Ex. 11-7: Clair de lune

Debussy's setting of Verlaine's "Clair de lune," No. 3 of Fêtes galantes, Premier recueil (Book 1, L. 80). It reworks an earlier setting from 1882; Debussy revised it in 1891–92, and it was published in 1903. (Ex. 13-5: Clair de lune by Claude Debussy)

Verlaine's collection takes its title from the fêtes galantes, the elegant garden-party scenes painted by Antoine Watteau in the Rococo age. In the poem, the beloved's soul is imagined as a moonlit garden. Masked figures play the lute and dance there — charming on the surface, but sad beneath their disguises.

Verlaine's "Clair de lune" drew Debussy back again and again: he set it as a song in 1882, wrote the famous piano piece of the same name in his Suite bergamasque, and then reworked the song into this version. That piano piece — one of the best-loved in all of classical music — was at first not called "Clair de lune" at all, but "Promenade sentimentale" (Sentimental Walk).

Around this time Debussy — who had won the Prix de Rome in 1884 — moved among the Symbolist poets and painters of Paris, and was a regular at the Tuesday gatherings of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

Fauré's 1887 setting of the same poem was the work that first brought Fauré and Verlaine's poetry together, introduced by Count Robert de Montesquiou. (Ex. 10-9: Clair de Lune by Gabriel Fauré)

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