Debussy composed this music for clarinet with piano in 1909 and 1910, orchestrated it in 1911, and conducted the first performance of the final version at St. Petersburg on a tour of Russia during December 1911. The year 1909 was, like the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities, "the best of times and the worst of times" for Debussy. At long last the Parisian musical establishment acknowledged his eminence by naming him to the advisory board of the same Conservatoire he had attended from 1872 to 1884, and had sparred with ever since. Prestigious Durand & Cie. was publishing his music. Pelléas et Mélisande was in repertoire at the Opéra-Comique. And his second marriage (in 1908, to the last of his mistresses, Emma Barduc) made him respectable if not pure in the eyes of France's bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, as a slow worker lifelong he was chronically in debt, obliging him to tour Europe as conductor and pianist from 1907 through 1914. Far more sinister were the first signs of colon cancer, not formally diagnosed until 1915. By now friends were few—he had lost many when an earlier mistress, and later on his first wife, attempted suicide, causing the shy Debussy to become even more withdrawn socially. Likewise his pleasures were few (at least those he shared with correspondents and cronies). Among them, however, was a genuine delight in the excellence of woodwind students at the Conservatoire, despite his unbuttoned public criticism of the school's harmony method, system of public competitions, and Prix de Rome (which he himself had won in 1884 after placing second the year before). To the surprise of many, Debussy agreed to write two test pieces for clarinetists in the 1910 competition. One was a sight-reading bagatelle, subsequently orchestrated and published as the Pétite Pièce. The more substantial work he called Première Rapsodie (though there never was a deuxième), orchestrated in 1911.

He was bewildered in St. Petersburg by "the consternation into which the Rapsodie has plunged the Russians. [This] seems to me rather excessive, especially as this piece is one of the easiest on the ear I've ever written...! Are they now regarding the clarinet as an instrument of revolutionary propaganda?" That the work is not heard more often today has to do with its brevity (eight and a half minutes, give or take a few seconds) rather than its quality.

Roger Nichols, the New Grove's Debussy doyen, concludes that this "most dreamlike of his rhapsodies [Robert Godet's phrase] exploited both the cantabile and con agilité aspects of the clarinet's character in a truly Mozartian fashion, without plumbing Mozartian depths [or intending to, one feels obliged to add]. The work gains greatly from the composer's own orchestral arrangement," which includes three flutes, English horn, two more clarinets, and oboes, four horns, two each of trumpets, harps and percussion.

The G flat major Rapsodie, marked "dreamily slow" at the start, sounds like a more mature Faun, whose voice has lowered over the 16 years since that work was composed. A later section in A flat major, still in duple meter but now 2/4 rather than 4/4, moves the music along until a joyous final section leaves us smiling as well astonished by virtuosic capers and gambols.

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