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Claude Debussy

(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.

Debussy in 1908

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 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes (1897–1899) and Images (1905–1912). His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition. He regarded the classical symphony as obsolete and sought an alternative in his "symphonic sketches", La mer (1903–1905). His piano works include sets of 24 Préludes and 12 Études. Throughout his career he wrote mélodies based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own. He was greatly influenced by the 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, 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

 

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

 
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".[32] Neither did he delight in Italian opera, as he found the operas of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. He was much more impressed by the music of the 16th-century composers Palestrina and 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 Tristan und Isolde at the 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]

 
Gamelan orchestra, circa 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 Société Nationale de Musique in 1893.[41] His String Quartet was premiered by the Ysaÿe string quartet at the Société Nationale in the same year. In May 1893 Debussy attended a theatrical event that was of key importance to his later career – the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's play 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

 
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

 
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 Légion d'honneur,[51] but his social standing suffered a great blow when another turn in his private life caused a scandal the following year. Among his pupils was Raoul Bardac, son of Emma, the wife of a Parisian banker, Sigismond Bardac. Raoul introduced his teacher to his mother, to whom Debussy quickly became greatly attracted. She was a sophisticate, a brilliant conversationalist, an accomplished singer, and relaxed about marital fidelity, having been the mistress and muse of Gabriel Fauré a few years earlier.[65] After despatching Lilly to her parental home at Bichain in Villeneuve-la-Guyard on 15 July 1904, Debussy took Emma away, staying incognito in Jersey and then at 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]

 
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's grave at Passy Cemetery in Paris

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 (the premiere of his Violin Sonata) 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 opus numbers, apart from his String Quartet, Op. 10 in G minor (also the only work where the composer's title included a key).[90] His works were catalogued and indexed by the musicologist François Lesure in 1977 (revised in 2003)[91] and their 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 Georges Jean-Aubry commented that Debussy "admirably imitated Massenet's melodic turns of phrase" in the cantata L'enfant prodigue (1884) which won him the Prix de Rome.[92] A more characteristically Debussian work from his early years is La Damoiselle élue, recasting the traditional form for oratorios and cantatas, using a chamber orchestra and a small body of choral tone and using new or long-neglected scales and harmonies.[92] His early mélodies, inspired by Marie Vasnier, are more virtuosic in character than his later works in the genre, with extensive wordless 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 Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme wrote that, together with La Demoiselle élue, the Ariettes oubliées and the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1889) show "the new, strange way which the young musician will hereafter follow".[15] Newman concurred: "There is a good deal of Wagner, especially of Tristan, in the idiom. But the work as a whole is distinctive, and the first in which we get a hint of the Debussy we were to know later – the lover of vague outlines, of half-lights, of mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour, the apostle of languor, the exclusivist in thought and in style."[87] During the next few years Debussy developed his personal style, without, at this stage, breaking sharply away from French musical traditions. Much of his music from this period is on a small scale, such as the Two Arabesques, Valse romantique, Suite bergamasque, and the first set of Fêtes galantes.[87] Newman remarked that, like Chopin, the Debussy of this period appears as a liberator from Germanic styles of composition – offering instead "an exquisite, pellucid style" capable of conveying "not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort".[87] In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy's early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Fauré;[94] in a 2007 book about the piano works, Margery Halford observes that Two Arabesques (1888–1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of Debussy's later style" but are not harmonically innovative. Halford cites the popular "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

 
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. Estampes for piano (1903) gives impressions of exotic locations, with further echoes of the gamelan in its pentatonic structures.[2] Debussy believed that since Beethoven, the traditional symphonic form had become formulaic, repetitive and obsolete.[102][n 13] The three-part, cyclic symphony by César Franck (1888) was more to his liking, and its influence can be found in La mer (1905); this uses a quasi-symphonic form, its three sections making up a giant sonata-form movement with, as Orledge observes, a cyclic theme, in the manner of Franck.[93] The central "Jeux de vagues" section has the function of a symphonic 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, Images (1905–1912) is better known than Jeux (1913).[104] The former follows the tripartite form established in the Nocturnes and La mer, but differs in employing traditional British and French folk tunes, and in making the central movement, "Ibéria", far longer than the outer ones, and subdividing it into three parts, all inspired by scenes from Spanish life. Although considering Images "the pinnacle of Debussy's achievement as a composer for orchestra", Trezise notes a contrary view that the accolade belongs to the ballet score Jeux.[105] The latter failed as a ballet because of what Jann Pasler describes as a banal scenario, and the score was neglected for some years. Recent analysts have found it a link between traditional continuity and thematic growth within a score and the desire to create discontinuity in a way mirrored in later 20th century music.[104][106] In this piece, Debussy abandoned the 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 Préludes (1909–10, 1911–13), short pieces that depict a wide range of subjects. Lesure comments that they range from the frolics of minstrels at Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat "General Lavine" "to dead leaves and the sounds and scents of the evening air".[2] En blanc et noir (In white and black, 1915), a three-movement work for two pianos, is a predominantly sombre piece, reflecting the war and national danger.[107] The Études (1915) for piano have divided opinion. Writing soon after Debussy's death, Newman found them laboured – "a strange last chapter in a great artist's life";[87] Lesure, writing eighty years later, rates them among Debussy's greatest late works: "Behind a pedagogic exterior, these 12 pieces explore abstract intervals, or – in the last five – the sonorities and timbres peculiar to the piano."[2] In 1914 Debussy started work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments. His fatal illness prevented him from completing the set, but those for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola and harp (1915), and violin and piano (1917 – his last completed work) are all concise, three-movement pieces, more 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

