Claude Debussy

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

head and shoulders photograph of middle-aged, white, dark-haired, bearded man
Debussy c. 1900 by Atelier Nadar

(Achille) Claude Debussy[n 1] (French: [aʃil klod dəbysi]; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of ten to France's leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande.

Debussy's orchestral works include

Symbolist poetic movement of the later 19th century. A small number of works, including the early La Damoiselle élue and the late Le Martyre de saint Sébastien have important parts for chorus. In his final years, he focused on chamber music, completing three of six planned sonatas for different combinations of instruments
.

With early influences including Russian and Far Eastern music and works by

Chopin, Debussy developed his own style of harmony and orchestral colouring, derided – and unsuccessfully resisted – by much of the musical establishment of the day. His works have strongly influenced a wide range of composers including Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin, and the jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. Debussy died from cancer
at his home in Paris at the age of 55 after a composing career of a little more than 30 years.

Life and career

Old postcard showing French street scene in a not very upmarket area
Rue au Pain, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, street of Debussy's birthplace

Early life

Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise, on the north-west fringes of Paris.[7][n 2] He was the eldest of the five children of Manuel-Achille Debussy and his wife, Victorine, née Manoury. Debussy senior ran a china shop and his wife was a seamstress.[2][9] The shop was unsuccessful, and closed in 1864; the family moved to Paris, first living with Victorine's mother, in Clichy, and, from 1868, in their own apartment in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Manuel worked in a printing factory.[10]

In 1870, to escape the

siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Debussy's pregnant mother took him and his sister Adèle to their paternal aunt's home in Cannes, where they remained until the following year. During his stay in Cannes, the seven-year-old Debussy had his first piano lessons; his aunt paid for him to study with an Italian musician, Jean Cerutti.[2] Manuel Debussy remained in Paris and joined the forces of the Commune; after its defeat by French government troops in 1871 he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, of which he only served one year. His fellow Communard prisoners included his friend Charles de Sivry, a musician.[11] Sivry's mother, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, gave piano lessons, and at his instigation the young Debussy became one of her pupils.[12][n 3]

Debussy's talents soon became evident, and in 1872, aged ten, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he remained a student for the next eleven years. He first joined the piano class of Antoine François Marmontel,[14] and studied solfège with Albert Lavignac and, later, composition with Ernest Guiraud, harmony with Émile Durand, and organ with César Franck.[15] The course included music history and theory studies with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, but it is not certain that Debussy, who was apt to skip classes, actually attended these.[16]

At the Conservatoire, Debussy initially made good progress. Marmontel said of him, "A charming child, a truly artistic temperament; much can be expected of him".[17] Another teacher was less impressed: Émile Durand wrote in a report, "Debussy would be an excellent pupil if he were less sketchy and less cavalier." A year later he described Debussy as "desperately careless".[18] In July 1874 Debussy received the award of deuxième accessit[n 4] for his performance as soloist in the first movement of Chopin's Second Piano Concerto at the Conservatoire's annual competition. He was a fine pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career had he wished,[20] but he was only intermittently diligent in his studies.[21] He advanced to premier accessit in 1875 and second prize in 1877, but failed at the competitions in 1878 and 1879. These failures made him ineligible to continue in the Conservatoire's piano classes, but he remained a student for harmony, solfège and, later, composition.[10]

With Marmontel's help Debussy secured a summer vacation job in 1879 as resident pianist at the Château de Chenonceau, where he rapidly acquired a taste for luxury that was to remain with him all his life.[10][22] His first compositions date from this period, two settings of poems by Alfred de Musset: "Ballade à la lune" and "Madrid, princesse des Espagnes".[10] The following year he secured a job as pianist in the household of Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of Tchaikovsky.[23] He travelled with her family for the summers of 1880 to 1882, staying at various places in France, Switzerland and Italy, as well as at her home in Moscow.[24] He composed his Piano Trio in G major for von Meck's ensemble, and made a transcription for piano duet of three dances from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.[10][n 5]

Prix de Rome

head and shoulder, semi-profile of young man with dark hair, combed forward into a fringe; he has a small beard
Debussy by Marcel Baschet, 1884

At the end of 1880 Debussy, while continuing his studies at the Conservatoire, was engaged as accompanist for Marie Moreau-Sainti's singing class; he took this role for four years.[26] Among the members of the class was Marie Vasnier; Debussy was greatly taken with her, and she inspired him to compose: he wrote 27 songs dedicated to her during their seven-year relationship.[27] She was the wife of Henri Vasnier, a prominent civil servant, and much younger than her husband. She soon became Debussy's lover as well as his muse. Whether Vasnier was content to tolerate his wife's affair with the young student or was simply unaware of it is not clear, but he and Debussy remained on excellent terms, and he continued to encourage the composer in his career.[28]

