Debussy's Arabesque No. 2, L. 66. The two arabesques were written together and published together, yet almost everyone knows only the first. The second is much faster and far more jumpy, playful from beginning to end — the opposite side of the same pair. Debussy wrote them in his twenties, more than a decade before the impressionist works he is remembered for. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The two belong together; only one of them got remembered
Debussy wrote the two arabesques around 1891 and published them together that year, under the same number, L. 66. He was in his twenties, recently back in Paris from Rome, making a living by accompanying and teaching.
"Arabesque" came from architecture and decorative art, where it means a winding, repeating line with no clear beginning or end. Debussy borrowed the word for the same thing in music: a line that goes out and comes back, driven neither by contrast nor by conflict.
Pairing them was deliberate. The first is slow, wide, and always descending; the second is quick, short, and always springing upward. After publication only the first was remembered — arranged for every instrument, put on countless compilations and into advertising — while the second stayed mostly inside complete recordings.
Neither is the Debussy people picture. The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which got him called an impressionist, came in 1894, and the suite that contains Clair de lune was published later still. These two are what he sounded like before he became that composer.
The whole piece sounds like someone trying not to laugh
It opens with a very light string of triplets, each note picked out separately rather than joined. That touch is the tone of the whole piece: not singing but plucking, not walking but hopping.
The melody keeps leaping up a long way and dropping straight back — like someone raising their voice halfway through a sentence and immediately pulling it back down. The piece does this dozens of times, and never twice from quite the same height.
In the middle it suddenly goes quiet, with fewer notes and lower down, as though holding something in. It does not hold for long: the triplets come back, faster than before.
The last stretch climbs to the highest point in the piece and then closes very lightly — no loud ending, it simply stops.
As background it behaves nothing like the first arabesque: that one slows time down, and this one speeds your hands up.
110 bars, one way of jumping taken to a dozen heights
110 bars, 4/4, G major, 1,945 sounding notes, split roughly evenly between the hands.
Bars 1 to 24 are the theme; the triplet touch is fixed from the first bar and the melody leaps upward throughout. At bar 25 the note count drops into single figures — the first time the piece lets go — and then builds straight back.
Bar 45 is the densest in the piece, 36 notes, and the first real climb: from there to bar 48 the top line is pushed to A6, near the ceiling of the piece.
At bar 62 the opening returns as it was, its bar-by-bar note counts and ranges almost identical to the passage from bar 5.
From bar 82 comes the widest writing in the piece: within a single bar the bass sits near F1 while the top reaches A6, the hands nearly five octaves apart.
From bar 98 it turns to the close, and in the last three bars the notes thin out and settle very quietly.
The shortest note lasts 0.015 seconds, and those triplet runs go past almost as a single line.
The difficulty is lightness, not speed
There are a lot of notes, but each is short and light, and speed itself is not the problem.
First, touch. Almost everything here is picked out rather than pressed, so the fingers stay close to the keys and the sound comes from small movements at the tip. Lift the hand and it gets heavy, and once it is heavy it is not this piece.
Second, the leaps. The melody jumps a long way at a time and has to land both accurately and lightly — practise the two notes of the leap on their own first, then put them back into the phrase.
Third, the pedal. Held down, whole passages turn to mud; in most places it can only be touched and released. The opposite of what the first arabesque wants.
Fourth, hand crossing. The hands change places often, so mark which one is on top before you read.
The tempo is 138 to the quarter, taken from the printed marking in another encoding of the same piece; the finished video runs three minutes twenty-three.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
The first of the pair, and what he became afterwards
The first of the pair, Arabesque No. 1, L. 66 No. 1, is already on this channel — slow, wide, always descending, with the hands counting differently. Hearing the two together is the point; Debussy published them as a pair.
For what he became afterwards: Clair de lune, L. 75, also on this channel, written in his thirties, more than a decade after these.
For the same lightness at the opposite speed: Satie's Gymnopédies, three of them here, from the same Paris and the same years.
