Prelude to the Afternoon of a Beagle

Note: The following presentation was made prior to a performance of the Debussy string quartet at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa on July 26, 2009.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Charles M. Schulz Museum. My name is Steve Osborn, and I’m the violist for the Felix String Quartet, which includes John Thompson on first violin, Diane Peterson on second, and Michael Fecskes on cello. We’re all local musicians with day jobs. We get together about once a week to play string quartets.

Some of you may remember that we played a Beethoven string quartet here back in January, as part of the Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse exhibit. That performance went well, and the museum said we’d be welcome to play here again.

A few months ago, I contacted the museum’s education director, Jessica Ruskin, and said we’d be interested in playing the one and only string quartet by Claude Debussy. She wrote back saying they appreciated our offer, but they were having trouble finding any connection between Debussy and Peanuts. Nonetheless, Jessica was kind enough to do a little research, and she discovered that Debussy was mentioned in two Peanuts comic strips, dating back to 1966 and 1988, respectively.

The first strip begins with Lucy leaning against Schroeder’s toy piano in a familiar pose. She says, “You think Beethoven was great. Well, what about”—and then she names 27 other composers, in more or less alphabetical order. Debussy is right in there with the D composers, between Delius and Dvorak.

[Aug. 20, 1966 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

Lucy’s list is significant in at least two ways. First, it shows the composers that just about any classical music lover—including Charles Schulz—is bound to admire. If you were to ask a thousand classical music lovers to name their favorite 27 composers other than Beethoven, their lists would probably be close to Lucy’s. They might drop Glinka and Humperdinck, or add Schumann and Wagner, but they’d mostly list the same composers. These are the all-stars.

The other significant aspect of Lucy’s list is that most of the all-stars are German or German-speaking, to say nothing of Beethoven himself. All the biggest names—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms—come from the great Austro-German tradition that dominated music during the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras.

After the Germans, the next largest contingent on Lucy’s list is the French, represented by Bizet, Franck, Ravel, and our guest of honor, Claude Debussy, who lived from 1862 to 1918. Like many French composers of his era, Debussy was profoundly influenced by his German counterparts, especially Wagner. But Debussy was also a rebel, and he wanted to assert both his French heritage and his independence from the German tradition.

Despite their cultural differences, French composers of the nineteenth century mostly used German musical forms, but Debussy yearned for something new. And in his string quartet, which he composed in 1893, you can begin to hear him turning away from the German tradition. That break would become complete later in 1893, when he composed his most famous work, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which is often described as the first piece of modern music.

The second strip alludes to Debussy’s famous prelude. Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Schroeder are listening to the radio, and Charlie asks, “What are you listening to?” to which Schroeder responds, “Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. It’s very beautiful.” Hearing this, Snoopy thinks to himself, “I can think of something even more beautiful: Afternoon of a Beagle.”

[April 18, 1988 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

Snoopy’s thought prompts an important question for all Peanuts lovers: If Beethoven is Schroeder’s muse, whose muse is Debussy? In other words, Beethoven is to Schroeder as Debussy is to whom? The answer is Snoopy himself.

Debussy’s quartet has four movements, each of which has a different personality. In this regard, it is much like Snoopy, who began as Charlie Brown’s dog but assumed a wide variety of roles over the years. Four of those roles correspond to the movements of Debussy’s string quartet. Snoopy is the Flying Ace in the first movement, the Beagle Scout in the second, the Literary Ace in the third, and Joe Cool in the fourth.

One of the ways Debussy separated himself from the German tradition was to give his movements highly descriptive tempo markings in French, rather than the standard Italian tempo markings favored by German composers, such as Allegro, Andante, or Adagio. The first movement is called Animé et très décidé, which means “animated and very decisive.” You can hear the animation and decisiveness in the opening few bars.

Now as for Snoopy, who could be more animated and decisive than the Flying Ace? In the strip below, you see him posing beside his Sopwith Camel, taking off from an aerodrome in France, and stating decisively: “My mission is to seek out the Red Baron and to bring him down! Contact!” Just in case you ever wondered about the identity of the Red Baron, now you know: it’s Richard Wagner.

[Feb. 21, 1966 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

You can imagine this first movement as a thrilling dogfight between Snoopy and the Red Baron, or between Debussy and Wagner. It has soaring lines and twirling propellers and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. Most of all, it’s about flight, a liberation from gravity.

In the second movement, energized by his encounter with the Red Baron, Snoopy returns to earth as a Beagle Scout, taking his hatchling troops on an assez vif et bien rythmé hike up the mountaintop, where the only danger is the wind. Debussy evokes the footsteps of this “rather lively, with good rhythm” hike by having us pluck the strings, which is called pizzicato. In the background behind this pizzicato, you hear a steady rhythm from the viola, which plays the same phrase over and over. This phrase, along with others that follow, is like the wind blowing in your face as your feet carry you along. You just have to make sure the phrases don’t blow you over.

[Aug. 16, 1978 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

Exhausted by his hike, Snoopy retreats to his study to write an andantino, doucement expressif love letter to his darling. “My darling,” he writes, “You asked me if I love you. There is only one thing I can say: Yeah.” Here Snoopy is the epitome of the “leisurely and softly expressive” beagle, distilling all his passion into a single word: Yeah.

[Oct. 18, 1975 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

For his part, Debussy takes a tender theme and instructs us to play it with a mute. As the movement progresses, we take off our mutes—ôtez la sourdine, as they say in French—and lay bare our collective soul, distilling it into a single magical chord at the end. That chord is the yeah you say when your darling asks you if you love them.

By the end of the third movement, Snoopy and Debussy have done it all. They’ve encountered the Red Baron, led their troops up the mountaintop, and corresponded with their lover. What more can be said? Snoopy solves this problem by becoming Joe Cool, hanging around the college dorm, and keeping up with the latest campus fads.

Debussy marks this movement as très mouvementé et avec passion, which means “very forward moving and with passion.” The movement actually starts slowly, then picks up speed bit by bit. And why is it picking up speed? Because both Snoopy and Debussy have discovered the latest campus fad: It’s streaking! What could be more forward moving and passionate than that?

[May 6, 1974 PEANUTS © UFS, Inc.]

Now of course it’s easy for a beagle to streak, but for an otherwise civilized composer—even a passionate French one—it takes a little while to undress and start tearing around the neighborhood.
Once he gets going, however, Debussy becomes a naked Adam sprinting across a musical paradise. He is finally free of all the German traditions that oppressed him as a young composer. When he’s done with his morning of streaking, he’s ready to put on a completely new set of clothes and re-emerge as a faun, a god of music whose afternoon in the sun radically changes the course of Western composition.

We invite you now to listen to Debussy’s Quartet in G minor, also known as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Beagle.

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