At the Conservatoire, Debussy incurred the disapproval of the faculty, particularly his composition teacher, Guiraud, for his failure to follow the orthodox rules of composition then prevailing.[29][n 6] Nevertheless, in 1884 Debussy won France's most prestigious musical award, the Prix de Rome,[31] with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. The Prix carried with it a residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further the winner's studies. Debussy was there from January 1885 to March 1887, with three or possibly four absences of several weeks when he returned to France, chiefly to see Marie Vasnier.[6]

Initially Debussy found the artistic atmosphere of the Villa Medici stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the accommodation "abominable".

Lassus, which he heard at Santa Maria dell'Anima: "The only church music I will accept".[6] He was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, who visited the students and played for them.[6] In June 1885, Debussy wrote of his desire to follow his own way, saying, "I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!"[33]

Debussy finally composed four pieces that were submitted to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima (based on a text by Heinrich Heine); the orchestral piece Printemps; the cantata La Damoiselle élue (1887–1888), the first piece in which the stylistic features of his later music began to emerge; and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, which was heavily based on Franck's music and was eventually withdrawn by Debussy. The Academy chided him for writing music that was "bizarre, incomprehensible and unperformable".[34] Although Debussy's works showed the influence of Jules Massenet, the latter concluded, "He is an enigma".[35] During his years in Rome Debussy composed – not for the Academy – most of his Verlaine cycle, Ariettes oubliées, which made little impact at the time but was successfully republished in 1903 after the composer had become well known.[36]

Return to Paris, 1887

A week after his return to Paris in 1887, Debussy heard the first act of Wagner's

Concerts Lamoureux, and judged it "decidedly the finest thing I know".[6] In 1888 and 1889 he went to the annual festivals of Wagner's operas at Bayreuth. He responded positively to Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies,[2] and was briefly influenced by them,[37] but, unlike some other French composers of his generation, he concluded that there was no future in attempting to adopt and develop Wagner's style.[38] He commented in 1903 that Wagner was "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn".[39]

large group of musicians in Javanese costume, with percussion instruments
Gamelan orchestra, c. 1889

In 1889, at the Paris Exposition Universelle, Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music. The gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him, and echoes of them are heard in "Pagodes" in his piano suite Estampes.[40] He also attended two concerts of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, conducted by the composer.[41] This too made an impression on him, and its harmonic freedom and non-Teutonic tone colours influenced his own developing musical style.[42][n 7]

Marie Vasnier ended her liaison with Debussy soon after his final return from Rome, although they remained on good enough terms for him to dedicate to her one more song, "Mandoline", in 1890.[44] Later in 1890 Debussy met Erik Satie, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially.[45] In the same year Debussy began a relationship with Gabrielle (Gaby) Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux; in July 1893 they began living together.[41]

Debussy continued to compose songs, piano pieces and other works, some of which were publicly performed, but his music made only a modest impact, although his fellow composers recognised his potential by electing him to the committee of the

Pelléas et Mélisande, which he immediately determined to turn into an opera.[41] He travelled to Maeterlinck's home in Ghent in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation.[41]

1894–1902: Pelléas et Mélisande

young woman in full-length frock and top coat leaning on a tree
Lilly Debussy in 1902

In February 1894 Debussy completed the first draft of Act I of his operatic version of Pelléas et Mélisande, and for most of the year worked to complete the work.[46] While still living with Dupont, he had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, and in 1894 he announced their engagement. His behaviour was widely condemned; anonymous letters circulated denouncing his treatment of both women, as well as his financial irresponsibility and debts.[46] The engagement was broken off, and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including Ernest Chausson, hitherto one of his strongest supporters.[47]

In terms of musical recognition, Debussy made a step forward in December 1894, when the symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, based on Stéphane Mallarmé's poem, was premiered at a concert of the Société Nationale.[46] The following year he completed the first draft of Pelléas and began efforts to get it staged. In May 1898 he made his first contacts with André Messager and Albert Carré, respectively the musical director and general manager of the Opéra-Comique, Paris, about presenting the opera.[46]

Poster by Georges Rochegrosse for the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).

