Claude Debussy: The Composer as Pianist

Debussy lived into the age of recording, but the primary documents of his playing are his Welte-Mignon piano rolls. The Welte-Mignon contraption was a mechanical "player" which you set before a regular piano. It differed from the familiar player piano in that it could reproduce not only dynamics but touch and pedal technique. Mahler also recorded some of his pieces in this way. The problem with these things is their extreme fussiness. There's a problem with getting them to play at the intended speeds. You don't know, for example, how fast or slow Debussy intended, say, "La cathedrale engloutie" simply by looking at the roll. Also, apparently Welte-Mignon players were fitted to the individual piano. However, Pierian has used the talents of an engineer, Kenneth Caswell, who has devoted decades to the innards of the player, and the results have won the imprimatur of Harold Schoenberg himself, formerly a severe critic of modern Welte-Mignon reproduction. That's good enough for me.

All that said, I consider this one of the ten most important releases in the history of recording, even though I don't know what the other nine would be. Debussy is one of the master composers of keyboard music, along with Scarlatti, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Liszt, Bartok, Ravel, and Prokofiev. So the recording is the equivalent of having Bach play the Goldbergs for you. Does Debussy differ from benchmark performances, like Gieseking? Not to take anything away from Gieseking, but, yes, he does. I can describe it as an extreme inwardness, as if the composer were communing with himself. The fingerwork isn't as sure as some, but the outstanding feature of the playing is its outstanding singing or, considering the composer's subtle temperament, humming. I can't imagine anybody interested in Debussy's piano music passing up this CD.

We also get Debussy's acoustic recordings as Mary Garden's accompanist in the Ariettes oubliees and in an extract from Pelleas. These to me have more problems than the rolls, mainly because the sound is so crude, but I make that judgment precisely because I have the rolls. Without Caswell's dedication, I'd have been extremely grateful for the acoustic recordings.

This is an album of Debussy's piano works played by Debussy himself. Most of the pieces are from rolls recorded by Debussy and played on Ken Caswell's beautifully and carefully restored Welte reproducing piano. There are also four acoustic recordings of Debussy vocal works, with Debussy playing piano.

The Welte reproducing piano records and plays back many aspects of piano playing (dynamics and touch) at remarkably high fidelity for the time. Thus these piano rolls are primary documents showing how Debussy intended his works to be played. While these recordings to not have the fidelity of modern acoustic recordings, it is possible to detect pedaling, tempo and dynamics. This recording has been the basis of scholarly research, such as the essay by Cecilia Denoyer in the book "Debussy in Performance", edited by James Briscoe.

The acoustic recordings of the vocal works are of much lower fidelity, but do give a sense of Debussy's feel of the piano.

If you are studying Debussy's piano works and want to know how to interpret his notation, this album is for you. If you just want to listen to Debussy's piano works, a modern recording may be more musically pleasing, but you may still enjoy hearing the pieces as they were played by the master himself.

I had known that Debussy had performed a few piano rolls before he died, shortly before the victory against the German's during World War One. It was sad to know that he passed before the knowledge of that inevitable victory for his country.
Piano rolls was the only source close to any composers treatment of actual performances of their own compositions. The special thing about piano rolls over transcriptions is that it can be applied to new and current technology so that it sounds like it was recorded yesterday on the finest concert grand piano.
There is a new CD of Debussy's entire piano roll performances, similar to this. But this CD is slightly superior in sound quality in that the microphone placement is slightly closer to the soundboard, making the overall sound up close and a little more intimate that the current release, which almost has the sound of it being in a high school auditorium. The fault here is that you don't really hear the richness of the piano as apposed to the distant and interfering acoustics of wherever the recording was made.
There's a new technology out only in the past few years where you can now take a scratchy, old and even worn recorded disc and transfer that information into a computer software and then take the next step and translate that information onto what can only be described as a brand new piano roll that can be applied to whatever grand piano the producer of this technology wants. Thus old recordings of solo piano performances can sound absolutely brand new. This was recently done with an Art Tatum performance from 1948 that was released originally as an old and worn record. Now it sounds brand spanking new as if Art was around today, around over a half century after his death. What's more amazing about this technology is that the next step may be to actually take a multiple instrumental recording, anylize and break down the frequencies of the various instruments and re-mix them into new and even stereophonic recordings. It would be nice to see this in my lifetime and I hope it happens. I'm 56.
Debussy is my favorite classical composer and very underated compared to the other masters like Bach,, Beethoven, Mozart and the other more accepted standard artists. Someday he'll get his due. Fortunately for now we have these recordings of the piano rolls. Invaluable.

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