l'oeuvre pour piano

For Élodie Vignon, the decision to record Debussy's complete piano works in chronological order was what the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune was in Debussy's time: a revelation! For her, playing this music is like withdrawing into a cocoon that is uniquely hers. The first edition of the complete recording with three discs begins with Debussy's early works, which are directly inspired by poems by Mallarmé and Verlaine and contain the mysterious dimension of sensual imagination. In the following years, he increasingly freed the music from functional tonality, kept the tonal space open and eventually began working with spectral music. Debussy liked to be inspired by memories when composing in order to maintain distance between his own emotions and the emotions he wanted to evoke in the listener. Alfred Cortot spoke about evoking sensations instead of feelings, thereby rejecting the late Romantic aesthetic of emotional identification between composer and listener: an obligation that Debussy found too restrictive to engage in open dialogue with the listeners of his work. Debussy's music, which seems to have been invented as it is being played, invites us to dream in order to better understand the complexity of the world.