Beschreibung
Notes by Robert Orledge: Debussy planned to compose seven pieces of incidental music for André Antoine’s production of Shakespeare’s King Lear (Le Roi Lear) in 1904 at the time of his elopement to Jersey with Emma Bardac. However, he never completed the project due to Antoine’s frequent postponements and unwillingness to provide the ‘30 musicians’ Debussy required to avoid ‘a feeble little sound like fleas rubbing their legs together!’ On the verso of the Fanfare manuscript from Debussy’s sketches, I discovered the start of an extremely moving little piece in a modal D minor, which could only be for ‘La Mort de Cordélia’ in Act 5, scene 3. I thought this would be best suited to a binary movement in which most of the first half, the striking chromatic introduction and the elegiac theme are all by Debussy. This pencil sketch turned up in 2000 in thecollection of Mrs Jayne Ericourt (wife of the pianist Daniel Ericourt) in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA.