Debussy: Sarabande from Pour le piano (p.260)
GENRE & STYLE
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A Sarabande is a slow dance in 3/4 time, often with a certain weight felt on the
2nd beat of the bar. It is one of the standard movements of the Baroque Suites
written in the late C17 and early C18 (cf. Bach’s Partita no.4 in the Anthology).
 Debussy composed two sets of piano pieces during the 1890s which look back
to French Baroque music, and especially to the music of Couperin.
Suite bergamasque
1. Prelude
2. Menuet
3. Clair de lune
4. Passepied
Pour le piano
1. Prelude
2. Sarabande
3. Toccata
 Another influence may have been Debussy’s contemporary Satie, who
composed a set of three Sarabandes in 1888.
 The aim of both Satie and Debussy in these pieces was to evoke the spirit of a
previous age, perhaps to find an alternative to the intense Romanticism which
dominated European music in the late C19.
STRUCTURE

There is an obvious dividing point at the end of bar 22 as the music sinks to
rest on the tonic (C sharp) followed by a double barline.
 This division into two unequal parts suggests a binary form (similar in outline
to the Bach Sarabande).
 The return of the opening theme in bar 42 might also suggest a ternary form.
 The alternation of themes from the opening section with new material could
also be felt as a sort of rondo form.
 It is typical of Debussy that the music suggests several possibilities at once, and
this ambiguity is an important part of the slightly blurred character of the piece
itself.
The main divisions are:
1-8
Theme A1
9-14 Theme A2
15-22 Theme A1
23-41
42-49
50-55
56-66
67-72
Theme B1
Theme A1
Theme B2
Theme A2
Coda
TEXTURE & KEYBOARD WRITING
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Compare Debussy’s keyboard writing with that of Bach in his Sarabande.
Bach’s music is largely in 2 parts and contrapuntal.
Debussy varies his textures from bare octaves through to chords with as many as
ten notes at one time, and the music is homophonic throughout.
Debussy uses a fair range of the notes available on a modern piano, especially
the very low notes, although he does not take the music into the highest
octaves.
Unlike the Bach and Mozart pieces, Debussy’s Sarabande would be unplayable
without using the sustaining pedal to bind together spread chords and to hold
onto one layer of music whilst another is added
HARMONY & TONALITY
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Key signature of 4 sharps suggests C sharp minor, and both sections of the piece
end on C sharp.
But it does not use the usual chords you might expect to find in C sharp minor
– in particular the dominant with a raised leading note (B sharp).
The first 8 bars only use the notes of the Aeolian mode on C sharp (the same
scale you get by playing the white notes on a piano from A to A). This gives the
music an antique feel, as the modes are associated with Mediaeval and
Renaissance music and went out of use from the Baroque onwards.
Debussy varies the harmony throughout the Sarabande, introducing chromatic
notes quite freely from bar 9 onwards and reharmonising themes when they
return – the opening melody begins over a D major chord in bar 42, for
example.
Debussy is very fond of parallel harmony, in which all the notes of the chords
(often 7ths or 9ths) move up or down together to form the same chord on a
new note – strictly forbidden in Classical harmony! The very opening is a good
example, and there are many others throughout the piece.
One passage, starting in bar 23, uses quartal harmony, in which the chords are
built by piling up 4ths, rather than 3rds (as in triads, 7ths, etc.). The effect is
strange and rather mysterious. The coda uses similar harmony in bars 67-70
before resolving onto a C sharp minor triad.