 
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 Turner, but also drew inspiration from 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

 
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 Rudolph Reti summarised six features of Debussy's music, which he asserted "established a new concept of tonality in European music": the frequent use of lengthy pedal points – "not merely bass pedals in the actual sense of the term, but sustained 'pedals' in any voice"; glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality; frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies; bitonality, or at least bitonal chords; use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales; and 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 Chopin was "the greatest of them all, for through the piano he discovered everything";[130] he professed his "respectful gratitude" for Chopin's piano music.[131] He was torn between dedicating his own Études to Chopin or to François Couperin, whom he also admired as a model of form, seeing himself as heir to their mastery of the genre.[131] Howat cautions against the assumption that Debussy's Ballade (1891) and Nocturne (1892) are influenced by Chopin – in Howat's view they owe more to Debussy's early Russian models[132] – but Chopin's influence is found in other early works such as the Two arabesques (1889–1891).[133] In 1914 the publisher 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 Pierre Louÿs, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone can do beyond Tristan'," although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, appearing at the turning of a bar".[2] After Debussy's short Wagnerian phase, he started to become interested in non-Western music and its unfamiliar approaches to composition.[2] The piano piece 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.[136] Debussy's orchestration in 1896 of Satie's Gymnopédies (which had been written in 1887) "put their composer on the map" according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, and the Sarabande from Debussy's Pour le piano (1901) "shows that [Debussy] knew Satie's Trois Sarabandes at a time when only a personal friend of the composer could have known them." (They were not published until 1911).[137] Debussy's interest in the popular music of his time is evidenced not only by the Golliwogg's Cakewalk and other piano pieces featuring 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

Despite his lack of formal schooling, Debussy read widely and found inspiration in literature. Lesure writes, "The development of free verse in poetry and the disappearance of the subject or model in painting influenced him to think about issues of musical form."[2] Debussy was influenced by the 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

 
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.[165] He made a set of 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. ^ Debussy was addressed by various permutations of his names during the course of his life. His name was officially registered at the 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. ^ Biographers of Debussy, including Edward Lockspeiser, Stephen Walsh and Eric Frederick Jensen, comment that although Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville was a woman of some affectations, with the assumed manner of a grande dame, she was a fine teacher. She claimed to have studied with 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. ^ Mary Garden was Messager's mistress at the time, but as far as is known she was chosen for wholly musical and dramatic reasons. She is described in the 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]

References

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  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Lesure & Howat, 2001
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  4. ^ Lesure, p. 4
  5. ^ Lockspeiser, p. 6; Jensen, p. 4; and Lesure, p. 85
  6. ^ a b c d e "Prix de Rome" 16 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 16 March 2018
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  15. ^ a b c Prod'homme, J. G. Claude Achille Debussy, The Musical Quarterly, October 1918, p. 556 (subscription required)
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  43. ^ Quoted in Taruskin, p. 55
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Sources

  • Wenk, Arthur (1976). Claude Debussy and the Poets. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02827-2.
  • Wheeldon, Marianne (2009). Debussy's Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-35239-2.
  • Wheeldon, Marianne (2011). "Tombeau de Claude Debussy". In Antokoletz, Elliott; Wheeldon, Marianne (eds.). Rethinking Debussy. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-975563-9.
  • Wheeldon, Marianne (2017). Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-063122-2.

