Clair de lune

• This work is the third movement from Debussy’s Suite bergamasque for piano, composed c. 1890, revised and published 1905.¹
• The title is taken from the opening poem of Fêtes galantes (1869)² by Paul Verlaine (1844–1896). Debussy also set many of Verlaine’s poems as art songs, including two settings of this poem.³

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Bewitched by masquers and bergamasquers,
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

From “Clair de lune,” by Verlaine ⁴

• Debussy also found the title of his full suite in Verlaine’s poem Clair de lune. The bergamasque is a 16^th century dance from Bergamo, Italy, which Verlaine has his masked characters performing in the poem.
• In his book Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy, Paul Roberts suggests that both Verlaine and Debussy used this term for an archaic effect, making the atmosphere mysterious and dreamlike.⁵

1. François Lesure and Roy Howat, “Debussy, (Achille-)Claude,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed August 27, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007353.
2. Paul Verlaine, trans. C.F. MacIntyre, Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 51.
3. Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 23.
4. Paul Verlaine, trans. Richard Stokes, “Clair de lune (1891) L80,” Oxford Lieder (2019), accessed August 28, 2019, https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/2827.
5. Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1996), 91.