Clair de lune

Clair de lune

Claude Debussy

Clair de lune, French for Moonlight, is the third movement of the piano suite Suite bergamasque by Claude Debussy.

Originally written in 1890, an unknown publisher urged Debussy to sell the music for his own fame, which caused Debussy to revise the earlier piano style. Although it is obscure whether how much he wrote in 1890 or rewrote in 1905, it is certain that he re-titled two of his movements.

“Clair de lune” is also a poem written by French poet Paul Verlaine in 1869. The inspiration for the famous movement of the same name, the first verse refers to ‘Bergamasques’:

(English translation of an excerpt from the poem ‘Clair de lune’):

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

A woman is attributed to a landscape of beauty, where bergamaskers dance without revealing their sadness, hidden behind their masks, showing a feeling of uneasiness.

A “Bergamask” is a rustic dance originated in the town of Bergamo, Italy, whose inhabitants were once ridiculed for their clumsiness.