Claude Debussy

French composer

• Born: August 22, 1862
• Birthplace: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, France
• Died: March 25, 1918
• Place of death: Paris, France

Debussy was the most innovative composer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laying down the foundation for the transition from the late Romantics such as Wagner to the early modernists such as Stravinsky. His influence was particularly felt in two areas: the suggestion of pictorial and visual effects in music, especially the subtle qualities of Impressionist painters, and the use of nontraditional scales and chords, greatly expanding harmonic possibilities.

Early Life

Claude Debussy (klohd deh-bwew-see) was born into a small tradesman’s family in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France. Nothing in the family background suggested inheritance of significant musical gifts. His aunt, temporarily in charge of the then seven-year-old Debussy and his sister, was responsible for starting him in piano lessons, although his first teacher saw little promise in him. His second teacher, a woman of some pretension, declared that he must become a musician; his father, a self-styled connoisseur, decided to force his son into that career. He imposed a schedule of extensive practice, and young Claude, moody and introspective, apparently accepted the role. At the age of ten, basically uneducated, he did well enough in the auditions for both piano and theory to be accepted by the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. He studied there for almost twelve years.

At first Debussy pursued a career in performance, but he failed to make much of an impression in the examinations for both 1878 and 1879. Thereafter he directed his attention to composition, although at first that also looked like a dead end. In 1880, he was accepted into this curriculum but only because of his skill in sight-reading rather than in harmony, the usual prerequisite. Before taking up a career as composer, he enjoyed a fling as a virtuoso and socialite. In the summer of 1880, he met Madame von Meck, the patron of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky; she invited him to become her household pianist, traveling with her family, giving lessons to her children, and playing in her household trio. This position not only took him to Italy, Vienna, and Russia for three consecutive summers, introducing him to much that was going on in contemporary music, but also allowed him to study Tchaikovsky’s mature scores as they were being written. Strangely, this had little direct influence on his music; nevertheless, the indirect benefit of eavesdropping on one of the great late Romantics at the height of his power must have been inestimable.

Debussy subsequently won the second Prix de Rome in 1883 and the first in 1884 with his cantata L’Enfant prodigue. His acceptance of this honor entailed residence in Rome, but Debussy chafed under the required duties. Returning to Paris as soon as his term expired in 1887, he spent the next six years in obscurity. Paris at that time was the perfect residence for someone of his gifts and temperament. The conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, much like the end of World War I forty-eight years later, was accompanied by a revulsion against the intellectual fashions that had promoted the war. By 1887, the revolutionary fervor was at its zenith, rationalist orthodoxy had fallen, and radical innovation became the vogue. Partly for these reasons, Debussy became interested in various kinds of extremist, eccentric, or unconventional music; he raved over Richard Wagner, a primitive gamelan band from Indonesia, and the modal counterpoint of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlando di Lassus. He also became intrigued by the theories of the Impressionist painters.

By the end of this period he had found himself. In 1893, he published and saw performed La Damoiselle Élué, for female chorus, having finished the first set of the song cycle Fětes galantes the previous year. About the same time he began sketching the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, saw the first performance of his String Quartet in G Minor, and began the Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune.

Life’s Work

Little of Debussy’s preliminary work foreshadowed in any way his revolutionary impact on many different forms of music from songs to opera, piano pieces to orchestral works. Furthermore, he continued expanding the boundaries of music, refusing to rest content with his initial transformations. In fact, he stands in the company of those who radically altered the nature of music during their lifetimes, so that music through them became capable of undreamed-of processes and expression. With Debussy, the first achievements were striking, and their extensions became more and more breathtaking.

