Achille-Claude Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, on August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25,1918. His Première rapsodie pour orchestre avec clarinette principale - his only such work despite the use of the word "first" - is an arrangement of a competition piece for clarinet and piano completed in 1910. The Rhapsody was first played publicly on January 16, 1911, in Paris, by clarinetist Prosper Mimart accompanied by the pianist Krieger. Debussy orchestrated the work later that year. The first documented performance of the orchestrated version took place on May 3, 1919, with Gaston Hamelin as soloist. In the preface to the printed score of the First Rhapsody (in the piano version), Graham Mackie writes the following: In February 1909, Debussy was elected a member of the Conseil Supérieur of the Paris Conservatoire and, in this capacity, was called on to serve on the jury at internal competitions. He was invited to write two test pieces for the 1910 clarinet contest; one for the interpretation class, the other [called simply Petite pièce] for the sight-reading test... Debussy obviously did not relish the prospect of adjudicating for on 8 July 1910 he wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand: "On Sunday, (spare me a thought!) I will be hearing the Rhapsody for Clarinet in 28 B-flat eleven times; I'll tell you about it if I'm still alive." The following week, on 15 July, he wrote again: "The clarinet contest was quite outstanding and, judging from the expressions on the faces of my colleagues, the Rhapsody was a success! ... One of the competitors, Vandercruyssen, played it from memory with great musicianship. As for the others, their playing was accurate but mediocre. The word "rhapsody," originally meaning the recitation of excerpts from a longer epic poem, was taken up in Romantic music as a name for a virtuosic composition with no strict formal structure. Yet sometimes (as in the case of some of Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsodies") a musical sequence was adopted in which a slower, lyrical section was followed by a faster, more brilliant one. This is the sequence that Debussy chose as the basis of his composition; there is a slow and dreamlike first melody whose main notes are taken from the pentatonic scale (the black keys of the piano); after a short interlude in a medium tempo, we hear the melody of the fast section ("Scherzando") which, in contrast, makes ample use of chromatic half-steps. After a brief recall of the first theme, the second one returns to close the piece.
-- Kendall Briggs