Rêverie

• Debussy composed this piece for piano around 1890 and it was published in 1891.  It’s one of Debussy’s earlier piano compositions.¹
• Debussy offered this piece to music publisher Fromont after he composed it in 1891,² but they didn’t get around to printing it until 1905, which they did without contacting Debussy first. He wasn’t thrilled, as by this time he wasn’t enamored of this early work.³

“I regret very much your decision to publish Rêverie….I wrote it in a hurry years ago, purely for material considerations. It is a work of no consequence and I frankly consider it absolutely no good.”

Debussy, in a letter to his publisher Fromont, after they’d published Rêverie.⁴

• Listen for: the opening right hand melody has a distinctive flavor that isn’t quite major or minor – that’s because it’s in the Dorian mode,⁵ and the piece doesn’t resolve to a conventional F Major tonality until m. 9.⁶

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. “Rêverie (Debussy, Claude),” International Music Score Library Project, accessed August 28, 2019, https://imslp.org/wiki/R%C3%AAverie_(Debussy%2C_Claude).
3. E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 58.
4. Quoted in E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 58.
5. Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy, 58.
6. Claude Debussy, Rêverie (Paris: Fromont, 1905), IMSLP, accessed August 28, 2019, http://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9/97/IMSLP14012-Debussy_-_R%C3%AAverie_(piano).pdf.