Debussy's Préludes, Books 1 & 2 — What the Impressionist Label Hides

Debussy hated the word. In a letter to his publisher Jacques Durand in 1908 he wrote that only imbeciles called what he was writing impressionism — “a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics”. A century on it still opens almost every program note and streaming blurb written about him.

The twenty-four Préludes are where the label does the most damage. Sold as fog and moonlight, the set contains an experiment in two keys at once, a deflated national anthem, a half-buried quotation of a second one, a piece the composer himself played at roughly double its printed speed, and a memorial named after a jar for human organs. Here is what is really in them, and which recording to buy.

Table of Contents

Start with the strangest thing about the score

He wrote the twelve pieces of Book 1 between December 1909 and February 1910, and Durand published them that year as L. 117. Book 2 was written in 1912–13 and published by Durand in 1913 as L. 123.

Open either book and you will not find a title at the head of any piece. There is a tempo marking in French and nothing else. The title turns up after the final barline, in parentheses, preceded by an ellipsis — …(Danseuses de Delphes.) — as if the music is admitting its own name once the room has emptied.

That inverts how program music had worked for a century. Berlioz and Liszt put the title first: you read Witches’ Sabbath, your imagination loads up, and the music supplies the pictures. Debussy makes you listen with nothing loaded, then hands you the caption. One common reading is that he wanted the title to land as an after-image rather than a prompt. Whatever the motive, you can use it: cover the title, play the track, notice what you heard first.

The premieres came piecemeal, which tells you these were never meant as a single evening’s arc. Debussy gave the first performance of four pieces from Book 1 — Nos. 1, 2, 10 and 11 — on 25 May 1910 at a Société musicale indépendante concert. Ricardo Viñes took Nos. 5, 8 and 9 on 14 January 1911 at the Société nationale, and Jane Mortier gave the first complete performance of Book 1 at the Salle Pleyel on 3 May 1911. Viñes also gave the first performance of three pieces from Book 2 on 5 April 1913 at the Société nationale.

What to listen for (four mechanisms, not moods)

Chords moved as blocks. Instead of each voice resolving where classical harmony says it should, Debussy slides an entire chord up or down in parallel. The sound has colour but no pull — nothing leans toward a home key. That one habit produces most of what people call atmosphere.

Scales that refuse to cadence. Whole-tone and pentatonic collections, church modes, black-key clusters: no leading note, so no click of arrival. Listen for the moment a phrase should land and simply doesn’t.

Ostinato as weather. A repeated figure in one hand is not accompaniment — it is the climate the piece happens inside. The harmony changes around it; the figure does not.

Register as orchestration. Debussy writes at the extremes with a hole in the middle of the keyboard, so the piano stops sounding like a piano. Most of the set lives between pp and ppp; if a performance sounds loud, something is wrong.

The pieces that break the label

Des pas sur la neige (Book 1, No. 6)

Thirty-six bars in D minor, built on a three-note figure — D, E, F — that repeats almost continuously from the first bar. Over that first bar Debussy wrote an instruction most composers would never sign: Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d’un fond de paysage triste et glacé — the rhythm should carry the sound of a sad, frozen landscape. Not a tempo, not a dynamic: a weather report, telling the pianist to stop performing the rhythm and become the landscape behind it.

It works because the figure never varies while everything under it does. Same footprints, different cold. Michelangeli is the reference here: he weights each repetition of those three notes differently, so a motif identical on the page arrives as a new object every time. It is the least atmospheric way to play this music and by far the most affecting.

La fille aux cheveux de lin (Book 1, No. 8)

This is the Debussy you have already heard — in adverts, in films, in the playlist a hotel lobby licenses by the year. What the lobby will not tell you is that the tune predates the prelude. Debussy had already set Leconte de Lisle’s poem as a song around 1882, as a conservatory student; the poem came from the 1852 collection Poèmes antiques. Nearly three decades later he went back to that student material and rebuilt it for solo piano.

Knowing that changes how it sounds. The famous simplicity is not a mature composer stripping down — it is a young one’s melody, kept in a drawer and reharmonised by the man he became. Gieseking is the one to hear it from: unhurried, with no attempt to make the tune prettier than it is. ▶ Listen on YouTube

La cathédrale engloutie (Book 1, No. 10) — the piece with two performing traditions

The Breton legend: the city of Ys drowned, and on clear mornings the cathedral rises from the water — bells, chant, then it sinks again. Debussy builds it from bare parallel fifths low on the keyboard, and at bar 16 writes Peu à peu sortant de la brume, telling the pianist to bring it out of the fog by degrees rather than by crescendo.