Debussy’s emergence into eminence as a composer was slow and gradual; his name remained relatively unknown until he was nearly forty. Before that, in 1894, his tone poem actually an attempt to simulate in music an actual poem by Stéphane MallarméPrélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune had gained some attention, though nothing like what one would expect of a work that introduced a totally new style of music. The word prélude in the title misleads doubly: It suggests that the composition is incidental or preliminary to the performance or enactment of the poem, which it is not. Debussy more likely used the word to suggest that his musical invocation of the poem follows the form of the prelude, especially as it was transformed by Frédéric Chopin. In any case, what he did in this composition was unprecedented. Not that the concept was new: The idea of imitating natural phenomena and emotions in music had long existed, perhaps since the invention of music. Debussy, however, seemed to make it possible. Instead of using mechanical phrases to imitate nature drumbeats for thunder, for example as earlier composers had, Debussy discovered musical equivalents for the emotional effects he wanted to reproduce; the sounds induce feelings, and the feelings generate images. It is as if Debussy had discovered the sound patterns missed by earlier composers. In the process of doing this, he seemed to reinvent the orchestra, for he used instruments in completely novel and surprising ways. When analyzed in detail, his innovations turned out to be minimal extensions of Wagnerian practices, but the effect is totally different.

Debussy followed this with the Nocturnes , which was first performed in its entirety in 1901, the year after the first public performance of Chansons de Bilitis , a song cycle. With these productions Debussy was finally noticed, especially for the Nocturnes, which accomplished for pictorial images what the Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune had accomplished for emotional nuances. The three sections “Nuages” (clouds), “Fětes” (festivals), and “Sirènes” (sirens) create a different impression of light and its effects, as if Debussy were attempting to develop a musical equivalent of Impressionist painting.

Pelléas et Mélisande , finally produced in 1902, cemented his reputation. Though the critical response was not uniformly enthusiastic from the beginning, the opera was an immediate box-office success, causing some writers to raise Debussy to the top rank of composers. The work is in many respects astonishing. Like so many of Debussy’s compositions, it bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; using Wagner’s musical language, it sounds nothing like Wagner. Based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian playwright who dominated theater at the turn of the century, the opera tells a fatalistic story that focuses on the futility of human attempts to evade the forces that control them a theme popular at the time, when many believed that civilization stood on the brink of an ultimately self-destructive war. Set in an indefinite medieval past, the work has many of the qualities of dreams. New productions of the opera continue to be mounted everywhere. Pelléas et Mélisande is the only opera Debussy completed; yet it alone makes him one of the major opera composers of all time.

With this work Debussy became a public figure, with all the advantages and disadvantages of publicity. Mostly he suffered from it. His first marriage dissolved about this time, and the popular press made much of a suicide attempt by his first wife and by his subsequent affair with a married woman. It also cast him as the lead figure of an artistic faction supposedly involved in a bitter feud over what real music was. For a number of reasons, he began to be plagued by a series of lawsuits that afflicted him for the rest of his life. Yet his production of music of various kinds increased significantly.

The years 1903-1904 brought a number of important piano pieces, a second series of the songs, Fětes galantes, and the Danse sacrée et danse profane for harp and orchestra; the year 1905 saw the first performance of La Mer , the second triptych for orchestra. In this work, Debussy rises to a new order of music, leaving the basically formless associationism of his earlier work for a structure in which musical motifs expand, develop, and interconnect. La Mer possesses all the evocative qualities developed earlier, but it gives them substance. The result is a definitive composition for twentieth century music and Debussy’s most popular and enduring work. The third triptych, the Images of 1912, again raises Debussy’s orchestral writing to another level, but it is more abstract and difficult than the earlier works and has therefore received less attention. The late ballet Jeux (1913) had been critically praised but remains little known.

Debussy began writing music for the piano early, but in this too his style evolved slowly. In the Suite bergamasque (1890-1905), he first incorporates into piano pieces the kind of literary, pictorial, and emotional evocation with which he had been experimenting in the orchestral works. He followed this with the suite Pour le piano (1901), which incorporates all the poetic suggestiveness that became his trademark, and the Éstampes (1903), in which he departs from all earlier writing for the piano to pursue his characteristic mature style. From this point he literally invents a new kind of keyboard music, as revolutionary in its way as that of Johann Sebastian Bach or Chopin. The two sets of Images (1905 and 1907), the Children’s Corner Suite (1908), and the two books of Douze Préludes (1910 and 1912) are simultaneously masterpieces of pictorial representation and sensitive explorations of the technical resources of the instrument. They are accompanied by the sets for four hands, the Six épigraphes antiques (1914) and En blanc et noir (1915). His last major work for the instrument, the two books of Études , composed during the unbelievable period of two months in 1914, presents a sophisticated synthesis of his stylistic innovations and his poetic imagination.

