(Achille) Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of ten to France’s leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire’s conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande.

The analyst David Cox wrote in 1974 that Debussy, admiring Wagner’s attempts to combine all the creative arts, “created a new, instinctive, dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective — a kind of art, in fact, which seemed to reach out into all aspects of experience”.

In 1988 the composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers wrote of Debussy:
Because of, rather than in spite of, his preoccupation with chords in themselves, he deprived music of the sense of harmonic progression, broke down three centuries’ dominance of harmonic tonality, and showed how the melodic conceptions of tonality typical of primitive folkmusic and of medieval music might be relevant to the twentieth century.

Debussy died from cancer at his home in Paris at the age of 55 after a composing career of a little more than 30 years.

‘Beau soir’ (French for ‘Beautiful Evening’ is a French art song written by Claude Debussy, first published in 1891. It is a setting of a poem by Paul Bourget. This arrangement is for violin and piano without voice.

Debussy created a ‘Beautiful Evening’ according to the words of Paul Bourget’s poem.

French original:
Lorsque au soleil couchant les rivières sont roses
Et qu’un tiède frisson court sur les champs de blé,
Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des choses
Et monter vers le cœur troublé.

Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au monde
Cependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau,
Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde:
Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau.

English translation:
When at sunset the rivers are pink
And a warm shiver runs over the wheat fields,
A hint of being happy seems to come out of things
And rise towards the troubled heart.

A hint of tasting the charm of being in the world
While one is young and the evening is beautiful,
For we are leaving, as this wave leaves:
She to the sea, we to the tomb.

The poem paints the picture of a beautiful evening where the rivers are turned rosecoloured by the sunset and the wheat fields are moved by a warm breeze. Debussy uses a gently flowing triplet rhythm in the accompaniment, which contrasts the duplets that drive the light melody. The piano and voice (violin in this arrangement) partner to create the sensation of peace that one might feel in the evening in nature, fitting the postRomantic style. As any evening fades, however, so does the mood of the piece, and the song modulates from E major to Fsharp minor. The piece reaches its climax when the melody reaches a high Fsharp about twothirds through the piece, before entering its modulated conclusion.

This performance is by the virtuoso Korean violinist Soojin Han accompanied by Junhee Kim on the piano.

Soojin Han, born in Korea in 1986, moved to the UK when she was aged two. She began the violin at the age of eight and entered the Yehudi Menuhin School before moving to the Purcell School to study with Felix Andrievsky. She continued her studies at Oxford University and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Soojin Han performs a considerable amount of concerts, mainly in the British capital, where she won a competition for a concert with the London Symphony Orchestra: for her performance of Jean Sibelius’s Concerto Besides the Barbican Centre Hall, she has performed at the Royal Festival Hall and the Wigmore Hall. She also tours in other countries of Europe and the USA.

Born in Korea in 1990, Junhee Kim began playing the piano at the age of five. He studied at the Music School of Yewon, South Korea, and at the Korean University of Arts.

He has received numerous international prizes and awards, including the Korea Times Piano Competition, the Chopin competition for young artists, the international Ettlingen competition (Germany) and the Korean Society of Music’s competition. Throughout his career, he has performed as soloist with the Seoul Philharmonic orchestra, and has given recitals in Europe, the US and in Asia.

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