Description
Fêtes galantes was actually planned as a hybrid opera-ballet to a libretto by Debussy’s friend Louis Laloy. For this, Laloy arranged selected poetry by Paul Verlaine into three tableaux, replacing an earlier (unstarted) Debussyan project with Charles Morice entitled Crimen amoris. During his last productive summer of 1915, Debussy set a sequence from the start of the first tableau, ‘Les Masques’, involving stanzas 1 and 3 of the opening song for Mezzetin in Verlaine’s comedy Les Uns et les autres. The action is set in a park à la Watteau late one summer afternoon as Mezzetin attempts to entertain a group of nonchalant masqueraders with only the aid of his voice and a mandolin..
This appears to have been prefaced by a slower, elegiac introduction reminiscent of the opening of the comtemporary Cello Sonata and it leads to a danced minuet by the masqued dancers which has clear echoes of the piano piece L’Isle Joyeuse (1904). Following Laloy’s scenario, the mas-queraders then sing extracts from Verlaine’s ‘A la promenade’ (from Fêtes galantes itself). The minuet returns at greater length before being cut short by a chilly gust of wind, after which the park returns to its orginal state (and music) as though nothing had really happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa8kIAUFOcQ