~ Debussy, Claude Achille ~
Born: 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France)
Died: 1918 in Paris (France)
Debussy was one of those key composers whose music represents a
true break with the immediate past. He spent over a decade ridding himself
of early influences, but then in the 1890s began the series of wholly original
works which would provide an alternative approach to modernism for those
unable or unwilling to embrace the Wagnerite philosophy.
Debussy was born into an impoverished Parisian family. His father,
a philandering ex-soldier, was a junior clerk while his mother appears
to have found children interfered with her activities. Consequently, Claude
was more or less brought up by his father's sister, Clementine. His musical
ability was recognized by the mother-in-law of the poet Verlaine, Madame
Mauté, and it was she who prepared him for a successful sitting
of the entrance examination to the Paris Conservatoire. In 1672, just 10
years old, Claude began formal music studies.
Debussy proved a brilliant and precocious student, but soon showed
himself willing to apply himself only to what interested him; thus a career
as a concert pianist was quickly abandoned. Studies in theory, harmony
and composition kept him at the Conservatoire until 1882. In the summers
between 1879 and 1882 he took private teaching positions with wealthy families
and for three years he was the summer tutor to Tchaikovsky's patroness,
Madame von Meck. That he came under the older composer's influence is indisputable;
in 1880 there was even published a set of piano duet arrangements of the
dances from Act Ill of Swan Lake, arranged by Debussy, then still in his
teens. In 1884 he won the Grand Prix de Rome, entitling him to a year's
study in Rome at the Conservatoire's expense. The two years spent there,
interspersed by frequent dashes back to Paris, his bohemian friends and
his paramour Mme Vasnier, were not happy; he called the Eternal City a
town of 'fleas and boredom'. He did, however, meet Liszt in Rome who introduced
him to the wonders of the music of Orlande de Lassus and Palestrina. Yet
nothing would induce him to stay the Conservatoire course and by early
1887 he had abandoned Rome. Instead, he threw himself into the Parisian
artistic milieu, and by 1888 he was attending the annual Wagnerian season
at Bayreuth. For a man who was soon to become one of the most scathing
critics of the Wagnerian cult and its pernicious effects on French musical
life, he showed an intense interest in the German composer's music and
ideas.
The World Exhibition in Paris in 1889 left an equally indelible
impression. Its collating of ethnic musics from across the world—from black
minstrels from America playing early forms of ragtime and syncopated music
through to the magical, bewitching sounds of the Javanese gamelan orchestra—intoxicated
and transfixed Debussy. The artistic exhibits from Japan in particular
had a widespread impact, launching Orientalism on the fin-de-siècle
world. Yet as the 1890s dawned Debussy remained an impecunious musician
living a bohemian existence. His lot was made easier by the generosity
of wealthy friends such as Ernest Chausson, and his circle of artistic
acquaintances was immeasurably widened by his regular attendance at the
soirées held at cabaret bars such as the Chat Noir, also frequented
by his friend Erik Satie.
Although a string quartet and a number of songs of great beauty
emerged, and in 1894 he completed the exquisite musical invocation of a
Mallarmé poem, Prélude à I'Après-midi d'un
Faune, Debussy was leaving a trail of unfinished projects in his wake as
he searched for an operatic subject and form which conformed to his musical
ideal. His long friendship with poet Pierre Louÿs helped concentrate
his artistic endeavours, especially when it came to the protracted gestation
of his one completed operatic masterpiece, Pelléas et MéIisande,
which was completed in short score by late summer of 1895, but had to wait
until 1901 and its acceptance by Albert Carré for production at
the Opéra-Comique for the full orchestral score to be produced.
Its première in 1902 lit the touchpaper of Debussy's international
career.
During the long period of waiting, the Nocturnes (1900) had been
completed, and on a personal level Debussy had progressed from his long
tempestuous affair with Gaby Dupont to a quick marriage to Rosalie (Lily)
Texier in 1899. Pierre Louÿs and Erik Satie were the witnesses at
the wedding. The marriage failed to survive Debussy's new life after the
success of Pelléas, and in 1904, against a background of a failed
suicide attempt by Lily (and a scandal), Debussy eloped with Emma Bardac,
who was expecting their child. His period of elopement with Emma In England
led eventually to the inspiration for his greatest orchestral work, La
Mer (1905). The following years saw the birth of his only child, the much-loved
Claude-Emma (Chou-Chou) followed in 1908 by the marriage of Debussy to
Emma Bardac. Debussy suffered a great deal from this marriage: although
it was to last for the rest of his life, he lost many of his closest friends,
including Pierre Louÿs, and La Mer's premiere drew great hostility
from critics more concerned to teach him a moral lesson than to evaluate
a new piece of music.
By 1908 Debussy's life had taken on the pattern which would last
until his death: composition, regular conducting tours around Europe (including
many visits to England), and endless plans for the follow-up to Pelléas,
all of which were abandoned or left uncompleted at his death. A poor conductor,
he found the rigours of touring debilitating in the extreme, but such concerts
were a financial necessity. In 1910 Debussy met both Mahler and Stravinsky,
but only the second meeting warmed into mutual admiration and friendship.