External links

claude, debussy, debussy, redirects, here, other, uses, debussy, disambiguation, achille, french, aʃil, klod, dəbysi, august, 1862, march, 1918, french, composer, sometimes, seen, first, impressionist, composer, although, vigorously, rejected, term, among, mos. Debussy redirects here For other uses see Debussy disambiguation Achille Claude Debussy n 1 French aʃil klod debysi 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 Debussy in 1908 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 Pelleas et Melisande Debussy s orchestral works include Prelude a l apres midi d un faune 1894 Nocturnes 1897 1899 and Images 1905 1912 His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition He regarded the classical symphony as obsolete and sought an alternative in his symphonic sketches La mer 1903 1905 His piano works include sets of 24 Preludes and 12 Etudes Throughout his career he wrote melodies based on a wide variety of poetry including his own He was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poetic movement of the later 19th century A small number of works including the early La Damoiselle elue and the late Le Martyre de saint Sebastien 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 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 Bela Bartok 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 Contents 1 Life and career 1 1 Early life 1 2 Prix de Rome 1 3 Return to Paris 1887 1 4 1894 1902 Pelleas et Melisande 1 5 1903 1918 2 Works 2 1 Early works 1879 1892 2 2 Middle works 1893 1905 2 3 Late works 1906 1917 3 Style 3 1 Debussy and Impressionism 3 2 Musical idiom 4 Influences 4 1 Musical 4 2 Literary 5 Influence on later composers 6 Recordings 7 Notes references and sources 7 1 Notes 7 2 References 7 3 Sources 8 External linksLife and career Edit Rue au Pain Saint Germain en Laye street of Debussy s birthplace Early life Edit 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 nee 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 Honore 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 Adele 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 Maute 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 Francois Marmontel 14 and studied solfege with Albert Lavignac and later composition with Ernest Guiraud harmony with Emile Durand and organ with Cesar 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 Emile 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 deuxieme 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 solfege and later composition 10 With Marmontel s help Debussy secured a summer vacation job in 1879 as resident pianist at the Chateau 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 a 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 Edit 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 32 Neither did he delight in Italian opera as he found the operas of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste He was much more impressed by the music of the 16th century composers Palestrina and 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 elue 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 oubliees 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 Edit A week after his return to Paris in 1887 Debussy heard the first act of Wagner s Tristan und Isolde at the 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 Gamelan orchestra circa 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 cafe 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 Societe Nationale de Musique in 1893 41 His String Quartet was premiered by the Ysaye string quartet at the Societe Nationale in the same year In May 1893 Debussy attended a theatrical event that was of key importance to his later career the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck s play Pelleas et Melisande 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 Pelleas et Melisande Edit Lilly Debussy in 1902 In February 1894 Debussy completed the first draft of Act I of his operatic version of Pelleas et Melisande and for most of the year worked to complete the work 46 While still living with Dupont he had an affair with the singer Therese 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 Prelude a l apres midi d un faune based on Stephane Mallarme s poem was premiered at a concert of the Societe Nationale 46 The following year he completed the first draft of Pelleas and began efforts to get it staged In May 1898 he made his first contacts with Andre Messager and Albert Carre respectively the musical director and general manager of the Opera Comique Paris about presenting the opera 46 Poster by Georges Rochegrosse for the premiere of Pelleas et Melisande 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 Vines 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 Breville 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 Saens institutions on the Paris Opera 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 Opera Comique for the opening of Pelleas et Melisande For three months Debussy attended rehearsals practically every day In February there was conflict between Maeterlinck on the one hand and Debussy Messager and Carre on the other about the casting of Melisande 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 Edit 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 Legion d honneur 51 but his social standing suffered a great blow when another turn in his private life caused a scandal the following year Among his pupils was Raoul Bardac son of Emma the wife of a Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac Raoul introduced his teacher to his mother to whom Debussy quickly became greatly attracted She was a sophisticate a brilliant conversationalist an accomplished singer and relaxed about marital fidelity having been the mistress and muse of Gabriel Faure a few years earlier 65 After despatching Lilly to her parental home at Bichain in Villeneuve la Guyard on 15 July 1904 Debussy took Emma away staying incognito in Jersey and then at 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 sketchesLa 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 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 Faure 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 Prelude a l apres midi d un faune and the Nocturnes at the Queen s Hall 81 in May he was present at the first London production of Pelleas et Melisande 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 Prelude a l apres 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 Faure s Penelope which had opened a week before 83 Debussy s grave at Passy Cemetery in Paris 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 Saens who in a letter to Faure 