Debussy abandoned Dupont for her friend Marie-Rosalie Texier, known as "Lilly", whom he married in October 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him.[48] She was affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well liked by Debussy's friends and associates,[49] but he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity.[50] The marriage lasted barely five years.[51]

From around 1900 Debussy's music became a focus and inspiration for an informal group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians who began meeting in Paris. They called themselves Les Apaches – roughly "The Hooligans" – to represent their status as "artistic outcasts".[52] The membership was fluid, but at various times included Maurice Ravel, Ricardo Viñes, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla.[n 8] In the same year the first two of Debussy's three orchestral Nocturnes were first performed. Although they did not make any great impact with the public they were well reviewed by musicians including Paul Dukas, Alfred Bruneau and Pierre de Bréville.[55] The complete set was given the following year.[46]

Like many other composers of the time, Debussy supplemented his income by teaching and writing.[n 9] For most of 1901 he had a sideline as music critic of La Revue Blanche, adopting the pen name "Monsieur Croche". He expressed trenchant views on composers ("I hate sentimentality – his name is Camille Saint-Saëns"), institutions (on the Paris Opéra: "A stranger would take it for a railway station, and, once inside, would mistake it for a Turkish bath"), conductors ("Nikisch is a unique virtuoso, so much so that his virtuosity seems to make him forget the claims of good taste"), musical politics ("The English actually think that a musician can manage an opera house successfully!"), and audiences ("their almost drugged expression of boredom, indifference and even stupidity").[59] He later collected his criticisms with a view to their publication as a book; it was published after his death as Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante.[60]

In January 1902 rehearsals began at the Opéra-Comique for the opening of Pelléas et Mélisande. For three months, Debussy attended rehearsals practically every day. In February there was conflict between Maeterlinck on the one hand and Debussy, Messager and Carré on the other about the casting of Mélisande. Maeterlinck wanted his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, to sing the role, and was incensed when she was passed over in favour of the Scottish soprano Mary Garden.[61][n 10] The opera opened on 30 April 1902, and although the first-night audience was divided between admirers and sceptics, the work quickly became a success.[61] It made Debussy a well-known name in France and abroad; The Times commented that the opera had "provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting, of course, those of Richard Strauss".[63] The Apaches, led by Ravel (who attended every one of the 14 performances in the first run), were loud in their support; the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire tried in vain to stop its students from seeing the opera.[64] The vocal score was published in early May, and the full orchestral score in 1904.[51]

1903–1918

drawing of profile head of youngish woman
Emma Bardac (later Emma Debussy) in 1903

In 1903 there was public recognition of Debussy's stature when he was appointed a Chevalier of the

Pourville in Normandy.[51] He wrote to his wife on 11 August from Dieppe, telling her that their marriage was over, but still making no mention of Bardac. When he returned to Paris he set up home on his own, taking a flat in a different arrondissement.[51] On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly Debussy attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest with a revolver;[51][n 11] she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life.[70] The ensuing scandal caused Bardac's family to disown her, and Debussy lost many good friends including Dukas and Messager.[71] His relations with Ravel, never close, were exacerbated when the latter joined other former friends of Debussy in contributing to a fund to support the deserted Lilly.[72]

The Bardacs divorced in May 1905.[51] Finding the hostility in Paris intolerable, Debussy and Emma (now pregnant) went to England. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne in July and August, where Debussy corrected the proofs of his symphonic sketches La mer, celebrating his divorce on 2 August.[51] After a brief visit to London, the couple returned to Paris in September, buying a house in a courtyard development off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch), Debussy's home for the rest of his life.[51]

exterior of large Parisian house
Debussy's last home, now 23 Square de l'Avenue Foch, Paris[73]

In October 1905 La mer, Debussy's most substantial orchestral work, was premiered in Paris by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard;[2] the reception was mixed. Some praised the work, but Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, hitherto an admirer of Debussy, wrote, "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea".[74][n 12] In the same month the composer's only child was born at their home.[51] Claude-Emma, affectionately known as "Chouchou", was a musical inspiration to the composer (she was the dedicatee of his Children's Corner suite). She outlived her father by scarcely a year, succumbing to the diphtheria epidemic of 1919.[76] Mary Garden said, "I honestly don't know if Debussy ever loved anybody really. He loved his music – and perhaps himself. I think he was wrapped up in his genius",[77] but biographers are agreed that whatever his relations with lovers and friends, Debussy was devoted to his daughter.[78][79][80]

Debussy and Emma Bardac eventually married in 1908, their troubled union enduring for the rest of his life. The following year began well, when at Fauré's invitation, Debussy became a member of the governing council of the Conservatoire.[51] His success in London was consolidated in April 1909, when he conducted Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and the Nocturnes at the Queen's Hall;[81] in May he was present at the first London production of Pelléas et Mélisande, at Covent Garden. In the same year, Debussy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, from which he was to die nine years later.[51]

