Stéphane Mallarmé's poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was written in 1876. Debussy was inspired by poetry in general and mesmerised by Mallarmé's work in particular, and had already set one of his poems in 1884; by the early 1890s the two men had met and became friends. Mallarmé was convinced that Faune should be set to music and sung, and tried to mount a performance already in 1891 though it never took place. Debussy probably started work on the piece in 1892, and it may be significant that a clear antecedent to the opening flute theme, with its fluid descending semitones, is the seductive aria ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix’ from Saint- Saëns's Samson et Dalila, premiered at the Paris Opéra that same year. Debussy's Faune was finally premiered in Paris on 22 December 1894; its elusive spareness was so radically different from anything the public, used to full-blooded German music in the mould of Wagner, was expecting at this early date that critics were divided and somewhat bemused, though generally unanimous that here was something new and significant.

sources

X  Autograph Particell, mostly on four or five staves, with some instrumental indications, published in facsimile by the Robert Owen Lehman Foundation, Washington D.C. in 1963

A  Autograph score, in the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris (shelf mark Ms. 17685); dated 1892 on the title-page, but this only signifies the year of the piece's conception; the full score was finished in September 1894, as is attested to by this date at the end of the score itself. A was used as Stichvorlage for E, and was conveyed by Debussy to the publisher Georges Hartmann on 23 October 1894. A is beautifully written out, with an astonishing amount of detail in the articulation and dynamics, and hardly a single correction or alteration. This is a fair copy for the printer; a working draft must have preceded it. Hence it seems inevitable that A contains a few errors resulting from the process of copying it out from the draft (e.g. hairpins in 33, perhaps). Nor does A represent the final version of the piece; some details in A are materially different from the final text (e.g. 12 Clar whole bar is played instead by 1.Fl in A, see section 6 below), and Debussy entered his final revisions into K. A facsimile of A, in full colour, was published by the Bibliotheque nationale de France in 2013