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 Saens had been a member of the Institut since 1881 Debussy never became one 85 His health continued to decline he gave his final concert the premiere of his Violin Sonata 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 Pere 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 Trocadero fulfilling his wish to rest among the trees and the birds his wife and daughter are buried with him 86 Works EditSee also List of compositions by Claude Debussy 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 opus numbers apart from his String Quartet Op 10 in G minor also the only work where the composer s title included a key 90 His works were catalogued and indexed by the musicologist Francois Lesure in 1977 revised in 2003 91 and their 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 Edit Clair de Lune 5 04 source source Composed in 1890 performed by Laurens Goedhart in 2011Premiere Arabesque 4 53 source source Deuxieme Arabesque 4 00 source source Both arabesques performed in 2016 by Patrizia Prati Problems playing these files See media help 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 Georges Jean Aubry commented that Debussy admirably imitated Massenet s melodic turns of phrase in the cantata L enfant prodigue 1884 which won him the Prix de Rome 92 A more characteristically Debussian work from his early years is La Damoiselle elue recasting the traditional form for oratorios and cantatas using a chamber orchestra and a small body of choral tone and using new or long neglected scales and harmonies 92 His early melodies inspired by Marie Vasnier are more virtuosic in character than his later works in the genre with extensive wordless vocalise from the Ariettes oubliees 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 Jacques Gabriel Prod homme wrote that together with La Demoiselle elue the Ariettes oubliees and the Cinq poemes de Charles Baudelaire 1889 show the new strange way which the young musician will hereafter follow 15 Newman concurred There is a good deal of Wagner especially of Tristan in the idiom But the work as a whole is distinctive and the first in which we get a hint of the Debussy we were to know later the lover of vague outlines of half lights of mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour the apostle of languor the exclusivist in thought and in style 87 During the next few years Debussy developed his personal style without at this stage breaking sharply away from French musical traditions Much of his music from this period is on a small scale such as the Two Arabesques Valse romantique Suite bergamasque and the first set of Fetes galantes 87 Newman remarked that like Chopin the Debussy of this period appears as a liberator from Germanic styles of composition offering instead an exquisite pellucid style capable of conveying not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort 87 In a 2004 study Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy s early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Faure 94 in a 2007 book about the piano works Margery Halford observes that Two Arabesques 1888 1891 and Reverie 1890 have the fluidity and warmth of Debussy s later style but are not harmonically innovative Halford cites the popular 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 Edit Illustration of L apres midi d un faune 1910 Musicians from Debussy s time onwards have regarded Prelude a l apres 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 Prelude a l apres 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 Pelleas et Melisande 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 Pelleas et Melisande 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 Fetes to the wordless female chorus in Sirenes Orledge considers the last a pre echo of the marine textures of La mer Estampes for piano 1903 gives impressions of exotic locations with further echoes of the gamelan in its pentatonic structures 2 Debussy believed that since Beethoven the traditional symphonic form had become formulaic repetitive and obsolete 102 n 13 The three part cyclic symphony by Cesar Franck 1888 was more to his liking and its influence can be found in La mer 1905 this uses a quasi symphonic form its three sections making up a giant sonata form movement with as Orledge observes a cyclic theme in the manner of Franck 93 The central Jeux de vagues section has the function of a symphonic 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 Edit Of the later orchestral works Images 1905 1912 is better known than Jeux 1913 104 The former follows the tripartite form established in the Nocturnes and La mer but differs in employing traditional British and French folk tunes and in making the central movement Iberia far longer than the outer ones and subdividing it into three parts all inspired by scenes from Spanish life Although considering Images the pinnacle of Debussy s achievement as a composer for orchestra Trezise notes a contrary view that the accolade belongs to the ballet score Jeux 105 The latter failed as a ballet because of what Jann Pasler describes as a banal scenario and the score was neglected for some years Recent analysts have found it a link between traditional continuity and thematic growth within a score and the desire to create discontinuity in a way mirrored in later 20th century music 104 106 In this piece Debussy abandoned the whole tone scale he had often favoured previously in favour of the octatonic scale with what the Debussy scholar Francois Lesure describes as its tonal ambiguities 2 Pieces from first book of Preludes 1909 1910 La fille aux cheveux de lin source source Performed by Mike AmbroseLa cathedrale engloutie source Performed by Ivan Ilic Problems playing these files See media help Among the late piano works are two books of Preludes 1909 10 1911 13 short pieces that depict a wide range of subjects Lesure comments that they range from the frolics of minstrels at Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat General Lavine to dead leaves and the sounds and scents of the evening air 2 En blanc et noir In white and black 1915 a three movement work for two pianos is a predominantly sombre piece reflecting the war and national danger 107 The Etudes 1915 for piano have divided opinion Writing soon after Debussy s death Newman found them laboured a strange last chapter in a great artist s life 87 Lesure writing eighty years later rates them among Debussy s greatest late works Behind a pedagogic exterior these 12 pieces explore abstract intervals or in the last five the sonorities and timbres peculiar to the piano 2 In 1914 Debussy started work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments