DEBUSSY'S SONGS
Sung by ANNE THURSFIELD (Soprano)
Beau Soir (1878) (Fair Evening)
Voici quo !e prmtemps (1880)
Mandoline (1880)
Air de Lia (1884) (Lia's Song, 'The Prodigal
Son')
Romance (1887)
DEBUSSY'S songs are all laid out with a fine sense of the importance of the accompaniment ; they might quite fittingly be called duets for voice and pianoforte. Like most French-men, he had a highly-cultured literary sense, and the poems he chose to set were much more than mere pegs on which to hang music. His settings do indeed seem to grow out of the text in a very spontaneous way, not merely illustrating it, but expressing it, with a wholly satisfying completeness. He was equally at home in songs of many different moods; some of his love songs, tender, sensitive, or passionate, are very beautiful, and there are others of more intimate personal feeling, varying between humour and rather weird tragedy. He left a number of fresh and breezy open-air songs, and there are three fine settings of ' Villon ' ballads, expressing the most varied emotions.
However little, as an instrumental composer, he may appeal to some of the older generation who like their music to be formal, there has never been any doubt that his songs are among the best things which French music of the last generation gave us.