Two versions of Clair de Lune

ShiroKuro · 2026-08-17T10:25:26+00:00

I believer we talked in another thread about this version of Clair de Lune by Victor Borge, but I keep listening to it and I just absolutely love it. When I talked about it with my teacher at our last lesson, she said she thinks CdL is well within my playable range in terms of difficulty… I think she may be overestimating me but that remains to be seen… Anyway, here is the version by Borge, along with a more contemporary version by Rousseau. I’m struck by how different they sound. CdL is one of those pieces that I’ve always ”known” and liked but never was particularly interested in playing. But hearing the version by Borge just stayed with me and I decided to try to learn it. Hearing the version by Rousseau, it strikes me as very sterile. It's too precise, too clean, too sterile. And I don't really care if I ever listen to it again. Victor Borge's Clair de Lune, on the other hand, I am obsessed with. I can't listen to it enough. Victor Borge: Rousseau I’m also curious about what other people think about these two versions. I sort of wondered if Borge's style of playing here is not currently "in vogue" in the classical piano world, but I don't know because I don't really know what's "in vogue" (like, I don't know, how would Lang Lang or Yuja Wang play CdL?) Anyway I’m curious if anyone else has any thoughts about it. 🙂

pianoloverus

ShiroKuro

pianoloverus lovely!

Jane

And I very much enjoy his version of this. Lyrical rather than virtuosic.

I just don't like his Clair de Lune.

pseudonym58

Slightly OT:
If you like Debussy's music, as I do, there's no shortage of amazing works to learn. Unfortunately, many of them are quite difficult, and not necessarily because you have to be a virtuoso to play them (although certainly for some of them, you do!), but rather they are sometimes difficult to hold together, structure-wise. This is particularly true of his later music.
The collection "Children's Corner" is by no means specifically written for students, but it is not as difficult to play as much of his other music, and is rewarding.

ShiroKuro

pseudonym58 Children's Corner

I don’t think I know this. Not by name at least.

pianoloverus

pseudonym58 There are several preludes from both books that are quite easy technically and musically: Delphi Dancers, Footsteps in the Snow, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Heather, and Canope. Other not overly difficult piece are the Sarabande from Pour le Piano, Le Petit Negre, and Le Plus que Lente.

ShiroKuro

This is a good listening list.

pianoloverus The Girl with the Flaxen Hair

I think this is the only one in this list that I know by name.

pseudonym58

pianoloverus those were some of the same pieces that I was thinking of in terms of not being as intimidating to learn. However, something like Footsteps (or Footprints) in the Snow is not obvious in terms of its melodic structure: an insistently repeated figure over increasingly distant harmony. We have the advantage of being able to listen to recorded performances, and if you do that a number of times, even a piece as oblique as Footsteps in the Snow will begin to make sense.

Stub

I did Jimbo's Lullaby from Childrens Corner some years ago, and didn't care for it that much. That one did seem to be aimed towards children (though not neccesarily to be played by them) and I tired of it quickly.

I was going to ask for suggestions for other Debussy that was reasonably doable, but you all beat me to it! Thank you!

pianoloverus

pseudonym58 I think it's actually one of the greatest preludes.

TulipAcid

Golliwog’s Cakewalk is a fun tune from Children’s corner.

BartK

I played quite a few Debussy pieces. IMHO, the easiest Debussy piece is Page d'album. It's literally one page long and around RCM 8/ABRSM 6 in difficulty:

Next in terms of difficulty are probably the easier pieces in Children's Corner, which are the middle ones. The last one, Golliwogg's Cakewalk, is slightly harder.

The preludes mentioned by pianoloverus are probably around the same difficulty. Des pas dans la neige is technically easy but musically harder than it appears because you have to shape everything even though you're in pianissimo all the time. If you judge by pure technical difficulty it's the easiest prelude. La fille aux cheveux de lin is a favorite and it's relatively straightforward if you can play pieces of this level (around RCM 9/ABRSM 7).

Next are Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum from Children's Corner and Rêverie.

Next are Arabesque no. 1 and Clair de lune, which are about RCM 10/ABRSM 8.

All my personal opinion. I have either played or sight read all these pieces.

ShiroKuro

@BartK thanks for that link.

I was just looking at the score for Arabesque No 1 and Reverie and they do both look easier than CdL… and the patterns look quite similar to other things I’ve played.

@BartK Do you think playing either (or both) of them before starting CdL would make CdL much easier to learn? Also @pianoloverus maybe you have thoughts about this?

This is a particularly important question for me right now because I had my first lesson of the fall semester yesterday and we agreed that I would work on CdL, but when I spent some time last night working on it, I felt like it was much harder to read through than I’d anticipated. One thing that felt challenging was making fingering decisions, especially in the section that starts in measure 27 …

It’s not that I felt the piece is beyond me, but more that it felt like I would have to devote so much time to it that I couldn’t really work on much else… which is not how I want to spend my piano time.

OTOH maybe I just need to spend a little more time with it (I was exhausted last night and didn’t get to the piano until after 9pm, so that didn’t help). Maybe working through fingering choices for a few key sections would make the rest of it easier to get through.

Anyway, so my core question right now is, would Reverie and/or Arabesque No 1 act like stepping stones to Claire de Lune? And if yes, which one would you recommend to start with?