Nineteenth-century painting of King Gradlon on horseback fleeing the flooded city of Ys through breaking waves — Évariste-Vital Luminais, *Fuite de Gradlon* (c. 1884) — the Breton legend of the drowned city of Ys behind the prelude. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then there is the evidence problem. Debussy recorded this prelude on Welte-Mignon reproducing piano rolls — a system that punched not just notes but dynamics and pedalling into paper, so playback comes close to the actual hands. The dating is disputed: Roy Howat says the rolls were cut in Paris in the summer of 1912, while the Henle edition places them at roughly the end of 1912 or the beginning of 1913.

A Welte-Mignon reproducing player piano on museum display with its paper-roll mechanism visible — A Welte-Mignon reproducing piano — the paper-roll system that preserved Debussy’s own playing. Photo: Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What matters is what the roll does. Roy Howat, whose Debussy in Proportion appeared in 1983, pointed out that from bar 7 Debussy plays the half notes at roughly the speed he had just been playing quarter notes — and Howat accordingly proposed equivalence markings at bar 7 and bar 13. Read the print literally and those passages become a slow processional; follow the roll and the cathedral rises at twice that rate. This remains disputed: one camp treats the roll as the composer’s intention overriding a printing convention, the other holds that a roll is one performance on one day and the engraved text stands. Both sides cite Debussy.

You needn’t take anyone’s word for it. Here is the composer’s own roll, then Zimerman live — back to back, the argument becomes audible in about ninety seconds.

Brouillards (Book 2, No. 1) — the fog that is really an experiment

Left hand on the white keys. Right hand on the black keys. Both at once, and neither gives way. The title says Fog, the most harmless word available, and underneath it sits a study in two tonal centres refusing to merge — the device textbooks usually hand to Stravinsky, Bartók and Milhaud.

It is the clearest case against the Impressionist reading. Look at the cover and you expect a pianistic Monet; look at the keyboard and you find a composer testing what happens when two keys are stacked and neither wins. The gap between the label and the machinery is widest here. ▶ Listen on YouTube

Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C. (Book 2, No. 9)

The acronym is Dickens’s own: Perpetual President, Member of the Pickwick Club, the title Samuel Pickwick awards himself in The Pickwick Papers. The prelude opens by quoting the opening refrain of God Save the King — undisguised, and pleased with itself.

Then the dignity goes. The line wobbles, the harmony slides sideways, the rhythm trips over its own ceremony, and the anthem ends up sounding like a stout man in robes several sizes too grand. Affectionate literary comedy, or a Frenchman laughing across the Channel? Debussy left no explanation and it works either way. What is not in doubt: this is a joke, written straight-faced, in a collection people file under dreamy. ▶ Listen on YouTube

Canope (Book 2, No. 10)

A canopic jar is the vessel Egyptian embalmers used to store the internal organs removed during mummification — liver, lungs, stomach, intestines, four jars, buried alongside the body. That is the object Debussy titled this prelude after.

Four ancient Egyptian alabaster canopic jars with carved lids representing the Four Sons of Horus — Ancient Egyptian alabaster canopic jars — the funerary vessels that give *Canope* its title. Photo: Gary Todd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The music is slow, thin and mostly hollow fifths, the melodic line staying close to a single voice and refusing to be padded with harmony. It sounds less like a museum object than like the acoustic of an empty stone room. Which kills the obvious reading before it starts. You will often see 1909 given as the year Debussy was diagnosed with cancer; it is really the year the symptoms became impossible to ignore — rectal pain from late 1908, near-daily bleeding by early 1909. The cancer itself was not diagnosed until the summer of 1915, just over two years after he finished Book 2, and the colostomy followed that December. Neither book is a dying man’s music. The chill is in the fifths, not the biography. ▶ Listen on YouTube

Feux d’artifice (Book 2, No. 12)

The set ends with its hardest piece. Fizzing repeated notes for the rocket trail, two-handed glissandos for the rise, hammered fortissimo chords for the burst — and the difficulty is not raw speed but a fragmented sparkle most étude training does not prepare a pianist for.

Then, before the end, a fragment of La Marseillaise drifts in from a distance, half-buried in the residue of the display. Set that beside Hommage à Pickwick and the pattern appears: the British anthem walks in at the front and is deflated; the French one arrives at the back and dissolves. Two anthems, neither honoured, in a set finished the year before Europe went to war. Hamelin makes the quotation audible where most pianists smear it into glitter. ▶ Listen on YouTube

How to enter the set (do not start at No. 1)

These are twenty-four separate pieces, not a cycle. Debussy did not organise them by key the way Chopin organised his Op. 28, and the premieres came in scattered handfuls, so playing 1-to-24 on a first pass gets you nothing a shuffled order wouldn’t. A better path:

1. La fille aux cheveux de lin — four minutes, already half-familiar, no homework required.
2. La cathédrale engloutie — the roll against a modern reading, which teaches you that the score is not a settled object.
3. Des pas sur la neige — three notes and almost nothing else. Once this lands, the quiet pieces stop sounding empty.
4. Feux d’artifice — the loud end of the range.
5. Canope, Brouillards, Hommage à Pickwick — the weird ones, once you trust the composer.