His fatal illness prevented him from completing the set but those for cello and piano 1915 flute viola and harp 1915 and violin and piano 1917 his last completed work are all concise three movement pieces more diatonic in nature than some of his other late works 2 Le Martyre de saint Sebastien 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 Andre Caplet in orchestrating and arranging the score 108 Two late stage works the ballets Khamma 1912 and La boite a joujoux 1913 were left with the orchestration incomplete and were completed by Charles Koechlin and Caplet respectively 2 Style EditDebussy and Impressionism Edit 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 Turner but also drew inspiration from Whistler With the latter in mind the composer wrote to the violinist Eugene Ysaye 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 Edit Improvised chord sequences played by Debussy for Guiraud 119 source source source Chords from dialogue with Ernest GuiraudDebussy 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 Rudolph Reti summarised six features of Debussy s music which he asserted established a new concept of tonality in European music the frequent use of lengthy pedal points not merely bass pedals in the actual sense of the term but sustained pedals in any voice glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality frequent use of parallel chords which are in essence not harmonies at all but rather chordal melodies enriched unisons described by some writers as non functional harmonies bitonality or at least bitonal chords use of the whole tone and pentatonic scales and 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 EditMusical Edit Chabrier Moussorgsky Palestrina voila 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 Pieces 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 Pelleas et Melisande 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 Chopin was the greatest of them all for through the piano he discovered everything 130 he professed his respectful gratitude for Chopin s piano music 131 He was torn between dedicating his own Etudes to Chopin or to Francois Couperin whom he also admired as a model of form seeing himself as heir to their mastery of the genre 131 Howat cautions against the assumption that Debussy s Ballade 1891 and Nocturne 1892 are influenced by Chopin in Howat s view they owe more to Debussy s early Russian models 132 but Chopin s influence is found in other early works such as the Two arabesques 1889 1891 133 In 1914 the publisher A Durand amp 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 elue and the Cinq poemes de Baudelaire both begun in 1887 According to Pierre Louys Debussy did not see what anyone can do beyond Tristan although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid the ghost of old Klingsor alias Richard Wagner appearing at the turning of a bar 2 After Debussy s short Wagnerian phase he started to become interested in non Western music and its unfamiliar approaches to composition 2 The piano piece 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 136 Debussy s orchestration in 1896 of Satie s Gymnopedies which had been written in 1887 put their composer on the map according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin and the Sarabande from Debussy s Pour le piano 1901 shows that Debussy knew Satie s Trois Sarabandes at a time when only a personal friend of the composer could have known them They were not published until 1911 137 Debussy s interest in the popular music of his time is evidenced not only by the Golliwogg s Cakewalk and other piano pieces featuring 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 Edit S Pickwick Esq P P M P C Despite his lack of formal schooling Debussy read widely and found inspiration in literature Lesure writes The development of free verse in poetry and the disappearance of the subject or model in painting influenced him to think about issues of musical form 2 Debussy was influenced by the Symbolist poets These writers who included Verlaine Mallarme 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 Pelleas et Melisande he drew on Shakespeare and Dickens for two of his Preludes for piano La Danse de Puck Book 1 1910 and Hommage a 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 elue 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 Theodore de Banville Leconte de Lisle Theophile Gautier Paul Verlaine Francois Villon and Mallarme the last of whom also provided Debussy with the inspiration for one of his most popular orchestral pieces Prelude a l apres midi d un faune 2 Influence on later composers Edit Debussy with Igor Stravinsky photograph by Erik Satie June 1910 taken at Debussy s home in the Avenue du Bois de BoulogneDebussy 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 Bartok 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 Pelleas et Melisande were the subject of study by Leos Janacek while he was writing his 1921 opera Kata Kabanova 153 Stravinsky was more ambivalent about Debussy s music he thought Pelleas 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 Pelleas et Melisande 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 Prelude a l apres midi d un faune as the definition of perfection 159 he has conducted Pelleas et Melisande 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 Preludes 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 EditIn 1904 Debussy played the piano accompaniment for Mary Garden in recordings for the Compagnie francaise du Gramophone of four of his songs three melodies from the Verlaine cycle Ariettes oubliees Il pleure dans mon coeur L ombre des arbres and Green and Mes longs cheveux from Act III of Pelleas et Melisande 165 He made a set of 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 soiree dans Grenade all six movements of Children s Corner and five of the Preludes Danseuses de Delphes Le vent dans la plaine La cathedrale 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 Vines in Poissons d or from Images and La soiree 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 melodies or excerpts from Pelleas et Melisande included Jane Bathori Claire Croiza Charles Panzera and Ninon Vallin and among the conductors in the major orchestral works were Ernest Ansermet Desire Emile Inghelbrecht Pierre Monteux and Arturo Toscanini and in the Petite Suite Henri Busser 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 EditNotes Edit Debussy was addressed by various permutations of his names during the course of his life His name was officially registered at the 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 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 