Debussy's works began to feature increasingly in concert programmes at home and overseas. In 1910 Gustav Mahler conducted the Nocturnes and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune in New York in successive months.[82] In the same year, visiting Budapest, Debussy commented that his works were better known there than in Paris.[2] In 1912 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a new ballet score, Jeux. That, and the three Images, premiered the following year, were the composer's last orchestral works.[82] Jeux was unfortunate in its timing: two weeks after the premiere, in March 1913, Diaghilev presented the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a sensational event that monopolised discussion in musical circles, and effectively sidelined Jeux along with Fauré's Pénélope, which had opened a week before.[83]

Debussy in 1908

In 1915 Debussy underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations. It achieved only a temporary respite, and occasioned him considerable frustration ("There are mornings when the effort of dressing seems like one of the twelve labours of Hercules").[84] He also had a fierce enemy at this period in the form of Camille Saint-Saëns, who in a letter to Fauré condemned Debussy's En blanc et noir: "It's incredible, and the door of the Institut [de France] must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities". Saint-Saëns had been a member of the Institut since 1881: Debussy never became one.[85] His health continued to decline; he gave his final concert on 14 September 1917 and became bedridden in early 1918.[76]

Debussy died on 25 March 1918 at his home. The

First World War was still raging and Paris was under German aerial and artillery bombardment. The military situation did not permit the honour of a public funeral with ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery as the German guns bombarded the city. Debussy's body was reinterred the following year in the small Passy Cemetery sequestered behind the Trocadéro, fulfilling his wish to rest "among the trees and the birds"; his wife and daughter are buried with him.[86]

Works

In a survey of Debussy's oeuvre shortly after the composer's death, the critic Ernest Newman wrote, "It would be hardly too much to say that Debussy spent a third of his life in the discovery of himself, a third in the free and happy realisation of himself, and the final third in the partial, painful loss of himself".[87] Later commentators have rated some of the late works more highly than Newman and other contemporaries did, but much of the music for which Debussy is best known is from the middle years of his career.[2]

The analyst David Cox wrote in 1974 that Debussy, admiring Wagner's attempts to combine all the creative arts, "created a new, instinctive, dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective – a kind of art, in fact, which seemed to reach out into all aspects of experience".[88] In 1988 the composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers wrote of Debussy:

Because of, rather than in spite of, his preoccupation with chords in themselves, he deprived music of the sense of harmonic progression, broke down three centuries' dominance of harmonic tonality, and showed how the melodic conceptions of tonality typical of primitive folk-music and of medieval music might be relevant to the twentieth century[89]

Debussy did not give his works

Lesure number
("L" followed by a number) is sometimes used as a suffix to their title in concert programmes and recordings.

Early works, 1879–1892

Debussy's musical development was slow, and as a student he was adept enough to produce for his teachers at the Conservatoire works that would conform to their conservative precepts. His friend

vocalise; from the Ariettes oubliées (1885–1887) onwards he developed a more restrained style. He wrote his own poems for the Proses lyriques (1892–1893) but, in the view of the musical scholar Robert Orledge, "his literary talents were not on a par with his musical imagination".[93]

The musicologist

"Clair de Lune" (1890), the third of the four movements of Suite Bergamasque, as a transitional work pointing towards the composer's mature style.[95]

Middle works, 1893–1905

drawing in the style of a bas-relief showing two dancers, one as a young woman, one as a faun in semi-human form
Illustration of L'après-midi d'un faune, 1910

Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have regarded Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894) as his first orchestral masterpiece.[2][87][96] Newman considered it "completely original in idea, absolutely personal in style, and logical and coherent from first to last, without a superfluous bar or even a superfluous note";[87] Pierre Boulez observed, "Modern music was awakened by Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune".[97] Most of the major works for which Debussy is best known were written between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s.[87] They include the String Quartet (1893), Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–1902), the Nocturnes for Orchestra (1899) and La mer (1903–1905).[2] The suite Pour le piano (1894–1901) is, in Halford's view, one of the first examples of the mature Debussy as a composer for the piano: "a major landmark ... and an enlargement of the use of piano sonorities".[95]

