Sonata in D Minor for Cello and Piano
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Died March 25, 1918, Paris

Near the end of his life Debussy planned a cycle of six sonatas for various combinations of instruments. He completed only the first three: for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola, and harp (1915) and violin and piano (1917). Projected-but never written-were sonatas for oboe, horn and harpsichord; for trumpet, clarinet, bassoon and piano; and a final sonata that would have included all the instruments from the five earlier sonatas.

This was not a happy period in the composer's life. He was suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him, and World War I was raging across Europe-Paris was actually being shelled on the day the composer died there. The three sonatas that Debussy completed have never achieved the popularity of his earlier works. Audiences have found them abstract in form, severe in expression and Debussy himself deprecated them with the self-irony that marked his painful final years. Of the Violin Sonata he said: "This sonata will be interesting from a documentary viewpoint and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war."

But this music has a power all its own, and listeners who put aside their preconceptions about what Debussy should sound like (and about what a sonata should be) will find the music moving and-in its austere way-painfully beautiful. One of the most impressive things about the Cello Sonata is its concentration: it lasts less than twelve minutes.

Further intensifying this music's severity is Debussy's refusal to develop-or even to use-themes in a traditional sense: this is music not of fully developed themes but of thematic fragments appearing in various forms and shapes. The opening movement, Prologue-Lent, is only 51 measures long, but Debussy alters the tempo every few measures: the score is saturated with tempo changes and performance instructions. The piano's opening three-measure phrase recurs throughout, contrasting with the cello's agitato passages in the center section. At the end, the cello winds gradually into its highest register and concludes hauntingly on the interval of a perfect fifth, played in harmonics.

The second and third movements are performed without pause. The second is marked Sérénade, but this is unlike any serenade one has heard before: there is nothing lyric about this song. The cello snaps out grumbling pizzicatos (Debussy considered calling this movement Pierrot Angry at the Moon), and when the cello is finally given a bowed passage, it is marked ironique.

The finale-Animé-opens with abrupt pizzicatos. As in the first movement, there are frequent changes of tempo, a continuing refusal to announce or develop themes in traditional senses, sudden changes of mood (the performer is instructed to play the brief lyric section at the movement's center con morbidezza, which means "gently"), explosive pizzicatos. Such a description makes the sonata sound fierce, abstract even mocking. But beneath the surface austerity of this sonata lies music of haunting emotional power.