Then take a complete traversal in one sitting — a closing chapter, not an introduction.

The recordings — and the one to buy

Krystian Zimerman / Deutsche Grammophon (recorded Kassel, August 1991) — buy this one. The reason is dynamic range: he plays far quieter than most pianists dare on record, then opens out inside the same piece — exactly what music living between pp and ppp needs. He also treats the pieces as separate objects instead of one mood, so Brouillards sounds like an experiment and Pickwick like a joke. If you dislike polished late-digital piano sound, this will not convert you.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli / Deutsche Grammophon (Book 1: Musikhalle, Hamburg, released 1978; Book 2: recorded 17 August 1988) — the obsessive’s set, and the one to own for Des pas sur la neige. Every repetition is weighted differently; every pedal change is a decision. It is also cold, consistently so. In Canope that serves the piece; elsewhere it keeps you at arm’s length. Get it second.

Walter Gieseking / EMI (Book 1: August 1953; Book 2: December 1954, mono) — the historical benchmark. His pedal-blurred, watercolour approach defined what Debussy playing meant for a generation, and hearing it explains why the Impressionist label stuck. Mono sound and a pre-Howat Cathédrale are the trade-offs. A document of a tradition, not your only copy.

Marc-André Hamelin / Hyperion, 2014 — Book 2 only, paired with the Images. The clarity is the point: the Marseillaise in Feux d’artifice is a phrase you can identify rather than a rumour. Resolution this high leaves less room for haze. For Book 2 dissected, unbeatable; for mystery, go back to Zimerman.

Debussy himself / Welte-Mignon rolls, issued by the Pierian Recording Society in 2000 as Claude Debussy: The Composer as Pianist — a primary source, not a recital. The transfers were made on a restored reproducing piano, and the sound is what century-old paper gives you. Listen once, for the tempo question, and treat it as evidence.

Sources and notes

Composition and premiere details come from the French and English Wikipedia articles on the Préludes; IMSLP supplies the Durand publication data for both books and the 1912–13 composition dating for Book 2. The tempo question follows G. Henle Verlag’s account of Roy Howat’s work on the Welte rolls, including the bar 7 and bar 13 equivalences — Henle and Howat disagree about when the rolls were cut, so I have given both datings. Recording dates come from label catalogue pages and discographies. Debussy’s illness dates follow Robert Greenberg and Interlude, not the English Wikipedia biography, which gives a 1909 diagnosis. How these pieces sound, and which recording to buy, is my own judgement as a listener.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Debussy Préludes should a beginner listen to first?

Four will do: La fille aux cheveux de lin (No. 8) for the familiar tune, La cathédrale engloutie (No. 10) for the big sound, Des pas sur la neige (No. 6) for the quiet extreme, all from Book 1, then Feux d’artifice from Book 2 for the loud one. Add Brouillards, Hommage à S. Pickwick and Canope when you want the strange ones.

Why do the titles appear at the end of each prelude?

In the Durand first editions the titles sit after the last barline, in parentheses and after an ellipsis, rather than above the first system. A common reading is that Debussy wanted the title to land as an after-image instead of a prompt, reversing the usual program-music order. He left no signed explanation, so treat the motive as an interpretation — but the layout is a plain fact you can see in the score.

Should La cathédrale engloutie be played fast or slow?

This is genuinely disputed. Debussy’s own Welte-Mignon roll plays the half-note passages from bar 7 at roughly the tempo of the preceding quarter notes, and Roy Howat proposed equivalence markings at bar 7 and bar 13 on that basis. Performers who accept the roll move through those bars about twice as fast as a literal reading of the print; others argue a roll captures one performance on one day and the engraved text stands. Hear both and pick the version you want in your head.

Is it fair to call Debussy an Impressionist composer?

He rejected the term himself, in writing, and the Préludes back him up. Their titles borrow from poets and novelists — Leconte de Lisle, Dickens — not painters, and pieces like Brouillards are structural experiments rather than atmosphere studies. The label works as rough shorthand for parallel chords and non-cadencing scales, but if it stops you noticing the bitonality, the anthem quotations and the tempo controversy, it has cost more than it gave.

Which complete recording of the Préludes is best?

Zimerman’s Deutsche Grammophon set, recorded in Kassel in August 1991, is the one to buy first — to my ear the widest dynamic range in any single-pianist traversal, and the least interested in blurring twenty-four pieces into one mood. Michelangeli’s Deutsche Grammophon books are the alternative if you want obsessive detail and can live with a cold surface. Gieseking’s mono EMI recordings are the historical document, not the everyday listen.

Debussy’s Préludes, Books 1 & 2 — What the Impressionist Label Hides