Uploaded December 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
- Composer: Abel Decaux (11 February 1869 -- 19 March 1943)
- Performer: Frederic Chiu (piano)
- Year of recording: 1994
Clairs de Lune, for piano, written between 1900-1907.
00:00 - No. 1 Lent (à Ferdinand Motte Lacroix) (1900)
05:08 - No. 2 Lent "La Ruelle" (1902)
09:52 - No. 3 Très lent "Le Cimetière" (1907)
16:16 - No. 4 Très large "La Mer" (1903)
Decaux’s biography is soon told, but is none the less surprising for that. Born in Auffay in 1869, the same year as Roussel and seven years after Debussy, he studied the organ with Widor and Guilmant and composition with Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire. For twenty-five years from around the turn of the century he was organist at Sacré-Cœur, then in 1923 he went to America and taught the organ at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Out of this routine life came these four extraordinary pieces 'Clairs de Lune', plus a sketch for a fifth piece of the set, ‘La Forêt’. Only a handful of other works are known by him.
An epigraph from the writer Louis de Lutèce sets the scene, with its white moon gliding silently in space, its motionless ghosts, pale luminescences, mysterious shadows, the carcass of a yowling cat …. This is the world of Edgar Allan Poe, whose writings, translated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, were the (masochistic) bedside reading of many a French artist of the fin-de-siècle, including Gide, Debussy and Ravel: Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit belongs to the same company. Even Debussy ultimately found the task of setting The Fall of the House of Usher beyond him, but Decaux’s more limited ambition succeeded most remarkably in bringing to life this world beyond what we call reality.
He wrote the pieces between 1900 and 1907, but they were not published until 1913. Whatever the reason for the delay (perhaps no other publisher would take them seriously?), Decaux’s teacher Massenet died in 1912 and so was spared what would surely have been a rude shock, not so much at the technique—as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, everything stems from the two falling bell motives at the outset (major second, major third; minor second, minor third)—as at the extraordinary harmonies and the no less extraordinary syntax. Whole tone aggregations (as at the beginning of ‘La Ruelle’) and consecutive fifths were nothing so out-of-the-way around 1900, but some of Decaux’s chords seem to have been taken from a source such as the songs in Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten; the only problem being that these weren’t written until 1909. Throughout, major and minor triads are scrupulously avoided or else, as in ‘La mer’, coloured persistently with a sharpened fourth. Again, this piece was written in December 1903, nearly two years before the premiere of Debussy’s La mer and six years before his similarly wild Prélude ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’.
Comments by Frederic Chiu himself:
- "Thank you for posting this and spreading the word about Decaux. If you like listening to this, please get the iTunes or MP3. You'll hear even more detail that is not here in this compressed version. Decaux was a visionary who wrote these atonal impressionist pieces before Debussy and Schoenberg had figured out Impressionist or Atonalism. There are number games and other symbolism as well. Then he married a socialite, demanding wife who sucked the inspiration out of him. (direct story from Decaux's grandson) Please share, and please purchase!"
- "Of all of my recordings, this is the program that I'm most proud of. Decaux as a bridge between Ravel and Schoenberg - he demonstrates that impressionism and expressionism were not mutually exclusive art trends, uniting the French and the Germanic."
- Composer: Abel Decaux (11 February 1869 -- 19 March 1943)
- Performer: Frederic Chiu (piano)
- Year of recording: 1994
Clairs de Lune, for piano, written between 1900-1907.
00:00 - No. 1 Lent (à Ferdinand Motte Lacroix) (1900)
05:08 - No. 2 Lent "La Ruelle" (1902)
09:52 - No. 3 Très lent "Le Cimetière" (1907)
16:16 - No. 4 Très large "La Mer" (1903)
Decaux’s biography is soon told, but is none the less surprising for that. Born in Auffay in 1869, the same year as Roussel and seven years after Debussy, he studied the organ with Widor and Guilmant and composition with Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire. For twenty-five years from around the turn of the century he was organist at Sacré-Cœur, then in 1923 he went to America and taught the organ at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Out of this routine life came these four extraordinary pieces 'Clairs de Lune', plus a sketch for a fifth piece of the set, ‘La Forêt’. Only a handful of other works are known by him.
An epigraph from the writer Louis de Lutèce sets the scene, with its white moon gliding silently in space, its motionless ghosts, pale luminescences, mysterious shadows, the carcass of a yowling cat …. This is the world of Edgar Allan Poe, whose writings, translated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, were the (masochistic) bedside reading of many a French artist of the fin-de-siècle, including Gide, Debussy and Ravel: Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit belongs to the same company. Even Debussy ultimately found the task of setting The Fall of the House of Usher beyond him, but Decaux’s more limited ambition succeeded most remarkably in bringing to life this world beyond what we call reality.
He wrote the pieces between 1900 and 1907, but they were not published until 1913. Whatever the reason for the delay (perhaps no other publisher would take them seriously?), Decaux’s teacher Massenet died in 1912 and so was spared what would surely have been a rude shock, not so much at the technique—as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, everything stems from the two falling bell motives at the outset (major second, major third; minor second, minor third)—as at the extraordinary harmonies and the no less extraordinary syntax. Whole tone aggregations (as at the beginning of ‘La Ruelle’) and consecutive fifths were nothing so out-of-the-way around 1900, but some of Decaux’s chords seem to have been taken from a source such as the songs in Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten; the only problem being that these weren’t written until 1909. Throughout, major and minor triads are scrupulously avoided or else, as in ‘La mer’, coloured persistently with a sharpened fourth. Again, this piece was written in December 1903, nearly two years before the premiere of Debussy’s La mer and six years before his similarly wild Prélude ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’.
Comments by Frederic Chiu himself:
- "Thank you for posting this and spreading the word about Decaux. If you like listening to this, please get the iTunes or MP3. You'll hear even more detail that is not here in this compressed version. Decaux was a visionary who wrote these atonal impressionist pieces before Debussy and Schoenberg had figured out Impressionist or Atonalism. There are number games and other symbolism as well. Then he married a socialite, demanding wife who sucked the inspiration out of him. (direct story from Decaux's grandson) Please share, and please purchase!"
- "Of all of my recordings, this is the program that I'm most proud of. Decaux as a bridge between Ravel and Schoenberg - he demonstrates that impressionism and expressionism were not mutually exclusive art trends, uniting the French and the Germanic."
