Thornton 1

Debussy, Mallarme, and Nijinsky's Collaborative Effort on Prélude à L'après-

midi D'un Faune

Gerald Thornton

MUCO 220

Dr. Avila

March 26, 2014

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The end of the 19th century was a pivotal moment for the French arts.

Composers, poets, and dancers broke away from the decided realism of the

past and strayed away from the dryness of their predecessors with

inclinations towards the exotic. Stéphane Mallarmé was the influential

symbolist poet who wrote L'après-midi D'un Faune in 1876, while Claude

Debussy composed and orchestrated the piece in 1894 for a 1912 ballet

performance choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. The effects that each of the

artists left on the same body of work is a striking reflection of each

individual's attempts to break from reality utilizing the themes of fantasy,

primitivism, exoticism which were very modern and appealing at the end of

the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

Debussy interpreted Mallarmé's poem as a set of scenes and did not attempt to replicate every nuance. Instead, he chose to use a wash of sound and "the accents occur at constantly changing intervals, as the meter shifts from 9/8 to 6/8, 9/8, 12/8, 3/4, and 4/4. The effect of drowsiness is reinforced by the soft, mellow tones of flute and strings, in a melting harmony where intervals of pitch are also irregular and obscure."1

1 Thomas Munro, "The Afternoon of a Faun" and the Interrelation of the Arts The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 10, No. 2 (Dec., 1951) p. 100 Farfan, Penny. "Man as Beast:Nijinsky's Faun." South Central Review, 2008: p. 76