The
Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. It
moves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of
spider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sight
and touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Apres-midi d'un
faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the
drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the
horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot
herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts and
thighs. The Lento movement of "Iberia" is like some drowsy, disheveled
gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full of the goodness of the flesh, is
like some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirenes,"
something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body,
is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinking
tides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the
aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene herself, with her
galaxy of tritons and naiads, approached earth's shores once more.
If any musical task is to be considered as having been accomplished, it
is that of Debussy. For he wrote the one book that every great artist
writes.
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