Mon Seul Désir

Claude Debussy: En Bateau, 1889 (Perényi Miklós - cello, Kocsis Zoltán - piano)

Featured paintings:
Mary Cassatt: Summertime (1894)
Frederick Childe Hassam: The White Dory (1895)
Manet: Boating (1874)
Monet: On a Boat (1887), The Boat Studio (1876), Water Lilies (1899, 1903, 1904, 1906, 1915, 1917)
Renoir: The yawl (1875)

Debussy’s Petite Suite (1886-1889) was originally written for piano, four hands and first performed in 1889 by Debussy and pianist–publisher Jacques Durand at a salon in Paris. The pieces were transcribed several times; our version of En bateau is written for cello and piano. Petite Suite has four movements: 1. En bateau („Sailing”), 2. Cortège („Retinue”), 3. Menuet, 4. Ballet. It may have been written upon request – possibly from Durand – for a piece that would be accessible to skilled amateurs, as its simplicity is in stark contrast with the modernist works that Debussy wrote at the time. The first two movements are settings of poems from the volume Fêtes galantes by Paul Verlaine. His poem En bateau (from Fêtes galantes) influenced Debussy to compose his charming piece with the same title. The poems evoke the era of 18th-century aristocrats on country outings, the world depicted in the fanciful paintings of Fragonard and Watteau.

Boats and lakes are often the subjects of Impressionist paintings. Monet had his own boat studio where he could observe the water closely; this boat studio is depicted by his friend Manet and by Monet himself as well. Some paintings from Monet’s series of water lilies (Nymphéas) are also present in our collection - series of approximately 250 oil paintings in the garden he had installed in his property at Giverny. Never was the artist’s brushstroke so free, so detached from the real form of objects. A close-up view of these canvases gives a feeling of abstraction. Renoir’s La yole (The yawl, 1875) is a charming idyll as well with two young ladies sitting in a boat; the reflections on the water are extremely detailed using colors like blue, green and yellow.

(via Liszt Memorial Museum Budapest)