In the String Quartet (1893), the gamelan sonorities Debussy had heard four years earlier are recalled in the pizzicatos and cross-rhythms of the scherzo.[93] Debussy's biographer Edward Lockspeiser comments that this movement shows the composer's rejection of "the traditional dictum that string instruments should be predominantly lyrical".[98] The work influenced Ravel, whose own String Quartet, written ten years later, has noticeably Debussian features.[99] The academic and journalist Stephen Walsh calls Pelléas et Mélisande (begun 1893, staged 1902) "a key work for the 20th century".[100] The composer Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by its "extraordinary harmonic qualities and ... transparent instrumental texture".[100] The opera is composed in what Alan Blyth describes as a sustained and heightened recitative style, with "sensuous, intimate" vocal lines.[101] It influenced composers as different as Stravinsky and Puccini.[100]

Orledge describes the Nocturnes as exceptionally varied in texture, "ranging from the Musorgskian start of 'Nuages', through the approaching brass band procession in 'Fêtes', to the wordless female chorus in 'Sirènes'". Orledge considers the last a pre-echo of the marine textures of La mer.

development section leading into the final "Dialogue du vent et de la mer", "a powerful essay in orchestral colour and sonority" (Orledge) which reworks themes from the first movement.[93] The reviews were sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even a step backward; others praised its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colours and definite lines.[103]

Late works, 1906–1917

Of the later orchestral works,

whole-tone scale he had often favoured previously in favour of the octatonic scale with what the Debussy scholar François Lesure describes as its tonal ambiguities.[2]

Among the late piano works are two books of

diatonic in nature than some of his other late works.[2]

Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911), originally a five-act musical play to a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio that took nearly five hours in performance, was not a success, and the music is now more often heard in a concert (or studio) adaptation with narrator, or as an orchestral suite of "Fragments symphoniques". Debussy enlisted the help of André Caplet in orchestrating and arranging the score.[108] Two late stage works, the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913), were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were completed by Charles Koechlin and Caplet, respectively.[2]

Style

Debussy and Impressionism

painting of a sunrise over a seascape
Monet's Impression, soleil levant (1872), from which "Impressionism" takes its name

The application of the term "Impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced has been much debated, both during his lifetime and since. The analyst Richard Langham Smith writes that Impressionism was originally a term coined to describe a style of late 19th-century French painting, typically scenes suffused with reflected light in which the emphasis is on the overall impression rather than outline or clarity of detail, as in works by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others.[109] Langham Smith writes that the term became transferred to the compositions of Debussy and others which were "concerned with the representation of landscape or natural phenomena, particularly the water and light imagery dear to Impressionists, through subtle textures suffused with instrumental colour".[109]

Among painters, Debussy particularly admired

Whistler. With the latter in mind the composer wrote to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe in 1894 describing the orchestral Nocturnes as "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting."[110]

Debussy strongly objected to the use of the word "Impressionism" for his (or anybody else's) music,[n 14] but it has continually been attached to him since the assessors at the Conservatoire first applied it, opprobriously, to his early work Printemps.[112] Langham Smith comments that Debussy wrote many piano pieces with titles evocative of nature – "Reflets dans l'eau" (1905), "Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" (1910) and "Brouillards" (1913)[n 15] – and suggests that the Impressionist painters' use of brush-strokes and dots is paralleled in the music of Debussy.[109] Although Debussy said that anyone using the term (whether about painting or music) was an imbecile,[113] some Debussy scholars have taken a less absolutist line. Lockspeiser calls La mer "the greatest example of an orchestral Impressionist work",[114] and more recently in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Nigel Simeone comments, "It does not seem unduly far-fetched to see a parallel in Monet's seascapes".[114][n 16]

In this context may be placed Debussy's pantheistic eulogy to Nature, in a 1911 interview with Henry Malherbe:

I have made mysterious Nature my religion ... When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvellous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration.[115]

In contrast to the "impressionistic" characterisation of Debussy's music, several writers have suggested that he structured at least some of his music on rigorous mathematical lines.[116] In 1983 the pianist and scholar Roy Howat published a book contending that certain of Debussy's works are proportioned using mathematical models, even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, which is approximated by ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.[117] Simon Trezise, in his 1994 book Debussy: La Mer, finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", with the caveat that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy deliberately sought such proportions.[118] Lesure takes a similar view, endorsing Howat's conclusions while not taking a view on Debussy's conscious intentions.[2]

Musical idiom

musical score showing a sequence of 22 different chords, each with 3, 4 or 5 notes
Improvised chord sequences played by Debussy for Guiraud[119]
Chords from dialogue with Ernest Guiraud

Debussy wrote "We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' We must at all costs preserve this magic which is peculiar to music and to which music, by its nature, is of all the arts the most receptive."[120]

Nevertheless, there are many indicators of the sources and elements of Debussy's idiom. Writing in 1958, the critic

unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge". Reti concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".[121]

