En blanc et noir

 

A bit of Swedish grammar...

Forms of the relatively few neuter nouns ending in -o (I have just realized), follow the model of neuter nouns ending in -e.

äpple, meddelande : apple, message

konto, piano: (bank) account, piano

äpplet, meddelandet: the apple, the message

kontot, pianot: the account, the piano

äpplen, meddelanden: apples, messages

konton, pianon: accounts, pianos

äpplena, meddelandena: the apples, the messages

kontona, pianona: the accounts, the pianos

So now I'm as ready as I'll ever be to chat about Claude Debussy's En blanc et noir, for two pianos. "Pianona, så trevliga..." (The pianos, so nice).

Here it's performed by Martha Argerich and Iddo Bar-Shai:

[Everything in this post is derivative. Along with the links given below, I strongly recommend Arun Rao's "Claude de France: Debussy's Great War of 1915" (PDF) .]

When war broke out in August 1914 Debussy had already virtually ceased to compose. He was depressed about his marriage, his financial situation and his ill-health. When war came, bursts of violent nationalist emotion and anti-boches fury vied with his customary scorn for the French mainstream.

En blanc et noir was one of the first compositions after that hiatus. Maybe Debussy chose the two-piano format because it was hard to muster an orchestra in wartime. The music was mostly written in Paris in June 1915. It was completed in July at Pourville-sur-mer (just to the west of Dieppe). Debussy wasn't easily prised away from Paris but now he accepted the playwright Ferdinand Hérold's offer to make use of his villa "Mon Coin"; with Emma and nine-year-old Chouchou, Debussy stayed there for three productive months. (He and Emma had been here before, in summer 1904.) There was no piano at the villa; it helped Debussy to concentrate on composition, far away from his Bechstein and the temptation to sit noodling at the keyboard. After completing En blanc et noir he immediately started work on the Études.

(This info comes from an article by Sudip Bose: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755628 .)

Debussy had been painfully suffering from colorectal cancer since late 1908.

On Debussy's cancer, by Georg Predota:

https://interlude.hk/on-this-day-25-march-claude-debussy-died/

It was only officially diagnosed in late 1915. In December 1915 he underwent a colostomy (one of the first ever performed) and had radium treatment, which was just as agonising as the disease. His health continued to decline and he died in March 1918.

En blanc et noir is not very obviously war music; the three pieces were originally called Caprices en blanc et noir and they certainly are capricious, as well as sarcastic, effusive, keening, raw, modernist. But despite Debussy's own denials the work certainly makes reference to the war, especially in the second movement episode where a Lutheran hymn tune is accompanied by bombastic artillery. The dedication of the second movement was ‘au Lieutenant Jacques Charlot tué à l'ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’. (The 'Prélude' in Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin is also dedicated to him.) Its epigraph is the Envoi from Villon's Ballade contre les ennemis de la France:

Prince, porte soit des serfs Eolus 
En la forest ou domme Glaucus, 

Ou prive soit de paix et d’espérance 

Car digne n’est de posséder vertus 

Qui mal vouldroit au royaume de France.

[From Swinburne's translation:

Prince, may the bright‑winged brood of Æolus

To sea‑king Glaucus' wild wood cavernous

⁠Bear him bereft of peace and hope's least glance,

For worthless is he to get good of us,

⁠Who could wish evil to the state of France.

]

About En blanc et noir, by Meg Ryan:

https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/musicdb/pieces/330/en-blanc-et-noir