Or is it possible that neither of these pieces would necessarily prepare me for CdL because CdL has challenges that are a bigger jump? (metaphorically speaking, not literal keyboard jump!)

BartK

@ShiroKuro If you love CdL then play CdL. The middle section has some tricky spots with regards to fingering so it's good to look at a bunch of suggestions first (I'm not going to suggest my fingerings because my hands are pretty large).

Arabesque 1 on the other hand has these constant 3:2 polyrhythms. They aren't particularly challenging if you have done polyrhythms before but because of that and because of length I would place this piece in the same category as CdL. In terms of pure technical skills to hit the right notes maybe the arpeggios in CdL are slightly more challenging.

If you want something easier I would say "La fille" is definitely easier (and way shorter - it's only 2 pages) and a requires the same kind of delicate touch and voicing as the more difficult Debussy pieces.

Stub

I've done Jimbo's Lullaby, which I mentioned I didn't care for all that much and didn't find very Debussy-ish.

As for Reverie, La fille , Arabesque No. 1, and CdL (which I'm just starting), I'd have to place them in the order I've listed them as to difficulty under my fingers. Reverie has a couple of 3 vs 4 polyrhyms, but only a couple. Arabesque 1 has a lot of 3 vs 2, but once you get the hang of them it's not a problem. I don't think any one of them prepares you for any of the others, unfortunately.

TulipAcid

I’d like to do Passepied. It’s a mish mash of flowy and bouncy. And a memorable tune.

As I climb out of many years of little piano playing into a more intense era, I’m hoping my skills reach a point in the not too distant future where it’s playable.

I learned (a forgiving word) Clair de Lune very early in my piano learning career. Probably because a request my mother made to my piano teacher.

What were they thinking?

The arabesques and Children’s Corner came much later.

Can someone remind me who did the Engulfed Cathedral? Was it Mussorgsky in Pictures at an Exhibition?

Stub

Engulfed Cathedral ('La Cathedrale engloutie' from Preludes, Bk 1) was Debussy.

ShiroKuro

BartK If you love CdL then play CdL.

This is the best reason for moving forward, IMO. I’m not really motivated to play La Fille. Eventually I’d like to play Arabesque and Reverie, but not now. Also, something about Reverie (its sleepy beginning maybe?) makes me think I now is not the time to work on that (maybe I can start it next summer, not during the school year when I’m practicing at 9pm at night and constantly tired!)

The middle section has some tricky spots with regards to fingering so it's good to look at a bunch of suggestions first (I'm not going to suggest my fingerings because my hands are pretty large).

Yeah, my hands are sort of average or maybe just a bit larger for a woman (I can reach a 9th, I don’t know if that’s average for female hands) but I also don’t like to over-stretch.

Arabesque 1 on the other hand has these constant 3:2 polyrhythms. They aren't particularly challenging if you have done polyrhythms before but because of that and because of length I would place this piece in the same category as CdL.

Yeah, I don’t know how much those 3:2 polyrhythms would put me off… I’ve played a lot of pieces with polyrhythms, but only by contemporary composers (Einaudi, Ffrench). I’d have to play those polyrhythms in Arabesque before I could decide how do-able they feel, but I would assume there would be a bit of learning curve initially.

Re length: very quick count (the score I have for Arabesque isn’t numbered and I haven’t number it myself becuase I’m not playing it yet) puts that at about 120 measures, whereas CdL is only 72. That’s enough of a length difference to make CdL feel shorter. (Learning-wise)

ShiroKuro

Oh, I forgot to give a report. 🙂

So practice last night went much better. I decided to just focus on the first 15 measures for now, and I’ll wait a bit before looking ahead to the section staring in measure 27, where the LH switches to those 16th notes.

I also turned my iPad sideways, so that the score appears much larger. I have the Henle score, which allows you to adjust the number of staves/lines per page, but not the number of measures per line. So it felt very cramped with tons of notes shoved into small spaces. Turning the score sideways opened everything up and made it so much easier to read. That changed my perception significantly and it immediately felt easier. After that my practice session was much more productive and the piece feels more do-able now.

🙂

(Hopefully this doesn’t mean I need new glasses…)

ShiroKuro

Well, I’m still feeling pretty positive about the difficulty level of CdL. I think it should be manageable. I am currently working on those first 14 measures. I have also skipped ahead to look at measure 27 (where the LH part changes to all 16th notes). My goal is to be really prepared for my lesson so that we can go over fingering questions and any approaches I should take to practicing so that I can make the most of my practice time after the lesson.

The piece is 72 measures long. Each week, if I could add an additional 10-20 measures to my practice of this piece, I could get through it in 4-5 weeks. Of course I don’t mean polish it in that amount of time, but get to the point where I’m working on the whole piece in that amount of time.

That sounds kind of ambitious, but it seems like there’s a lot of repetition, and the technique issues also seem to be limited (resolving a technique challenge in one section shield apply to a subsequent section). So maybe it’s do-able.

I think if I can’t get to the point where I’m working on the whole piece after about a month to a month and a half, then I would probably feel like it’s too hard.

So that’s what I mean here, that hopefully, I can get to that point where I’m working on it all and that will make it feel like the price is within my level.

Time will tell.

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