In 1889, Debussy held conversations with his former teacher Guiraud, which included exploration of harmonic possibilities at the piano. The discussion, and Debussy's chordal keyboard improvisations, were noted by a younger pupil of Guiraud, Maurice Emmanuel.[122] The chord sequences played by Debussy include some of the elements identified by Reti. They may also indicate the influence on Debussy of Satie's 1887 Trois Sarabandes.[123] A further improvisation by Debussy during this conversation included a sequence of whole tone harmonies which may have been inspired by the music of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov which was becoming known in Paris at this time.[124] During the conversation, Debussy told Guiraud, "There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law!" – although he also conceded, "I feel free because I have been through the mill, and I don't write in the fugal style because I know it."[122]

Influences

Musical

"Chabrier, Moussorgsky, Palestrina, voilà ce que j'aime" – they are what I love.

Debussy in 1893[125]

Among French predecessors, Chabrier was an important influence on Debussy (as he was on Ravel and Poulenc);[126] Howat has written that Chabrier's piano music such as "Sous-bois" and "Mauresque" in the Pièces pittoresques explored new sound-worlds of which Debussy made effective use 30 years later.[127] Lesure finds traces of Gounod and Massenet in some of Debussy's early songs, and remarks that it may have been from the Russians – Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky – that Debussy acquired his taste for "ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules".[2] Lesure also considers that Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov directly influenced Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.[2] In the music of Palestrina, Debussy found what he called "a perfect whiteness", and he felt that although Palestrina's musical forms had a "strict manner", they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers.[128] He drew inspiration from what he called Palestrina's "harmony created by melody", finding an arabesque-like quality in the melodic lines.[129]

Debussy opined that

A. Durand & fils began publishing scholarly new editions of the works of major composers, and Debussy undertook the supervision of the editing of Chopin's music.[82][n 17]

Although Debussy was in no doubt of Wagner's stature, he was only briefly influenced by him in his compositions, after La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (both begun in 1887). According to

Golliwogg's Cakewalk, from the 1908 suite Children's Corner, contains a parody of music from the introduction to Tristan, in which, in the opinion of the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, Debussy escapes the shadow of the older composer and "smilingly relativizes Wagner into insignificance".[135]

A contemporary influence was Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy's "most faithful friend" amongst French musicians.

rag-time, such as The Little Nigar (Debussy's spelling) (1909), but by the slow waltz La plus que lente (The more than slow), based on the style of the gipsy violinist at a Paris hotel (to whom he gave the manuscript of the piece).[25]

In addition to the composers who influenced his own compositions, Debussy held strong views about several others. He was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss[138] and Stravinsky, respectful of Mozart and was in awe of Bach, whom he called the "good God of music" (le Bon Dieu de la musique).[139][n 18] His relationship to Beethoven was complex; he was said to refer to him as le vieux sourd ('the old deaf one')[140] and asked one young pupil not to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave;"[141] but he believed that Beethoven had profound things to say, yet did not know how to say them, "because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness."[142] He was not in sympathy with Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".[143]

With the advent of the First World War, Debussy became ardently patriotic in his musical opinions. Writing to Stravinsky, he asked "How could we not have foreseen that these men were plotting the destruction of our art, just as they had planned the destruction of our country?"[144] In 1915 he complained that "since Rameau we have had no purely French tradition [...] We tolerated overblown orchestras, tortuous forms [...] we were about to give the seal of approval to even more suspect naturalizations when the sound of gunfire put a sudden stop to it all." Taruskin writes that some have seen this as a reference to the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, both born Jewish. In 1912 Debussy had remarked to his publisher of the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue by the (also Jewish) composer Paul Dukas, "You're right, [it] is a masterpiece – but it's not a masterpiece of French music."[145]

Literary

Symbolist poets. These writers, who included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Rimbaud, reacted against the realism, naturalism, objectivity and formal conservatism that prevailed in the 1870s. They favoured poetry using suggestion rather than direct statement; the literary scholar Chris Baldrick writes that they evoked "subjective moods through the use of private symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinion".[146] Debussy was much in sympathy with the Symbolists' desire to bring poetry closer to music, became friendly with several leading exponents, and set many Symbolist works throughout his career.[147]

