Sarabande

• This work is the second of a set of three pieces which Debussy composed in 1894-1901 and published in 1901 as Pour le piano.¹
• “Sarabande,” composed in 1894, was originally conceived as part of a set of Images for piano.² This set wasn’t published until 1978 (under the title Images oubliées, “forgotten images”) and its version of the “Sarabande” is only slightly different.³
• In the original version (in Images oubliées) this Sarabande had a title: “Souvenir de Louvre” (Memory of the Louvre”) with an inscription from Debussy:
  • “Dans le mouvement d’une “Sarabande”, c’est-à-dire avec une élégance grave et lente, même un peu vieux portrait, souvenir de Louvre, etc.”⁴ (“In the tempo of a ‘Sarabande’, that is, with a grave and slow elegance, even a bit old-portrait, souvenir of the Louvre, etc.”)⁵
• Read about the dance form Sarabande

Debussy played this piece “with the easy simplicity of a good dancer from the sixteenth century.”

Émile Vuillermoz, music critic who heard Debussy play this piece. ⁶

• Maurice Ravel orchestrated the Sarabande in 1922.

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 Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1996), 6.
3. Lesure and Howat, “Debussy, (Achille-)Claude,” Grove Music Online.
4. Claude Debussy, Images (oubliées) (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Theodore Presser Company, 1977), 5.
5. Stephen Walsh, Debussy: A Painter in Sound (New York: Knopf, 2018), Ebook.
6. Quoted in Roy Howat, “What do we perform?”, in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 13.