knees. As they play, their lips meet on the flute. She comes home late and tells her mother she was out looking for her lost belt, which her mother does not believe.

The title "La flûte de Pan" means "Pan's flute." In Greek myth, Pan is a god of the wild — half man and half goat — who plays a pan flute. A nymph named Syrinx ran away from him and was turned into reeds; Pan cut them and made his pipe. In Greek, the pipe itself is called a "syrinx." Debussy used this same title again for a short piece for solo flute, which he wrote in 1913 for a play. Published after his death as "Syrinx," it became one of the most famous solo flute pieces ever written. The name was changed, it is often said, to avoid confusion with this song.

When these poems appeared, they were said to be the work of an ancient Greek woman poet named Bilitis. But there was no such poet. Pierre Louÿs wrote all the poems himself and pretended they were very old — and even expert scholars believed him.

From the album Nuit d'étoiles – Mélodies françaises by Véronique Gens and Roger Vignoles (2000)
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