About this Piece

“Your soul is a choice landscape

Where charming maskers and bergamaskers pass”

These lines open Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s 1869 poem “Clair de lune,” or “Moonlight.” Claude Debussy set the poem to music twice, but it most notably inspired his piano composition Suite bergamasque. Its title comes from the poem’s first stanza, which alludes to the 16th-century folk dance from Bergamo, Italy.

Clair de lune is the third and best-loved movement of Debussy’s suite. Verlaine’s lush, dreamlike imagery provided fertile inspiration for Debussy’s warm, wistful style. With every twinkle, glimmer, and lingering pause, it evokes the poet’s lines: “And their song mingles with the moonlight/With the calm moonlight sad and beautiful/Which makes the birds dream in the trees/And the fountains sob with ecstasy.”

In 1937, Leopold Stokowski, then Music Director of The Philadelphia Orchestra, arranged Clair de lune for orchestra and recorded it with his ensemble. Three years later, he and The Philadelphia Orchestra rerecorded it for Disney’s Fantasia, but its accompanying scene—featuring a dusky wetland and graceful herons—was omitted from the completed film. Stokowski’s arrangement preserves the wonder-evoking delicacy of Debussy’s original and allows the violins, flutes, and clarinets to take turns with the melody and bare their moonlit souls.

—Tess Carges

Translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de Lune” from Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune by Gurminder Kaur Bhogal.