Biographers of Debussy including Edward Lockspeiser Stephen Walsh and Eric Frederick Jensen comment that although Antoinette Maute de Fleurville was a woman of some affectations with the assumed manner of a grande dame she was a fine teacher She claimed to have studied with 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 That is fourth prize after the premier accessit the runner up second prix and the winner premier prix 19 In September 1880 von Meck sent the manuscript of Debussy s Danse bohemienne 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 The director of the Conservatoire Ambroise Thomas was a deeply conservative musician as were most of his faculty It was not until Gabriel Faure became director in 1905 that modern music such as Debussy s or even Wagner s was accepted within the Conservatoire 30 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 Other members were the composers Florent Schmitt Maurice Delage and Paul Ladmirault the poets Leon Paul Fargue and Tristan Klingsor the painter Paul Sordes and the critic Michel Calvocoressi 53 54 Saint Saens Franck Massenet Faure and Ravel were all known as teachers 15 56 and Faure Messager and Dukas were regular music critics for Parisian journals 57 58 Mary Garden was Messager s mistress at the time but as far as is known she was chosen for wholly musical and dramatic reasons She is described in the 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 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 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 He described the symphonies of Schumann and Mendelssohn as respectful repetition 102 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 Respectively Reflections in the Water Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air and Mists 109 Roy Howat writes that Debussy like Faure 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 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 He remarked to a colleague that if Wagner Mozart and Beethoven could come to his door and ask him to play Pelleas to them he would gladly do so but if it were Bach he would be too in awe to dare 139 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 References Edit Lesure and Cain p 18 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Lesure amp Howat 2001 Lesure p 4 Fulcher p 101 Lockspeiser p 235 and Nichols 1998 p 3 Lesure p 4 Lockspeiser p 6 Jensen p 4 and Lesure p 85 a b c d e Prix de Rome Archived 16 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 16 March 2018 Lockspeiser p 6 and Trezise 2003 p xiv Maison Natale Claude Debussy Archived 14 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine Saint Germain en Laye municipal website retrieved 12 June 2018 in French Jensen pp 3 4 a b c d e Formative Years Archived 26 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 18 April 2018 Lockspeiser p 20 Jensen p 7 Lockspeiser pp 20 21 Walsh 2003 Chapter 1 and Jensen pp 7 8 Lockspeiser p 25 a b c Prod homme J G Claude Achille Debussy The Musical Quarterly October 1918 p 556 subscription required Fulcher p 302 Lockspeiser p 26 Nichols 1980 p 306 Concours du Conservatoire Archived 14 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine Le Mercure Musical 15 August 1908 p 98 in French Schonberg p 343 Lockspeiser p 28 Nichols 1998 p 12 Nichols 1998 p 13 Walsh 2018 p 36 a b Andres Robert An introduction to the solo piano music of Debussy and Ravel Archived 6 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine BBC retrieved 15 May 2018 Nichols 1998 p 15 Fulcher p 114 Nichols 1998 p 29 Jensen p 27 Nectoux p 269 Simeone 2000 p 212 Thompson p 70 Thompson p 77 Fulcher p 71 Thompson p 82 Wenk p 205 Holloway pp 21 and 42 Nectoux p 39 and Donnellon pp 46 47 Donnellon p 46 Cooke pp 258 260 a b c d e The Bohemian period Archived 17 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 16 May 2018 Jones p 18 Quoted in Taruskin p 55 Johnson p 95 Moore Whiting p 172 a b c d e From L apres midi d un faune to Pelleas Archived 17 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 18 May 2018 Jensen p 60 Dietschy p 107 Holmes p 58 Orledge p 4 a b c d e f g h i j k l The Consecration Archived 30 June 2017 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 18 May 2018 Orenstein p 28 Nichols 1977 p 20 and Orenstein p 28 Pasler Jann Stravinsky and the Apaches The Musical Times June 1982 pp 403 407 subscription required Jensen p 71 Nectoux pp 43 44 Saint Saens and pp 263 267 Messager and Faure Nectoux Jean Michel Faure Gabriel Urbain Grove Music Online Oxford University Press retrieved 21 August 2010 subscription required Schwartz Manuela and G W Hopkins Dukas Paul Grove Music Online Oxford University Press retrieved 19 March 2011 subscription required Debussy 1962 pp 4 12 13 24 27 59 Debussy 1962 pp 3 188 a b Schonberg Harold C Maeterlinck s Mistress Assumed She Was Going to Sing Melisande But Archived 20 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine The New York Times 15 March 1970 p 111 Turnbull Michael T R B Garden Mary Grove Music Online Oxford University Press retrieved 18 May 2018 subscription required Music Pelleas et Melisande The Times 22 May 1909 p 13 McAuliffe pp 57 58 Nectoux pp 180 181 Orledge p 21 Dietschy 1990 p 125 Nichols 1998 p 94 Orledge 2003 p 21 and Simeone 2000 p 54 a b Jensen p 85 Un drame parisien Le Figaro 4 November 1904 p 4 Nichols 2000 p 115 Nichols 2000 p 116 Nichols 2011 pp 58 59 23 Square Avenue Foch 75116 Paris France Google Maps Retrieved 11 June 2015 a b Lalo Pierre Music La Mer Suite of three symphonic pictures its virtues and its faults Le Temps 16 October 1905 quoted in Jensen p 206 Parris p 274 a b War and Illness Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 18 May 2018 Garden and Biancolli p 302 Jensen p 95 Hartmann p 154 Schmidtz p 118 M Debussy at Queen s Hall The Times 1 March 1909 p 10 a b c From Preludes to Jeux Archived 28 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 18 May 2018 Simeone 2008 pp 125 126 Vallas p 269 Nichols 1980 p 308 Simeone 2000 p 251 a b c d e f g h Newman Ernest The Development of Debussy The Musical Times May 1918 pp 119 203 subscription required Cox p 6 Mellers p 938 Parker Roger Debussy Quartet in G minor Op 10 Archived 12 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine Gresham College 2008 retrieved 18 June 2018 Alphabetical order Archived 27 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine Centre de documentation Claude Debussy Bibliotheque nationale de France retrieved 16 May 2018 a b Jean Aubry Georges trans Frederick H Martens Claude Debussy The Musical Quarterly October 1918 pp 542 554 subscription required a b c d Orledge Robert Debussy Achille Claude The Oxford