Debussy's literary inspirations were mostly French, but he did not overlook foreign writers. As well as Maeterlinck for Pelléas et Mélisande, he drew on Shakespeare and Dickens for two of his Préludes for piano – La Danse de Puck (Book 1, 1910) and Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C. (Book 2, 1913). He set Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel in his early cantata, La Damoiselle élue (1888). He wrote incidental music for King Lear and planned an opera based on As You Like It, but abandoned that once he turned his attention to setting Maeterlinck's play. In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and later sketched the libretto for an opera, La chute de la maison Usher. Another project inspired by Poe – an operatic version of The Devil in the Belfry did not progress beyond sketches.[148] French writers whose words he set include Paul Bourget, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Paul Verlaine, François Villon, and Mallarmé – the last of whom also provided Debussy with the inspiration for one of his most popular orchestral pieces, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.[2]

Influence on later composers

two white men, one bearded, middle-aged, standing, one younger, seated, in a book-lined room
Debussy with Igor Stravinsky: photograph by Erik Satie, June 1910, taken at Debussy's home in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne

Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.[2][149][150][151] Roger Nichols writes that "if one omits Schoenberg [...] a list of 20th-century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th-century composers tout court."[120]

Bartók first encountered Debussy's music in 1907 and later said that "Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities".[152] Not only Debussy's use of whole-tone scales, but also his style of word-setting in Pelléas et Mélisande, were the subject of study by Leoš Janáček while he was writing his 1921 opera Káťa Kabanová.[153] Stravinsky was more ambivalent about Debussy's music (he thought Pelléas "a terrible bore ... in spite of many wonderful pages")[154] but the two composers knew each other and Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) was written as a memorial for Debussy.[155]

In the aftermath of the First World War, the young French composers of Les Six reacted against what they saw as the poetic, mystical quality of Debussy's music in favour of something more hard-edged. Their sympathiser and self-appointed spokesman Jean Cocteau wrote in 1918: "Enough of nuages, waves, aquariums, ondines and nocturnal perfumes," pointedly alluding to the titles of pieces by Debussy.[156] Later generations of French composers had a much more positive relationship with his music. Messiaen was given a score of Pelléas et Mélisande as a boy and said that it was "a revelation, love at first sight" and "probably the most decisive influence I have been subject to".[157] Boulez also discovered Debussy's music at a young age and said that it gave him his first sense of what modernity in music could mean.[158]

Among contemporary composers George Benjamin has described Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune as "the definition of perfection";[159] he has conducted Pelléas et Mélisande[160] and the critic Rupert Christiansen detects the influence of the work in Benjamin's opera Written on Skin (2012).[161] Others have made orchestrations of some of the piano and vocal works, including John Adams's version of four of the Baudelaire songs (Le Livre de Baudelaire, 1994), Robin Holloway's of En blanc et noir (2002), and Colin Matthews's of both books of Préludes (2001–2006).[162]

The pianist Stephen Hough believes that Debussy's influence also extends to jazz and suggests that Reflets dans l'eau can be heard in the harmonies of Bill Evans.[163][n 19]

Recordings

In 1904, Debussy played the piano accompaniment for Mary Garden in recordings for the Compagnie française du Gramophone of four of his songs: three mélodies from the Verlaine cycle Ariettes oubliées – "Il pleure dans mon coeur", "L'ombre des arbres" and "Green" – and "Mes longs cheveux", from Act III of Pelléas et Mélisande.

piano rolls for the Welte-Mignon company in 1913. They contain fourteen of his pieces: "D'un cahier d'esquisses", "La plus que lente", "La soirée dans Grenade", all six movements of Children's Corner, and five of the Preludes: "Danseuses de Delphes", "Le vent dans la plaine", "La cathédrale engloutie", "La danse de Puck" and "Minstrels". The 1904 and 1913 sets have been transferred to compact disc.[166]

Contemporaries of Debussy who made recordings of his music included the pianists Ricardo Viñes (in "Poissons d'or" from Images and "La soirée dans Grenade" from Estampes); Alfred Cortot (numerous solo pieces as well as the Violin Sonata with Jacques Thibaud and the Chansons de Bilitis with Maggie Teyte); and Marguerite Long ("Jardins sous la pluie" and "Arabesques"). Singers in Debussy's mélodies or excerpts from Pelléas et Mélisande included Jane Bathori, Claire Croiza, Charles Panzéra and Ninon Vallin; and among the conductors in the major orchestral works were Ernest Ansermet, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Pierre Monteux and Arturo Toscanini, and in the Petite Suite, Henri Büsser, who had prepared the orchestration for Debussy. Many of these early recordings have been reissued on CD.[167]

In more recent times Debussy's output has been extensively recorded. In 2018, to mark the centenary of the composer's death, Warner Classics, with contributions from other companies, issued a 33-CD set that is claimed to include all the music Debussy wrote.[168]

