Debussy's Clair de lune was written when he was twenty-eight, and then he sat on the whole suite for fifteen years, letting it be published only in 1905 — by which time he was no longer the composer who had written it. 4:45, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
The title is the name of a poem
The Suite bergamasque dates from around 1890, when Debussy was twenty-eight. Both the suite's name and this movement's come from Verlaine's collection Fêtes galantes — a line there mentions masks and bergamasques, and "Clair de lune" is one of the poems in that book. It opens by telling someone that their soul is a chosen landscape.
He was in no hurry to publish. The suite sat in a drawer for fifteen years and was printed by Fromont only in 1905, by which time he had already written the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Pelléas et Mélisande and moved a long way on. He revised it before publication, and the third and fourth movements lost their original titles.
The piece that ended up best remembered is the one he sat on longest.
Films have been using it for decades
At the end of Ocean's Eleven (2001) the crew stand in front of the Bellagio fountains saying nothing, and this is what plays.
It is the piece in Edward's room in Twilight (2008), it runs through Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and it was in Giant (1956), James Dean's last film.
You cannot hear where a bar begins
The opening has almost no notes — two or three drop, then nothing, then two or three more. There is no beat to nod along to; the accents have been deliberately rubbed out, and you cannot hear where a bar begins.
The middle does something else: the left hand spreads into a continuous ripple while the right sings one very slow line above it. There are far more notes there, yet it sounds flatter, because all of them are equally light.
The last pages empty out again, emptier than the beginning. At the end you barely hear anything stop; it simply thins until it is gone.
Seventeen hundred notes, not one of them loud
Seventy-two bars, 1,716 notes, in 9/8. It falls into four stretches: up to bar 16 the texture is thinnest, about ten notes to a bar; from bar 17 it thickens; from bar 29 the left hand turns into a continuous ripple that runs to bar 48; at bar 53 the opening returns; after bar 65 it empties out.
The highest and fullest point is between bars 37 and 42, where the right hand reaches near the top of its range.
One thing is very visible in the score: the left hand changes clef twenty-four times. It moves back and forth between treble and bass because the ripple keeps crossing middle C into the right hand's territory — the two hands overlap on the keyboard. There are also forty-four tuplet groups, which is what "the barlines have been rubbed out" looks like on paper.
The difficulty is not the notes; it is letting none of them stick out
We rate this 4 out of 5. The technical difficulty is concentrated in the middle ripple: the left hand crosses between treble and bass clef twenty-four times, and the whole surface has to stay even — one heavy note breaks it.
The right hand's long line has to sing at a very low volume, which is harder than playing it out.
There are many tuplet groups and the two hands are often divided differently, so counting does not help; you have to listen.
The other three movements
The Suite bergamasque also contains a Prélude, a Menuet and a Passepied; more will follow.
For more of the same repeating-without-emphasis: Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1.
