En blanc et noir

Debussy composed En blanc et noir at his vacation residence on the Normandy coast between 4 and 20 June 1915. He was suffering from cancer. France had been at war since 3 August 1914, and emotions were heated against everything German. Conservative romantic Camille Saint-Saëns, complaining about the style of the music, condemned the work, saying "We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut [de France] against a man capable of such atrocities; they should be put next to the cubist pictures." == Music ==

En blanc et noir consists of three movements, each preceded by a literary quotation. I. Avec emportement The first movement is marked Avec emportement. An energetic waltz, it is in C major and time, = 66. The movement is dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky, a musician friend from allied Russia. Debussy prefaced the movement by an excerpt from Barbier and Carré's libretto for Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. The motto translates to "He who stays in his place and does not dance quietly admits to a disgrace." Debussy may have found himself a disgrace as he could not participate in the "dance" of fighting for France due to his illness. II. Lent. Sombre The second movement is marked Lent. Sombre. It is in F major and time, = 42. The movement is prefaced by a passage from Villon's Ballade contre les ennemis de la France. Debussy had set some of the ballads by the 15th-century poet to music. The quotation is chosen from a ballad "against France's enemies". The movement is dedicated to the memory of Jacques Charlot, a business associate of Debussy's publisher Durand who had been killed in the war. It has been called a political comment of unexpected intensity. The German hymn "Ein feste Burg" by Martin Luther is quoted in the foreground, with a focus on its military aspect, while the French Marseillaise appears almost hidden. III. Scherzando The third movement is marked Scherzando. The playful scherzo is in D minor and time, = 72. Dedicated to Igor Stravinsky, another musician from Russia, the movement is prefaced by a quote from another 15th-century poet, Charles of Orléans: "Yver, vous n'estes qu'un vilain" (Winter, you are nothing but a villain). Debussy had earlier set the poem containing the line for choir a cappella, an "outburst against a hostile force". == Performances and recordings ==

Pianists Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss played En blanc et noir as the final work in a recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 31 May 2008, which also included Schubert's Allegro in A minor, Debussy's arrangement of Schumann's Canons for pedal-piano, Beethoven's transcription of the Große Fuge and Stravinsky's Agon. On a 2008 recording, Vladimir Ashkenazy and his son played En blanc et noir together with other works by Debussy and Ravel, including Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole and La Valse. A review described their playing as swirling but clear in the first movement, painting "a bleak and devastated landscape" in the second, and in the third with "an understatement which is breathtaking". A 2015 recording by the Duo Tal & Groethuysen combines the work with another work written in response to the World War, Reynaldo Hahn's Le ruban dénoué, composed at the front near Verdun, where the volunteer soldier experienced anxiety, fascination and deadly boredom. A cycle of twelve waltzes recalls the 19th-century balls in nostalgic reminiscence. == Evaluation ==

En blanc et noir has been regarded as a subtle comment on the historical condition through literary and musical allusion, under the sparkling surface of brilliant pianistic artistry, making it a key work of 1915. == References ==