Call of the wild
The intoxicating, opening flute solo of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune continues to exert its radical influence even today, explains Tom Service
Just a C sharp: a simple, quiet, muchpractised note on a solo flute. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, as the opening note of one of the most famous pieces in the orchestral repertoire – Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, composed and first performed in 1894 and still one of the most sensually radical pieces of orchestral music ever conceived – this note gives fully-grown flautists a very particular kind of waking anxiety.
This C sharp is exquisitely chosen by Debussy to create in shimmering sound the ambiguous languidity of Stéphane Mallarmé’s faun, in the poem this Prélude is based upon, to conjure the haze of erotic daydream in which this whole ten-minute piece is suspended.
And this particular C sharp, as any flautist will tell you – like Gareth Davies, the London Symphony Orchestra’s principal flute, who has played this opening solo hundreds of times, and who revealed its beautiful fragility for The Listening Service – is deliberately chosen because it exists in the flute’s zone of sonic uncertainty. The physics of where the flautist’s fingers find this C sharp means the sound that emerges from the instrument is full of breath and air, so the note seems to hover, halfformed – but all-faun! – on the air.
And that’s just the first note. The shape that the whole flute solo at the start of the Prélude makes, shimmering up and down a tritone – the ambiguous unresolved devil-in-music of an interval that’s here turned into a sounding symbol of a state of longing and dream that the faun, and all of us listening, never want to escape – is the start of a piece that makes a veil of irresistible in-betweenness; in which harmonies dissolve only to coalesce into gossamer shapes that no composer had dared make before; in which what sounds like a climax is really just another wave of rich and strange musical dreamscape.
The chain of sensual revolution, started by Debussy in 1894 in the Prélude, has never stopped shimmering. And not only in music – although it surely has done that, in the rest of Debussy’s own oeuvre, in homages and reflections of the Prélude’s power in music by Edgard Varèse, Olivier
Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Kaija Saariaho and others – but also in dance. When Vaslav Nijinsky danced Debussy’s faun in 1912 at the Ballets Russes in Paris, his movements were seen as erotomaniacally scandalous because they took the flute’s breath of freedom as an excuse to conjure a newly animalistic choreography.
So when Freddie Mercury needed an image of pure freedom in the video for Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ in 1984, he danced as Nijinsky’s faun, dressed in Léon Bakst’s original costumes.
Debussy’s flute is a sensual sirensong of freedom that has never stopped and will never cease resonating across musical culture: dare you follow where that C sharp leads?
Debussy’s flute is a sensual siren-song of freedom that never stops resonating