Debussy – Prélude VIII The Girl with Linen Hair with score (sheet music)
La Fille aux cheveux de lin
The Girl with Linen Hair The Girl with Linen Hair is a musical composition by Claude Debussy. This is the eighth piece of the first book of Preludes (1909-1910) by Debussy. This piece is thirty-nine bars long and lasts about two minutes and thirty seconds.
This is one of Debussy’s most recorded pieces, both in its original version for piano and in various arrangements such as for guitar, for string quartet, for full orchestra or even for saxophone quartet. The piece is in G flat major. It was the pianist Franz Liebich who performed The Girl with Linen Hair for the first time in public on June 2, 1910, at Wigmore Hall in London.
There is also a song by Debussy written around 1882, which he did not publish, and which bears the same title. The piece is dedicated to the singer, Marie Blanche Vasnier, a thirteen-year-old woman, Debussy’s eldest whom he fell in love with.
To prove his love for her, he set many poems by Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville to music. The Girl with Linen Hair is therefore the melody of the poem by Leconte de Lisle taken from the Scottish Songs of his Poèmes antiques, published by Alphonse Lemerre in Paris in 1874. Alfred Cortot writes of this prelude that it is’a tender paraphrase of the Scottish song by Leconte de Lisle which tells the charm and the sweetness of the distant lover, on the alfalfa in flower seated»
His impact will be decisive in the history of music. For André Boucourechliev, he would embody the true musical revolution of the twentieth century. Download the best sheet music from our library. Two years after the death of Claude Debussy, Henry Prunières, director of the Revue musicale, called on ten composers to form an “international tribute to the memory of Debussy, which will be a veritable “monument” like those that the poets of the Renaissance raised to the artists they had loved”:
Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy was published on December 1, 1920, and premiered the following year as part of the concerts of the Independent Musical Society. Tributes Debussy is represented on the 20-franc note created by the Banque de France on August 9, 1980, and put into circulation from October 6, 1981, valid until the appearance of the euro. In astronomy, the asteroid (4492) Debussy is named in his honor, and, since 2010, the mercurial crater Debussy, a crater which also gives its name to the region in which it is located on Mercury, the Debussy quadrangle.
On August 22, 2013, Google, for the 151st anniversary of his birth, dedicated a musical and animated Doodle to him featuring the piano piece Clair de Lune, one of his most famous pieces. In Paris, the Claude-Debussy garden, rue Claude-Debussy and square Claude-Debussy inscribe his name in the geography of the capital.
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