“You now use a word which to this day has been meaningless to me.”
“Your country?”
“I do not know under what latitude it lies.”
“Beauty?”
“I would love her gladly; goddess and immortal.”
“Well, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?”
“I love the clouds, the clouds that pass, yonder, the marvellous clouds.”
Festivals, with its strange processional march, its whirring capriciousness, makes a more direct appeal. Does the third movement answer the old question put by Tiberius to the grammarians and repeated by Sir Thomas Browne, “What song did the sirens sing?” Here is music of waves and of sea-women: music that never was heard on a casino-lined coast, but sounds that might go with “The light that never was, on sea or land.” Here is music that is subtly poetic, music of ineffable beauty. Suppose that Debussy had put words to this song; how he would have cheapened the nocturne! To each hearer on the ship of Ulysses, or to each hearer of Debussy’s music, the sirens sang of what might well lure him.
The first two nocturnes, Nuages and Fêtes, were produced at a Lamoureux concert, Camille Chevillard conductor, Paris, December 9, 1900, and they were played by the same orchestra January 6, 1901. The third, Sirènes, was first produced—in company with the other two—at a Lamoureux concert, October 27, 1901. The third is for orchestra with chorus of female voices. At this last concert the friends of Debussy were so exuberant in manifestations of delight that there was sharp hissing as a corrective. The Nocturnes were composed in 1898, and published in 1899.