ABSTRACT
Devotees of French music interplaying with the past might suggest Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin as a landmark. Banville's melancholic reading of Watteau found echoes in Verlaine and Debussy who, from his first settings onwards of poems from the Fêtes galantes, alighted on poems with darker themes set against the plaisirs. Both French and English composers' interest in the fête galante was particularly intense in the 1880s when Debussy began to use pastiche baroque forms to evoke it. Louis Rosoor, one of the work's early interpreters recounted, in programme notes for his concerts, a remark Debussy made to him explaining the movement: 'Pierrot wakes up with a start, shaking off his sleepiness. He rushes to deliver a serenade to his belle who, despite his pleas, remains impervious. He consoles himself for his failure singing a song of freedom'.
