With regard to the three ballets, danced poems, pantomimes, or whatever one wishes to call them, La Boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box) is the only one that enjoys real legitimacy as an actual work for piano, since Debussy originally wrote it for piano in 1913 for his daughter Emma, partially orchestrating it himself later. A version for two pianos was published a number of years ago, but for this recording, Bavouzet has made his own two-hand arrangement. As Bavouzet explains in his album note, Debussy’s piano reduction of Jeux is incomprehensible and essentially unplayable as a piece for two hands.
It, too, was conceived as an orchestral work, its piano reduction being prepared for the dancers to rehearse to, much as opera singers rehearse their parts with a répétiteur at the piano.
Debussy’s piano reduction was intended for rehearsal purposes only, never for actual performance. The result was that he walked off the job midway through the project, leaving it in the hands of Charles Koechlin to complete the unfinished score and to orchestrate it. In a nutshell, Debussy had a falling out early on with Maud Allan, the dancer/actress/choreographer for whom he was composing Khamma. For a fuller discussion of this Légende dansée, see the review of Jun Märkl’s Naxos recording in 34:4. Of the three piano reductions, Khamma is the most problematic. He does, however, include the Étude retrouvée. Ironically, this makes Bavouzet’s survey both more complete and less complete than Howat’s, for while Howat doesn’t include these questionable transcriptions of orchestral scores, Bavouzet doesn’t include the Intermède. The answer will be found on disc 5, on which Bavouzet performs piano transcriptions of three of Debussy’s orchestral works, Khamma, Jeux, and La Boîte à joujoux.
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