It was the memory of a small but exquisite bit of theater.
Right now is very likely the 110th anniversary of the composition of Debussy’s Twelve Etudes for piano, one of his last works and rarely heard today. He composed them during the summer of 1915, when he was desperately ill with the cancer that would kill him within three years. He dedicated them to the memory of Chopin, whose own etudes and other works he had played and loved since childhood, and which he was currently editing for Editions Durand, which had commissioned him to provide new editions to replace standard German publications no longer available because of the Great War.
No. 1 of Debussy’s Etudes is titled “Pour les cinq doigts” with a subtitle, “d’après Monsieur Czerny,” in muted derision of the Austrian composer whose own School of Velocity (op. 299) and warming-up exercises, full of dry scales and mechanical figurations, had haunted piano students for nearly a century. Debussy had already poked the same kind of fun at Clementi’s well-worn torture manual, Gradus ad Parnassum, in the first piece of his Children’s Corner suite a few years earlier (1908).
Etude no. 1 begins with a basic five-fingered pattern in the left hand, and immediately is startled with A flat, with a RH overreach. In the performance I saw in Montreal 13 years ago, the pianist, François Chaplin, faced toward where I was sitting and I could not see his hands. At this moment he glanced to his left with an unmistakable irritation, as if to say “How did you get in here?” In the next measures the interrupting gesture is repeated and brushed off in mounting pianistic impatience. But the leftward glance said it all, and only with great difficulty did I keep from exploding with laughter. It was a superb vignette such as one rarely encounters in the concert hall.
Some years later I realized that Debussy had set this identical pattern before, impressionistically if not theatrically. This was in Ibéria (1908), in the third movement, “Le matin d’un jour de fête,” where a solo violin holds forth in the middle of the street with a six-bar display cadenza:
Note the scale pattern, C-D-E-F amid the coarse double-stops, brusquely interrupted by a reaching-over A flat, as the spectators (woodwinds and xylophone) laugh and applaud. This is a bright C-major moment in a tonally complex festival in which Debussy, a first-rate pianist, pushes the string section into unknown territories, even quasi guitara, with conspicuous success.
If the above writer is the person named Cecilia that I think she may be: I remember when you, a violinist, were abruptly exempted from theory class at the New England Conservatory ca. 1969. We were about to study score-reading, using Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto as our example, and your violin teacher feared you would lose your “perfect pitch” if you had to learn to read clefs other than the treble. Soon you were gone–but you did get a nice job down the block …
Comment by David Satz — August 31, 2025 at 3:03 am
I’d say that what John Smith describes is not Absolute Pitch but “Absolutist” pitch, and certainly there are people who fit that attribution. I was told at age 6 that I have perfect pitch, and I was able to rely on it, with near tuning-fork accuracy, for the next 60 or so years. Then my sense of absolute pitch began to deteriorate, and I now tend to hear everything a semitone higher — G major pieces in Aflat, for instance. The late George Perle (1915-2009, 25 years older than I) told me he had the same trouble. Now I am compelled to verify everything constantly. But to address Cecilia’s observation, I admit that my own comparison here of Etude and Iberia is somewhat esoteric; but I was driven to it because I have already published extensively on the subject ( please see https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.tufts.edu/dist/6/2974/files/2023/02/Debussy-Absolute.pdf ). Debussy’s own absolute pitch was well known and it shows up in his music. If you can find a copy of my book, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music (2004), unfortunately now out of print, the chapter on “Debussy’s Recycling” goes into related depth, with respect to his self-copying and his decorous expropriation of others’ music, notably Ravel’s.
Comment by Mark DeVoto — August 22, 2025 at 2:38 pm
Lest Cecilia think I was serious, that was intended as a joke. But all in good fun. Now, name that note……….. G##
Comment by John Smith — August 21, 2025 at 8:53 am
Lest anyone out there think Mr. Smith is correct, he is, in fact, not.
Absolute pitch and perfect pitch are the same, and whatever the wonderful phenomenon is called, it has nothing to do with the article it heads.
Comment by Cecilia — August 19, 2025 at 11:14 pm
Absolute pitch is the phenomenon of a person being absolutely convinced s/he is correct about what a given pitch is, even when s/he is wrong. Perfect pitch is instead the ability of a person to correctly identify any pitch in any register, even a whistling radiator or bird call.
Comment by John Smith — August 19, 2025 at 9:19 am
Interesting article, but what does the title of the article have to do with its content?
I assume Mr. DeVoto and Co. know what absolute pitch is – I was lucky enough to be born with it, perhaps they were also – but nothing in the article meshes with its definition, or my experience with it over a lifetime.
Comment by Cecilia — August 18, 2025 at 2:42 pm