Debussy

While listening to your music as a young man when it was still new to me, I imagined we were friends, sharing our lives of carefree poverty, able to make do with our musical talents to play in bars or churches or schools, as chance would have it, and sometimes filling in for absent musicians in the Lamoreaux Orchestra, fully aware Mallarme and his friends were in the audience, anxious to hear more Wagner, as we were to play him, being still Wagnerites ourselves. And so we played THE RING excerpts with passion and verve, and made the LOHENGRIN Prelude shimmer with mystic light. And late in the concert, the TRISTAN Prelude almost reduced us to tears. Afterwards, we feasted on tables replete with food and wine, spread out on the lawn by rich patrons of the arts. And we were delighted in our artful lives... But Sunday's respite over, we returned to our hack jobs. But already in your mind swirled the sounds that would transform Music into something new and wondrous. And even with that thought, my day dream closed, and I was alone in my apartment, playing records in solitude of those later achievements: Preludes, Images, Nocturnes and Seascapes and a sublime opera, celebrating the unexpected love of a lonely boy and an abandoned girl, a prince and princess no less, whose hesitant gestures, rooted in deep desire, flowered into rapture. Despite the dark forest in which they were trapped, they became beacons to each other, and joy flourished. Your music imparts happiness to them and us who listen, and, of course, it is this happiness which lasts forever.