His only other stage works performed during his lifetime were the ballet
Jeux (1913), written for Serge Diaghilev to a slight but risqué
plot involving Nijinsky and a game of tennis, and the strange play-with-music
in partnership with Gabriele D'Annunzio, Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien
(1911), starring Ida Rubinstein (Marcel Proust, attending the première,
felt that Ida's legs were the most interesting thing about the event).
At this stage Debussy's health was beginning to falter and he was often
left exhausted, although the cancer which eventually killed him had not
yet been diagnosed.
The onset of WWI initially halted all Debussy's creative ventures,
but in 1915 he completed the last of his great piano cycles, the Etudes,
as well as piano works for four hands and the late sonatas. Financial worries
obliged him to continue touring until the end of 1915, but from then on
he was virtually an invalid. Confined to bed during the winter of 1917-18,
and while the Germans bombarded Paris, he succumbed to cancer in March
1918.
Debussy's music is such an intoxicating mix of timbre and colour
that it is tempting to label him as a musical equivalent of the Impressionist
art movement of the time. But Debussy himself felt his music to be closer
to the Symbolist ideal of seeking the true meaning and nature of things
beneath their surface, of attempting to get at the mystery which resides
at the centre of all experience. His orchestral works were an attempt to
delineate the precise qualities of nature, rather than record impressions
of light and colour (the avowed aim of the Impressionists). His opera Pelléas
et Mélisande is concerned with psychological reality and evoking
mental and emotional states rather than dramatic action or conflicts between
state and individual. His music for the most part avoids violent declamation
and strident crescendos, and his rhythmic concepts are some of the most
complex and subtle in the entire Western Classical canon. His is a music
of exquisite mystery and extraordinary delicacy. His last works indicate
a shift in style towards the Classicism of French 18th-century composers,
but the music remains very much identifiable as his.
Many composers bring their influence to bear on just one genre
of Classical music: Debussy is one of the few to have composed masterpieces
across the disciplines which have had a profound influence on his contemporaries
and subsequent generations. The opera Pelléas et Mélisande
dispensed with both the Wagnerian and French Grand Opera models which had
cast such long shadows over music for the stage in France and Germany,
and forged a new relationship between singer and orchestra where the whole
work was deliberately undramatic, evolving more like a living organism.
Debussy's great orchestral works La Mer, Nocturnes and Images pour Orchestre
each attempt to depict both the inner and outer characters of natural phenomena—the
sea, clouds. landscapes-while his exquisite tone-poem Prélude à
I'Après-midi d'un Faune weaves an incandescent spell of lazy sensuality
and unspoken yearning. In recent years, his late ballet Jeux has been named
as an influential masterpiece by many composers and performers.
Yet if any of his music can be called definitive, it is perhaps
his body of music for the piano. It was on this most impersonal of instruments
that his most intimate and personal musical world was conjured, from evoking
Javanese gamelan music in 'Pagodes' from Estampes (1903) to depicting moonlight
in the famous 'Clair de lune' from the Suite Bergamasque (1905) or executing
an incisive and amusing sketch of vaudeville and low-life comic characters
in 'Minstrels' from the first book of Préludes (1910). This merely
touches on the vast range of his subjects. His Children's Corner (1906-08)
is a suite of pieces, ostensibly for children, which resonate deeply in
an adult sensibility. 'Jimbo's Lullaby', The Snowflakes are Dancing' and
'Golliwog's Cakewalk' all carry an air of magic and delight. Yet even here,
the mystery at the core of Debussy's music is present in the form of the
will-o-the-wisp arabesques and elusive melancholy of 'The Little Shepherd'.
All of these tendencies can be traced at greater depth in the second book
of Préludes (1913), both books of Images (1905 Et 1908), and the
enigmatic and abstract late work, Etudes (1915).
Debussy's chamber music is not plentiful, but is all worth studying;
his early String Quartet (1893) takes a step back from current role models
such as Fauré and Franck, looking for inspiration from pre-Baroque
French music. His three late sonatas, for Violin and Piano (1916-17), Cello
and Piano (1915) and Flute, Viola and Harp (1915), all written in a more
severe and compact style, have latterly won a wider audience and been recognized
as influential masterpieces. Lastly, it must be remembered that Debussy
first found his mature style in songs (melodies), and wrote a substantial
body of works, many of them revolutionary in their own time and hauntingly
beautiful.
Debussy was one of the key figures in showing that there was a
way ahead in Western music which need not use the methods most favoured
by German-speaking composers and theorists, whether they be Wagner, Brahms,
Schoenberg or Strauss. He constructed a musical language which drew from
hitherto neglected sources, including Palestrina, Mussorgsky, Couperin
and the music of countries such as Spain and Bali. He was able to combine
the most advanced study of harmony and musical construction with a sensitivity
for sheer sound perhaps matched only by Ravel, and that in another context.
He was also able to use the simplest of harmonic devices—such as the whole-tone
scale—and invest it with such a personal identity that it could offer itself
as a way out to later generations exhausted by the rigors of serialism.
Debussy was also a master of rhythm: his use of silence and space, of ostinato
patterns, of counter-rhythms and asymmetric phrasings foreshadowed much
of the rhythmic freedom to be displayed by composers 50 years later. Debussy's
contribution to the musical language of this century is an absolutely central
one.
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