Claude Debussy:
Prélude a l‘apres-midi d‘un faune (arr. Maurice Ravel)
La Mer, Trois esquisses symphoniques

Maurice Ravel:
La Valse (arr. Lucien Garban)

Igor Stravinsky:
Le Sacre du Printemps (arr. Igor Stravinsky & Pianoduo Mimese)

“Attention, les Apaches!”, (“Watch out, gangsters!”) shouted the newspaper boy when he was startled by a noisy party that evening. The group of friends were in a boisterous mood when they bumped into the salesboy. The insulting comparison with the infamous Les Apaches gang – social outcasts who terrorized Paris in the 1900s – did not bother them at all. On the contrary. The young men, who thought of themselves as artistic outcasts, immediately appropriated the epithet for themselves.

The reason for their excitement: the friends who had now been renamed Apaches had just returned from the Opéra-Comique, where Pelléas et Mélissande had its controversial premiere on 30 April 1902. Debussy’s opera, they were convinced, would change both their own lives and the course of musical history. Or as Stravinsky put it: “The musicians of my generation, myself included, are most indebted to Debussy.” Initially, however, the work was received disastrously, a phenomenon that would haunt Les Apaches.

When we think of ‘revolutionaries’, we think of brash, noisy individuals. Debussy, however, was a quiet revolutionary. It was never his intention to shock. And nevertheless, he let the genie out of the bottle: Debussy embodied all the dreams, aspirations and ideas of a young generation of ‘debussysts’. The Apaches, as the heart of that generation of iconoclasts, fervently defended his innovations. In the midst of academic Paris, they joined together to forge the path of French modernism.

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Recording: Amuz.