Debussy's Arabesque No. 2, L. 66. The two arabesques were written together and published together, yet almost everyone knows only the first. The second is much faster and far more jumpy, playful from beginning to end — the opposite side of the same pair. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The two belong together; only one of them got remembered
The two arabesques were written between about 1888 and 1891 and published together by Durand in 1891, under the same number, L. 66. Debussy was twenty-eight or twenty-nine and recently back in Paris from Rome.
"Arabesque" came from architecture and decorative art, where it means a winding, repeating line with no clear beginning or end. Debussy borrowed the word for the same thing in music: a line that goes out and comes back, driven neither by contrast nor by conflict.
Pairing them was deliberate. The first is slow, wide, and always descending; the second is quick, short, and always springing upward. After publication it was the first that travelled — it is the one in Spider-Man: Far From Home — and the second never caught up.
Neither is the Debussy people picture. The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which got him called an impressionist, came in 1894, and the suite that contains Clair de lune was published later still. These two are what he sounded like before he became that composer.
The whole piece sounds like someone trying not to laugh
It opens with a very light string of triplets, three slurred together and then a short note bounced off on its own. That touch is the tone of the whole piece: not singing but plucking, not walking but hopping.
The melody keeps leaping up a long way and dropping straight back — like someone raising their voice halfway through a sentence and immediately pulling it back down. The piece does this dozens of times, and never twice from quite the same height.
In the middle it suddenly goes quiet, with fewer notes and lower down, as though holding something in. It does not hold for long: the triplets come back at the opening speed.
The last stretch builds and climbs until the hands are five full octaves apart, then fades and closes very lightly — no loud ending, it simply stops.
110 bars, one way of jumping taken to a dozen heights
110 bars and 1,806 sounding notes — 1,107 in the right hand and 699 in the left.
Bars 1 to 25 are the theme; the triplet touch is fixed from the first bar and the melody leaps upward throughout. In bars 26 and 27 the note count drops into single figures, eight and seven — the first time the piece lets go — and bar 28 builds straight back with a sforzando.
Bar 45 is the densest in the piece, 36 notes, and the first real climb: the highest note of the whole piece, A6, comes two bars later in bar 47, and only there.
From bar 62 (a tempo) bars 5 to 14 come back, both hands note for note except the right hand in bar 70; from bar 72 it goes elsewhere.
In bars 82 to 88 (Meno mosso) the left hand holds long low notes such as G1 and F1 while the right hand sits around E6 and F♯6, nearly five octaves apart; the widest single bar is bar 100, G1 to G6, exactly five octaves.
From bar 106 it turns to the close, and the last three bars thin out — twenty notes, then five, then three — and settle very quietly.
The shortest notes are the grace notes in bars 16 and 18, about 0.03 seconds; each triplet note lasts about 0.07 seconds, so the runs go past almost as a single line.
The difficulty is lightness, not speed
There are a lot of notes, but each is short and light, and speed itself is not the problem.
First, touch. Almost everything here is picked out rather than pressed, so the fingers stay close to the keys and the sound comes from small movements at the tip. Lift the hand and it gets heavy, and once it is heavy it is not this piece.
Second, the leaps. The melody jumps a long way at a time and has to land both accurately and lightly — practise the two notes of the leap on their own first, then put them back into the phrase.
Third, the pedal. Held down, whole passages turn to mud; in most places it can only be touched and released. The opposite of what the first arabesque wants.
Fourth, the hand-over. In bars 76 to 81 a line of eighth notes passes back and forth between the hands, the notes on the lower staff taken by the left; it should sound like one hand.
The tempo is 138 to the quarter, taken from the printed marking in another encoding of the same piece; the finished video runs three minutes twenty-one.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
The first of the pair, and Clair de lune from the same years
The first of the pair, Arabesque No. 1, L. 66 No. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1_OURgXXk
Hearing the two together is the point; Debussy published them as a pair.
Written alongside these: Clair de lune, L. 75, also on this channel — around 1890, though not published until 1905.
For the same lightness at the opposite speed: Satie's Gymnopédies, three of them here, from the same Paris and the same years.
