Debussy’s best-known piece, and one he nearly left unpublished.
Debussy drafted the Suite bergamasque around 1890, in his late twenties, then left it alone for fifteen years and only allowed it into print in 1905 — by which time he was an established composer and, by several accounts, embarrassed by the early music. He renamed the third movement Clair de lune at that point, after a Verlaine poem he had already set twice as a song. The title means moonlight; the suite’s name comes from the bergamasque, an old dance from Bergamo, and from the masked revellers in the same poem.
The piece is in D♭ major and written in 9/8, which is where its floating pulse comes from — nine quiet beats to the bar, grouped so the ear never quite lands. It opens with the melody in thirds over a still bass, gathers into a middle section of rolling broken chords, and returns to the opening idea before dissolving upwards. There are almost no loud bars in it: the whole piece lives between pianissimo and mezzo-forte, and its climax is a matter of colour rather than volume.
Clair de Lune is not fast, and it is not a beginner’s piece. The difficulty is in two hands sharing the middle of the keyboard, in cross-rhythms where one plays triplets against the other’s pairs, and in chords that have to be spread and voiced so that only the top note sings. The pedal is doing as much work as the fingers. The middle section adds a rolling accompaniment under a melody that keeps changing hands.
It is a good piece to take apart. One hand at a time makes the cross-rhythms obvious; a slower tempo makes the spread chords playable long before they are comfortable. Its arranged levels thin the accompaniment first and leave the melody as written, so the shape of the piece is there from the first day.
This is one of the pieces we have arranged into levels — the same music, thinned out, so you can start it long before you can play it whole. Every note in an easier level is a note the composer wrote; nothing is moved or rewritten. Not every piece supports all four rungs, and the app tells you which ones this piece has.
