When I was a boy I got some piano lessons from my grandma, whose creaky piano had been a feature of her back room for as long as I could remember, and although my progress was limited (and permanently arrested at age thirteen when I discovered the guitar), I retain some vivid memories: my grandma singing the music hall favourite Two Lovely Black Eyes in her trademark falsetto, as well as Edelweiss from The Sound Of Music and the military march song Men Of Harlech (after which, for a period, she would address me as Dai Bach, or ‘little David’ in Welsh, as if recalling familial roots that never existed). I would faithfully learn these songs on the piano, whilst leaving the unique singing to her.
Another piece of music I recall practising in those years was Claude Debussy’s Clair De Lune. No doubt every erstwhile piano student does. It’s a haunting and lovely tune, for sure, and later I was to learn that Debussy was a veritable master of the haunting and lovely tune. He had an astonishing ability to translate the natural world into sound for orchestral and solo piano music. Listen to La Mer, for example, one of many pieces Debussy wrote about water: it’s easy to discern the ‘sound’ of the play of light on water. The evocative musical imagery captured so cleverly in such compositions as Rêverie, Images, Préludes, Études and Nocturnes led him to be dubbed the first Impressionist composer, the musical equivalent of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir (he was none too happy with the term by all accounts, but I’d have taken it).
My favourite evocation, though, as a fan of the pastoral and bucolic, is Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist poem of the same name, the Prélude conjures up a dream-like world of idyllic woodland thick with summer haze, in which sprawls a lethargic faun, waking from reverie. If you don’t know it from its title, you’ll know it when you hear it from the excerpt below (it’s been used all over the shop). Oh, to be a faun in a mythological Greek summer landscape! Beats working…
