Unbeatable Price Debussy, Claude. (1862-1918) Cinq Poèmes De Ch. Baudelaire. Signed Presentation Copy Cyber Monday Only [Ul9rui6Y]

Rare inscribed presentation score from the edition of 150 examples and one of only 50 on Hollande laid paper (no. 7), inscribed by the young composer to his composition teacher "to Ernest Guiraud./ Cl. Debussy/ February 1890." Folio. [V] (Title; Dedication; Contents], 35pp. Printed parchment wrappers, hand-made paper. Blindstamp to upper right of first page of J. Ferlin, lawyer in Valence. Pages separated, small tears along spine and edges, spine reinforced with paper tape (could be removed), small losses to lower edge, overall very good.

Signed scores from Debussy are uncommon, but this is a particularly special example. The music was only available in this limited edition and not produced for general sale until 1902. Lesure No.64. WorldCat records copies at Harvard, New York Public Library and Texas. 

The American-born French composer and music teacher Ernest Guiraud (1837-1892) is mostly remembered today as the supportive composition teacher of Debussy,  Dukas, and Satie and for having composed some of the recitatives in Bizet’s Carmen, as well as completing the orchestration of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. He was also a composer in his own right, having won the Prix de Rome, and his comic opera Piccolino (1876) was a huge success in its time. He also received a prize for the best orchestral work of the previous two years, beating Saint-Saëns by twenty-eight votes to ten. As Massenet testified at his funeral, Guiraud was unanimously loved and admired by his colleagues, a sentiment that was also expressed by Saint-Saëns’s and Dukas’s decision to orchestrate Guiraud’s opera Frédégonde after his death.

Debussy's settings of Charles Baudelaire's Le Balcon, Harmonie du Soir, Le Jet d' Eau, Recueillement and La Mort des Amants for voice and piano. The poems are Debussy's only settings of the poet's works and show the composer using non-diatonic scales and chord streams to emulate the symbolist interest in pure sound. Debussy met the dedicatee Étienne Dupin in 1887 and started composing these settings in 1888. Debussy knew nearly all Wagner's works long before he went to Bayreuth, but his Wagnerism reached its peak in 1887-8 when, according to Pierre Louÿs, he made and won a bet that he could play Tristan by heart. His apostasy after his second visit to Bayreuth was above all the result of his quest for a personal style somewhere beyond Wagner. Before beginning Pelléas, he confided to Louÿs that he did not see what anyone can do beyond Tristan, and as late as 1896 he still gave Wagnerian sessions at the home of a society hostess, Madame Godard-Decrais. The early works in which the Wagnerian influence is most evident are La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire; the latter pieces are exceptional among Debussy's output of songs in their length, their wide intervals and their chromatic harmonies.