Clair de Lune et Soleil Levant

Moonlight

Your soul is a select landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.
All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.

Paul Verlaine


Debussy - Clair de Lune (played by Alexander Lubyantsev)

I was watching a television show about a pianist and the three composers he most related to: Rachmaninov, Ravel and Debussy, and found out that Clair de Lune was written inspired by a poem by Verlaine. The piece compliments it and is such a perfect translation of words into music. The main tune has such a heart ache to it and the second prominent tune with the cascading bubbling fountain in the background. Debussy was labelled an Impressionist, and I don't see why not, looking at the score and listening to the piece, it's seamless as if bar lines don't exist. And I'm going to use the analogy, that Debussy paints a picture with his music, makes a film even!

Monet - Soleil Levant

If I recall correctly from my high school art lessons, the Soleil Levant painted by Claude Monet (other famous paintings include the water lilies) was the first Impressionist painting. And it is, just an impression, not realisitic, rather capturing moreso the mood that go with the scene. I think the Arts go hand in hand together, they all serve to make an impression on the reader/viewer/listener, take you away from where you physically are at that particular moment in time. Art, music, etc, they're all intertwined. In year 5 during music, there was a particular lesson where we listened to some famous pieces and used colours and lines to describe it. I remember the Ride of the Valkyries came on, and I got my red and black pencils and just went nuts with the crazy angry lines :)

Even with food this happens, now that I'm writing about this...

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