Astonishingly, for much of this time his health was poor. In January of 1909, he was diagnosed as having cancer of the colon. He fought the disease for several years but finally had surgery in early 1916. Thereafter he declined, though he did not die until March 25, 1918.

Significance

Debussy came to prominence relatively late in life and remained at the top for only a few years. During his early life, the leading forces in music were Wagner and Tchaikovsky. By the time of his death the new age had dawned. Igor Stravinsky’s epochal and riot-provoking compositions had premiered, and music would never be as it had been. The single person most responsible for this transition was Debussy. Like Ludwig van Beethoven, Debussy profited from occupying this transition point. Because they both built on what was substantial in the musical past, they produced music that was relatively recognizable; because they advanced in new directions, their music was fresh and exciting. Just as Beethoven’s music foreshadowed that of almost the entire nineteenth century, so has Debussy’s anticipated that of the twentieth.

Debussy’s music speaks to all cultures. He created seemingly perfect musical evocations of natural settings, pictorial situations, verbal images, and human emotions. He did this in an astonishing array of forms songs, piano pieces, chamber music, orchestral compositions, choral works, oratorio, and opera. In this process, he redefined the limits and possibilities of the piano, the orchestra, solo instruments, and accompanied voice. By adopting the whole-tone scale, he moved beyond the limits of tonality, creating standards of scene-painting for many film composers of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Cooper, Martin. French Music from the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Although much of this book is not directly about Debussy, Cooper is invaluable because he shows how all the dominant tendencies in French music in the latter half of the nineteenth century culminated in Debussy. This work puts Debussy squarely in his culture, making his transcendence of that culture easier to see.

DeVoto, Mark. Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2004. A collection of essays analyzing the specifics of Debussy’s music.

Fulcher, Jane F., ed. Debussy and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Examines Debussy’s personal and artistic identity within the context of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Jarociński, Stefan. Debussy, Impressionism, and Symbolism. Translated by Rollo Myers. London: Eulenberg Books, 1976. This is a valuable, though somewhat abstract, placing of Debussy within the artistic and cultural contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Lochspeiser, Edward. Debussy. 5th ed. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1980. Originally published in 1932, this standard biography has undergone repeated revision. The material can be easily handled by general readers, and the critical apparatus is complete.

Nichols, Roger. Debussy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Part of the Oxford Studies of Composers series. An excellent entry in an outstanding series, this is the most complete general study of the composer to be published. Nichols provides eighty-six pages of detailed reporting, with bibliography and index. Despite the claim that this series is aimed at general readers, however, Nichols expects some musical knowledge of his readers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Claude Debussy.” In The New Grove Twentieth-Century French Masters, edited by Jean-Michel Nectoux et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. This is not a distilled version of Nichols’s study above but presents a rather cursory, abbreviated life followed by detailed discussions of the music with complete, updated critical and bibliographic materials.

Trezise, Simon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collection of essays examining Debussy the man, musician, and critic. Contains essays and technical studies of his music, including an essay exploring the relationship of his music to nature.

Wenk, Arthur B. Claude Debussy and Twentieth Century Music. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Part of Twayne’s Music series. In this 176-page book, Wenk presents an extended illustration of Debussy’s impact on modern music. This is a thorough treatment with complete apparatus, necessary for serious students.

Young, Percy M. Debussy. London: Benn, 1968. Part of the Masters of Music series. This is a useful seventy-six page survey of Debussy and his music for advanced students, though it needs updating through other sources.