Parisian Cake Walks.pdf - ResearchSpace@Auckland

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Parisian Cake Walks
DAVINIA CADDY
My title will of course bring to mind Debussy’s
“Golliwogg’s cake walk,” the finale of his 1908
piano suite Children’s Corner. Dedicated to
the composer’s daughter, “avec les tendres excuses
de son père pour ce qui va suivre” (with
her father’s tender apologies for what follows),
the movement is known for its catchy, syncopated
melody—a frivolity of tone, once thought
I would like to thank Roger Parker, Emanuele Senici, Mary
Ann Smart, Richard Langham Smith, and my anonymous
readers for their comments on the first draft of this article.
Thanks also to Sai Man Liu for his assistance with musical
examples, and to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Département des arts du spectacle and the
Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, for guiding me around various
archival catalogues and answering my numerous queries.
Of the various spellings of “cake walk” found in
primary and secondary sources (cake walk, cake-walk,
cakewalk), I will follow that used by Debussy in his
“Golliwogg’s cake walk.” The autograph score of Debussy’s
movement is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Département de la musique (hereafter referred to as F-Pn);
for a facsimile, see the Schott-Universal edition, Vienna,
1984.
288
incongruous within the composer’s opus, that
seems to endorse recent notions of a “pluralistic,”
“polyphonous” Debussy. 1 A different kind
of notoriety has also arisen. “Avec une grande
émotion,” the so-called Sehnsuchts-motif from
Wagner’s Tristan appears four times in the
middle of the movement. According to Edward
Lockspeiser, this “hilariously comic caricature”
portrays something of the child’s imagination
of the world, a glimpse of its artificiality or
pretentiousness. 2 On the other hand, Robin
1 See Jane F. Fulcher, “Introduction: Constructions and Reconstructions
of Debussy,” in Debussy and His World, ed.
Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.
1–5. Fulcher argues that Debussy’s composerly identity
was “inherently pluralistic,” his art “unclassifiable” (p. 4).
2 Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy (1936; rpt. London: Dent,
1963), p. 154. Lockspeiser continues: “The authenticity of
each of the little pieces of Children’s Corner resides precisely
in the fact that they so wonderfully confront the
minds of the child and the artist, discovering and tracing
in the one and the other the thin, almost imperceptible
borderline between reality and fantasy.”
19th-Century Music, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 288–317. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2007 by the Regents of
the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/
reprintInfo.asp. DOI: ncm.2007.30.3.288.