Claude Debussy – Jeux (1912)

Jeux isn’t really a new piece to me, but I’m getting to know it better these days because I’m writing a short paper about it, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to sketch out some thoughts in a more informal context here.  For those unfamiliar with the piece, it’s Debussy’s last orchestral work, written for Diaghilev and Nijinsky just a year before The Rite of Spring.  It’s almost as radical as the Stravinsky piece too, but because it’s less in-your-face about its innovations — because it confounded contemporary listeners with its surreal, desultory form rather than with violent dissonances, and because Diaghilev’s choreography tells a cryptic story of illicit adolescent love rather than a horrifying story of sexualized human sacrifice — because of all that, audiences largely received it with befuddlement rather than scandal.  In fact, even now the critical consensus on the piece seems to be essentially “WTF?”  And I can’t say I entirely disagree with that assessment.

Listen to ten seconds of Jeux and it doesn’t sound so different from other Debussy pieces:  sensuous orchestration, vivid cinematic gestures, tonality thrown out of focus by chromatic, whole-tone and other dissonant harmonies.  But listen for a minute or two and you’ll quickly find yourself lost.  The music constantly speeds up and slows down;  musical threads are abandoned almost as fast as they appear, and when they return they’re often transformed almost to the point of being unrecognizable.  After a while all the melodies start to blend together, until it feels like the only unifying motifs are ones so small that they’re more like amino acids than genes — more like the fundamental building blocks of early 20th century music than anything specific to this piece.  Every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve found myself eventually giving up on trying to follow the moment-to-moment connections between gestures and surrendering myself to the larger flow of the piece.

The story told by the ballet is appropriately mysterious.  The synopsis at the premiere:  “The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden.”

Full disclosure:  I haven’t actually seen the ballet.  (Based on this description, I kind of picture it looking like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film “Phantoms of Nabua.”)  But I did find an article that describes in some detail which events in the story correspond to which passages in the music.  And I was happy to discover that my intuitions about the piece’s large-scale form are borne out by what’s happening on stage.  Specifically:

1.  About a third of the way into the piece, there’s a passage in which the music slows down, with the strings playing spooky parallel major triads.  Debussy continues to shift direction frequently, but in this passage, he’s much more likely to return to what he was doing before the interruption.  There’s a general sense of relaxation;  the music is free-associative but no longer so anxious and restless.

2.  About two thirds of the way into the piece, there’s another slow passage in which Debussy strips the texture down to almost nothing — a dramatic gesture in a piece that’s otherwise very lushly orchestrated.  Two clarinets play strange little phrases in parallel thirds;  the strings interject with two chords, one short and one long;  a flute and an oboe begin a phrase and then trail off.  All of these fragments are separated by silences.

3.  In the last quarter of the piece, the music becomes more and more dreamlike.  A drunken, sensual dance, all shifty Wagnerian chromatic motion, gives way to a strangely static passage in which the winds play the dance’s rhythm on a single note, interrupted by the flutes and oboes obsessively repeating the same little six-note figure.  Harps appear, playing repetitive figures in 4-against-3 rhythms.  The bassoons and horns enter with a mysterious octatonic-ish melody, still superimposed over that pared-down remnant of the earlier dance (now played by the high strings, with some help from a percussionist playing a tambourine and a cymbal), and high winds continue to repeat that six-note figure obsessively.  And then all that gives way to a melody played by the horns and cellos, a waltz shot through with nostalgia and yearning, surrounded by fluttering winds and high strings and harps.  The music builds and builds — at long last, sustained movement in one direction, without digressions or stops and starts! — and finally arrives at … an anticlimax, a four-note figure deliberately orchestrated without any big satisfying bass notes — in fact, without any notes lower than the G# above middle C! — which then dissolves into a texture almost as spare and fragmentary as the one I described above.

Well, guess what?  The first passage I described corresponds to the moment when the characters’ interaction turns flirtatious, and the third is the buildup to the triple kiss, which comes almost at the end of the ballet.  And as for the second, this is the strangest part:  Debussy left it completely open, writing that Nijinsky seize the moment and do whatever he wanted.   I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this passage, possibly the most striking and unusual in the piece, was intentionally written to be open to interpretation — especially in light of Debussy’s association with Stephane Mallarmé, the poet who wrote “The Afternoon of a Faun,” and who believed (in the words of another article I found) that “truth is essentially mysterious, and easily eludes our grasp.”  The fact that Debussy chose to make this moment the quietist in the piece reminds me of something that Greil Marcus says in his wonderful book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice:  “You will find your audience not by shouting but by whispering, not by haranguing a crowd but by speaking so quietly, or so queerly, that a crowd will gather out of a helpless curiosity, just to figure out what it is you’re saying.”