Companion to Music Oxford University Press 2011 retrieved 21 May 2018 subscription required DeVoto 2004 p xiv a b Halford p 12 Sackville West and Shawe Taylor p 214 Rolf p 29 Lockspeiser Edward Claude Debussy Archived 22 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine Encyclopaedia Britannica retrieved 21 May 2018 Nichols 1977 p 52 a b c Walsh 1997 p 97 Blyth p 125 a b Donnellon p 49 Thompson pp 158 159 a b Pasler Jann Debussy Jeux Playing with Time and Form 19th Century Music Summer 1982 pp 60 75 subscription required Trezise 2003 p 250 Goubault Christian Jeux Poeme danse by Claude Debussy Revue de Musicologie No 1 1990 pp 133 134 in French subscription required Wheeldon 2009 p 44 Orledge Robert Debussy s Orchestral Collaborations 1911 13 1 Le martyre de Saint Sebastien The Musical Times December 1974 pp 1030 1033 and 1035 subscription required a b c d Langham Smith Richard Impressionism The Oxford Companion to Music Oxford University Press 2011 retrieved 17 May 2018 subscription required Weintraub p 351 Thompson p 161 Jensen p 35 Fulcher p 150 a b Simeone 2007 p 109 Vallas p 225 The interview was published in Excelsior magazine on 11 February 1911 Iyer Vijay Strength in numbers How Fibonacci taught us how to swing Archived 10 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian 15 October 2009 Howat 1983 pp 1 10 Trezise 1994 p 53 Nadeau Roland Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality Music Educators Journal September 1979 p 71 subscription required and Lockspeiser Appendix B a b Nichols 1980 p 310 Reti pp 26 30 a b Nichols 1980 p 307 Taruskin 2010 pp 70 73 Taruskin 2010 p 71 Howat 2011 p 34 Orenstein p 219 and Poulenc p 54 DeVoto Mark The Art of French Piano Music Debussy Ravel Faure Chabrier Notes June 2010 p 790 subscription required Archived 14 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine Jensen p 146 Jensen p 147 Siepmann p 132 a b Wheeldon 2001 p 261 Howat 2011 p 32 DeVoto 2003 p 179 Evans p 77 De Martelly Elizabeth Signification Objectification and the Mimetic Uncanny in Claude Debussy s Golliwog s Cakewalk Archived 16 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine Current Musicology Fall 2010 p 8 retrieved 15 June 2018 Nichols 1980 p 309 Taruskin 2010 pp 69 70 Debussy 1962 pp 121 123 a b Wheeldon 2017 p 173 Nichols 1992 p 105 Nichols 1992 p 120 Nichols 1992 p 166 Thompson pp 180 185 Debussy 1987 p 308 Taruskin 2010 pp 105 106 Baldrick Chris Symbolists The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Oxford University Press 2015 retrieved 13 June 2018 subscription required Phillips C Henry The Symbolists and Debussy Music amp Letters July 1932 pp 298 311 subscription required Debussy Claude The Oxford Companion to English Literature ed Dinah Birch Oxford University Press 2009 retrieved 7 May 2018 subscription required Kennedy Michael and Joyce Bourne Kennedy Debussy Achille Claude The Oxford Dictionary of Music ed Tim Rutherford Johnson Oxford University Press 2012 retrieved 17 May 2018 subscription required Gorlinski p 117 Briscoe James R Debussy Studies Notes December 1998 pp 395 397 subscription required Moreux p 92 Taruskin 2010 p 443 Nichols 1992 p 107 Taruskin 2010 p 469 Ross pp 99 100 Samuel p 69 Boulez p 28 Service Tom Mining for Diamonds Archived 12 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian 14 July 2000 George Benjamin Conductor Composer and Knight Dutch National Opera retrieved 2 June 2018 Christiansen Rupert Written on Skin is one of the operatic masterpieces of our time review Archived 14 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine The Telegraph 14 January 2017 Debussy orchestrations point towards 2018 centenary Archived 19 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine Boosey amp Hawkes 2016 retrieved 2 June 2018 and Works Archived 5 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine Colin Matthews retrieved 2 June 2018 Pullinger Mark The Debussy Legacy Gramophone 10 April 2018 retrieved 3 June 2018 Pamies Sergio 2021 Deconstructing Modal Jazz Piano Techniques The Relation between Debussy s Piano Works and the Innovations of Post Bop Pianists Jazz Education in Research and Practice 2 1 76 105 doi 10 2979 jazzeducrese 2 1 06 ISSN 2639 7668 Timbrell pp 267 268 Timbrell p 261 Notes to Warner Classics CD 190295642952 2018 Clements Andrew Debussy The Complete Works review a comprehensive and invaluable survey Archived 22 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian 3 January 2018 Sources Edit Barraque Jean 1977 Debussy Paris Editions du Seuil ISBN 978 2 02 000242 4 Blyth Alan 1994 Opera on CD London Kyle Cathie ISBN 978 1 85626 103 6 Boulez Pierre 2017 Serrou Bruno ed Entretiens de Pierre Boulez 1983 2013 recueillis par Bruno Serrou in French Chateau Gontier Editions Aedam Musicae ISBN 978 2 919046 34 8 Brown Matthew 2012 Debussy Redux The Impact of his Music on Popular Culture Bloomington Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 253 35716 8 Cooke Mervyn 1998 The East in the West Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music In Bellman Jonathan ed The Exotic in Western Music Boston Northeastern University Press ISBN 978 1 55553 319 9 Cox David 1974 Debussy Orchestral Music London BBC ISBN 978 0 563 12678 2 Debussy Claude 1962 1927 Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater New York Dover OCLC 613848806 Debussy Claude 1987 Lesure Francois Nichols Roger eds Debussy Letters Translated by Nichols Roger Cambridge MA Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 19429 8 DeVoto Mark 2003 The Debussy sound colour texture gesture In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65478 4 DeVoto Mark 2004 Debussy and the Veil of Tonality Hillsdale NY Pendragon Press ISBN 978 1 57647 090 9 Dietschy Marcel 1990 A Portrait of Claude Debussy Translated by Ashbrook William Cobb Margaret Oxford and New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 315469 8 Donnellon Deirdre 2003 Debussy as musician and critic In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65478 4 Dumesnil Maurice 1979 1940 Claude Debussy Master of Dreams Westport Greenwood ISBN 978 0 313 20775 4 Evans Allan 2009 Ignaz Friedman Romantic Master Pianist Bloomington Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 25 335310 8 Fulcher Jane 2001 Debussy and his World Princeton Princeton University Press ISBN 978 1 4008 3195 1 Garden Mary Biancolli Louis Leopold 1951 Mary Garden s Story New York Simon amp Schuster OCLC 1001487250 Gorlinski Gini ed 2009 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time New York Britannica Educational Publishing ISBN 978 1 61530 006 8 Halford Margery 2006 Debussy An Introduction to his Piano Music Van Nuys Alfred ISBN 978 0 7390 3876 5 