Notes, references and sources

Notes

  1. mairie on the day of his birth as "Achille Claude".[1] Many authorities hyphenate "Achille-Claude".[2][3] As a little boy he was addressed as "Claude"; his baptismal certificate (he was not baptised until July 1864) is in the name of "Claude-Achille";[4] as a youth he was known as "Achille"; at the beginning of his career he sought to make his name more impressive by calling himself "Claude-Achille" (and sometimes rendering his surname as "de Bussy").[5] He signed himself as "Claude-Achille" between December 1889 and 4 June 1892, after which he permanently adopted the shorter "Claude".[6]
  2. ^ Debussy's birthplace is now a museum dedicated to him. In addition to displays depicting his life and work, the building contains a small auditorium in which an annual season of concerts is given.[8]
  3. Chopin, and although many of Debussy's biographers have been sceptical about this, her artistic prowess was vouched for not only by Debussy, but by her son-in-law, Paul Verlaine.[13]
  4. ^ That is, fourth prize, after the premier accessit, the runner-up (second prix) and the winner (premier prix).[19]
  5. ^ In September 1880 von Meck sent the manuscript of Debussy's Danse bohémienne for Tchaikovsky's perusal; a month later Tchaikovsky wrote back, mildly complimenting the work but remarking on its slightness and brevity. Debussy did not publish it, and the manuscript remained in the von Meck family and was not published until 1932.[25]
  6. ^ The director of the Conservatoire, Ambroise Thomas, was a deeply conservative musician, as were most of his faculty. It was not until Gabriel Fauré became director in 1905 that modern music such as Debussy's or even Wagner's was accepted within the Conservatoire.[30]
  7. ^ Debussy's regard for Rimsky-Korsakov's music was not reciprocated. After hearing Estampes a decade later, Rimsky wrote in his diary, "Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique; even less imagination. The impudent decadent – he ignores all music that has gone before him, and ... thinks he has discovered America."[43]
  8. ^ Other members were the composers Florent Schmitt, Maurice Delage and Paul Ladmirault, the poets Léon-Paul Fargue and Tristan Klingsor, the painter Paul Sordes and the critic Michel Calvocoressi.[53][54]
  9. ^ Saint-Saëns, Franck, Massenet, Fauré and Ravel were all known as teachers,[15][56] and Fauré, Messager and Dukas were regular music critics for Parisian journals.[57][58]
  10. Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a supreme singing-actress, with uncommonly vivid powers of characterization ... and a rare subtlety of colour and phrasing."[62]
  11. ^ A fictionalised and melodramatic dramatisation of the affair, La femme nue, played in Paris in 1908.[66] A myth grew up that Lilly Debussy shot herself in the Place de la Concorde, rather than at home. That version of events is not corroborated by Debussy scholars such as Marcel Dietschy, Roger Nichols, Robert Orledge and Nigel Simeone;[67] and no mention of the Place de la Concorde appeared in even the most sensational press coverage at the time.[68][69] Another inaccurate report of the case, in Le Figaro in early January 1905, stated that Lilly had made a second attempt at suicide.[68]
  12. ^ Lalo objected to what he felt was the artificiality of the piece: "a reproduction of nature; a wonderfully refined, ingenious and carefully composed reproduction, but a reproduction none the less".[74] Another Parisian critic, Louis Schneider, wrote, "The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer."[75]
  13. ^ He described the symphonies of Schumann and Mendelssohn as "respectful repetition"[102]
  14. ^ In a letter of 1908 he wrote: "I am trying to do 'something different' – an effect of reality ... what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art."[111]
  15. ^ Respectively, Reflections in the Water, Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air, and Mists.[109]
  16. ^ Roy Howat writes that Debussy, like Fauré "often juxtaposes the same basic material in different modes or with a strategically shifted bass" which, Howat suggests, is "arguably his most literal approach to true Impressionist technique, the equivalent of Monet's fixed object (be it cathedral or haystack) illuminated from different angles".[2]
  17. ^ Debussy examined some existing editions, and chose to base his on that of Ignaz Friedman. He wrote to Durand: "In Friedmann's [sic] preface (Breitkopf Edition, which is quite superior to the Peters), Chopin's influence on Wagner is indicated for the first time".[134]
  18. ^ He remarked to a colleague that if Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven could come to his door and ask him to play Pelléas to them, he would gladly do so, but if it were Bach, he would be too in awe to dare.[139]
  19. ^ In addition to Bill Evans, other jazz musicians influenced by Debussy include Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner, according to an article in Jazz Education in Research and Practice.[164]

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Sources

External links