LDV84

22 DEBUSSY_12 ÉTUDES • LE MARTYRE DE SAINT SÉBASTIEN One can already detect in Chopin’s late works a quest for new harmonic horizons and a pronounced taste for musical colour. Can it be said that Debussy embodied Chopin’s dream of the ‘absolute piano’? I believe that in his late pieces, which I personally place at the zenith of the entire repertory, Chopin himself embodied this dreamof the absolute piano! In the 1840s, Chopin’s last works, with their harmonic innovations and strokes of audacity, their search for new sonorities, their experiments with resonance and timbre, were staggering in their modernity, several decades ahead of their time. Debussy obviously followed on from this approach, which he adopted as his own and pushed to previously unexplored heights. The thread that links the two composers, sixty years apart, is an overwhelmingly powerful one. And if knowledge of Chopin, especially late Chopin, makes it possible to understand where Debussy is coming from, Debussy’s output sheds new light on the subtleties and richness of Chopin.