Hartmann Arthur 2003 Claude Debussy as I knew him Rochester NY University of Rochester Press ISBN 978 1 58046 104 7 Holloway Robin 1979 Debussy and Wagner London Eulenburg ISBN 978 0 903873 25 3 Holmes Paul 2010 Debussy London and New York Omnibus Press ISBN 978 0 85712 433 3 Howat Roy 1983 Debussy in Proportion A Musical Analysis Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 31145 8 Howat Roy 2011 Russian imprints in Debussy s piano music In Antokoletz Elliott Wheeldon Marianne eds Rethinking Debussy New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 975563 9 Jensen Eric Frederick 2014 Debussy Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 973005 6 Johnson Graham 2002 A French Song Companion Oxford and New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 973005 6 Jones J Barrie 1979 Debussy Milton Keynes Open University ISBN 978 0 335 05451 0 Lesure Francois 2019 translation of 2003 French ed Claude Debussy A Critical Biography Translated by Rolf Marie Rochester University of Rochester Press ISBN 978 1 580 46903 6 Lesure Francois Howat Roy 2001 Debussy Achille Claude Grove Music Online 8th ed Oxford University Press ISBN 978 1 56159 263 0 Lesure Francois Cain Julien 1962 Claude Debussy 1862 1918 Exposition organisee pour commemorer le centenaire de sa naissance in French Bordeaux Ville de Bordeaux OCLC 557859304 Lockspeiser Edward 1978 1962 Debussy His Life and Mind Second ed Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 22054 5 McAuliffe Mary 2014 Twilight of the Belle Epoque Lanham MA Rowman amp Littlefield ISBN 978 1 4422 2163 5 Mellers Wilfrid 1988 Romanticism and the Twentieth Century London Barrie amp Jenkins ISBN 978 0 7126 2050 5 Moore Whiting Stephen 1999 Satie the Bohemian From Cabaret to Concert Hall Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 816458 6 Moreux Serge 1953 Bela Bartok Translated by Fraser G S Mauny Erik de London The Harvill Press ISBN 978 0 8443 0105 1 Nectoux Jean Michel 1991 Gabriel Faure A Musical Life Roger Nichols trans Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 52 123524 2 Nichols Roger 1980 Debussy Achille Claude In Sadie Stanley ed The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians London Macmillan ISBN 978 0 333 23111 1 Nichols Roger 1992 Debussy Remembered London Faber amp Faber ISBN 978 0 571 15357 2 Nichols Roger 1998 The Life of Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 57887 5 Nichols Roger 2011 1977 Ravel New Haven CN and London Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 10882 8 Orenstein Arbie 1991 1975 Ravel Man and Musician Mineola US Dover ISBN 978 0 486 26633 6 Orledge Robert 2003 Debussy the Man In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65478 4 Parris Matthew 2008 Scorn London Little ISBN 978 1 904435 98 3 Potter Keith 1999 Four Musical Minimalists Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 48250 9 Poulenc Francis 1978 Audel Stephane ed My Friends and Myself Translated by Harding James London Dennis Dobson ISBN 978 0 234 77251 5 Reti Rudolph 1958 Tonality Atonality Pantonality A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music London Rockliffe OCLC 470370109 Rolf Marie 2011 Debussy s Rites of Spring In Antokoletz Elliott Wheeldon Marianne eds Rethinking Debussy New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 975563 9 Ross Alex 2008 The Rest Is Noise London Fourth Estate ISBN 978 1 84115 475 6 Sackville West Edward Shawe Taylor Desmond 1955 The Record Guide London Collins OCLC 500373060 Samuel Claude 1976 Conversations with Olivier Messiaen Translated by Aprahamian Felix London Stainer and Bell ISBN 978 0 85249 308 3 Schmitz E Robert 1966 1950 The Piano Works of Claude Debussy New York Dover Publications ISBN 978 0 486 17275 0 Schonberg Harold C 1987 The Great Pianists New York Simon amp Schuster ISBN 978 0 671 64200 6 Siepmann Jeremy 1998 The Piano Wisconsin Hal Leonard Corp ISBN 978 0 7935 9976 9 Simeone Nigel 2000 Paris A Musical Gazetteer New Haven Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 08053 7 Simeone Nigel 2007 Debussy and Expression In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65243 8 Simeone Nigel 2008 France and the Mediterranean In Cooke Mervyn ed The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 78009 4 Taruskin Richard 1996 Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Berkeley University of California Press ISBN 978 0 520 29348 9 Taruskin Richard 2010 Music in the Early Twentieth Century Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 538484 0 Thompson Oscar 1940 Debussy Man and Artist New York Tudor Publishing OCLC 636471036 Timbrell Charles 2003 Debussy in Performance In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65478 4 Trezise Simon 1994 Debussy La mer Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 44656 3 Trezise Simon 2003 Introduction amp Debussy s rhythmicised time In Trezise Simon ed The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 65478 4 Vallas Leon 1933 Claude Debussy His Life and Works Translated by O Brien Maire O Brien Grace Oxford Oxford University Press OCLC 458329645 Walsh Stephen 1997 Claude Debussy In Holden Amanda ed The Penguin Opera Guide London Penguin ISBN 978 0 14 051385 1 Walsh Stephen 2018 Debussy A Painter in Sound London Faber amp Faber ISBN 978 0 571 33016 4 Weintraub Stanley 2001 Whistler A Biography New York Da Capo Press ISBN 978 0 306 80971 2 Wenk Arthur 1976 Claude Debussy and the Poets Berkeley University of California Press ISBN 978 0 520 02827 2 Wheeldon Marianne 2009 Debussy s Late Style Bloomington Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 253 35239 2 Wheeldon Marianne 2011 Tombeau de Claude Debussy In Antokoletz Elliott Wheeldon Marianne eds Rethinking Debussy New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 975563 9 Wheeldon Marianne 2017 Debussy s Legacy and the Construction of Reputation New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 063122 2 External links EditFree scores by Claude Debussy at the International Music Score Library Project IMSLP Free scores by Claude Debussy in the Choral Public Domain Library ChoralWiki Discovering Debussy BBC Radio 3 Legge Robin Humphrey 1911 Debussy Claude Achille Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 7 11th ed pp 906 907 Website of Debussy museum St Germain en Laye Portals Classical music Opera Biography MusicClaude Debussy at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from Commons Quotations from Wikiquote Texts from Wikisource Data from Wikidata Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Claude Debussy amp oldid 1141373157, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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