Clair de lune

Details

“Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”) from Suite bergamasque, L. 75, arranged for one piano, six hands by Greg Anderson / Full score / Difficulty: Intermediate-advanced / Duration: 5 min / Pages: 9 / Copyright: 2007 / Work number: 018 / Appears on the album Browns in Blue / Spotify / Apple Music

Program Notes

Arranging Clair de lune for six hands at one piano posed an unusual challenge. Debussy’s iconic work is celebrated for its transparency and atmospheric delicacy—qualities that resist the inherent density and physicality of six hands crowded at a single keyboard. This format tends to favor textures that span the full range of the piano, with layered voicings and rich sonorities.

To reconcile these differences, I turned to the poem that inspired Debussy himself, Paul Verlaine’s Clair de lune. Guided by its imagery, I embellished the original music, seeking to retain the intimacy of Debussy’s vision while reimagining it as an elegant ballet of six hands—one that unfolds across a more expansive soundscape, with taller fountains and greater distance between earth and moon, bass and treble.

Here are four lines from Verlaine’s Clair de lune, from his Fêtes galantes, in my own translation:

The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Brings dreams to the birds in the trees
And makes the fountains sob of ecstasy,
Tall, slender fountains among the marble statues.

— Greg Anderson