Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy, ca. 1908 (photo by Félix Nadar)

Achille-Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer. He worked within the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, a term which he dismissed. He infused the Western harmony, which at that time was considered as having reached the saturation point, a conviction shared also by Schoenberg, with non-Western elements and thus showed a way to innovate music without destroying the center of harmony, as Schoenberg did. For this, Debussy was not only one of the most influential French composers but also one of the most important figures in music at the turn of the last century; his music represents the transition from late-Romantic music to the 20th century Modernist music. He was another in the series of music's innovators and dissenters, for which he was misunderstood and underappreciated by his contemporaries, yet his popularity remains stable. He had a disrupted childhood and his life in a sense reflects the commotions of France of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He had many relationships with women, and only his second wife, Emma Bardac, along with their daughter Chouchou, brought calm and happiness into his life. Debussy died of cancer at the age of 55 just before the Germans overtook France.

Life and Studies

Debussy at the Villa Médici in Rome, 1885. The composer is in the centre at the top, wearing a white jacket

Claude Debussy was born in St Germain-en-Laye near Paris, France. His parents ran a china store, without much success, and his father later commanded a battalion on the wrong side of the Franco-Prussian War, for which he went to jail. The family then found themselves destitute and were sustained by the father's sister. The little Debussy spent part of his childhood living with her. These disruptions are probably to blame for much of his egoism and awkward social skills.

Debussy received piano instruction from Chopin's pupil Madame de Fleurville, and, being very gifted, entered the Paris Conservatoire when he was 11. There he studied with Ernest Guiraud, César Franck, and others. He was an unorthodox student, much to the dismay of his teachers, but a talented one, which fetched him many prizes. In 1880 he entered in the service of Tchaikovsky's patron Nadezhda von Meck, teaching music to her children for two years.

In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome prize for L'Enfant prodigue, which secured him a scholarship from the Académie des Beaux-Arts a year later, including a four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to broaden his education. His letters from this period reveal that he was prone to depression and was able to compose only sporadically. Four of his pieces were sent to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima (set to a text by Heinrich Heine), the orchestral piece Printemps, Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, and the cantata La damoiselle élue, which the Academy criticized as "bizarre"; on the other hand, those were the first glimpses of some of the stylistic features of his later style. Fantaisie was still indebted to Franck's music and was withdrawn by the composer himself. In Italy he met Franz Liszt, but the lack of recognition eventually drove him back to France without completing his residence.

Debussy's last years of life were marked by a struggle with rectal cancer and physical pain; he died in Paris during its last German offensive of World War I. He had been battling the disease from 1909. Since these were hard times for France, no official funeral with honors was held for him. Instead, the funeral procession made its way through deserted streets as shells from the German guns ripped into Debussy's beloved city, laying him to rest at the Cimetière de Passy. This was just eight months before victory was celebrated in France. France has ever since celebrated Debussy as one of the most distinguished ambassadors of its culture, and his music is repeatedly heard in film and television.

Family Life

In 1899, Debussy married Rosalie Texier, who was described as not complementary given his cultural taste and experience. While still married to her, he developed a romance with the then-married Emma Bardac, who eventually became his second wife. When Rosalie found out about her husband's affair, she made a suicide attempt, and many of his friends turned away from him as a result. The relationship with Bardac and his strong feelings for their only child, Claude-Emma, nicknamed Chouchou, brought genuine happiness to the composer's life. He dedicated Children's Corner for piano to his daughter, whose sweetness and love would quell his depressions. She died prematurely when 14 years old, a mere 16 months after her father passed away.

Debussy had several affairs with married women prior to his betrothal. He would start a relationship before ending the previous one. He also developed a reputation as a notorious borrower of money from friends and relatives without bothering to return it, and as pleasure seeker unwilling to sacrifice. His own words, "I intend to live according to my wishes" , testify to such dispositions. When Maurice Ravel heard of the breakdown of Debussy's first marriage, he took pity on Rosalie and reportedly contributed to a fund for her.

Historical Background

France in late 19th and early 20th centuries was subject to frequent changes in the political system, and between the Paris Commune of 1871 and World War I alone, the government changed hands 60 times. The economy was devastated in the aftermath of a grapevine disease, the bank to which many farmers had entrusted their savings went bankrupt, and villagers moved in droves to urban areas. Social relations revolved around caste snobbery, as the old nobility considered themselves superior to the Empire nobility, who in turn looked down upon the financiers and businesspeople.

Debussy was born during the second half of the Second Empire (1852–1870), during the reign of Napoleon III, the emperor who paid lip service to the ideals of the Empire, that is, guidance of the people towards justice and peace. He was critical of the previous oligarchical governments for their neglect of social issues, but once in power, he introduced the system centered on himself and paralyzed parliament, universal suffrage, the press, education, and associations.

The Second Empire was replaced by the Third Republic (1870-1940), defined as a republican parliamentary democracy, which came into being following the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War. The Radical-Socialist Party, founded in 1901, held a sway over the country during this period. Governments rarely lasted more than a few months as radicals, socialists, liberals, conservatives, republicans and monarchists vied for power. In 1905, the government instituted the separation of Church and State, amidst a rift between the religious rural France and the secular urban France.

Style & Works

Father of Impressionism in Music

Debussy at the piano, behind him is the composer Ernest Chausson, 1893

Debussy's musical style began emerging in full in the 1890s under the influence of Eric Satie, the Impressionist painters, who rejected representation in painting, and Symbolist poets, who denounced the importance of ideas. He criticized Realism and programmatic writing, instead envisioning a style that would be to music what Manet, Renoir, and Cezanne were to painting and Mallarmé to poetry. Thus was born Impressionism in music. String Quartet in G Minor and the orchestral prelude "L'Apres midi d'un faune", composed between 1893 and 1894, were the first masterpieces of the new style. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and heavy emotionalism exhibited by late-Romantic composers, he chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. His String Quartet in G Minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring harmonic exploration. In this work he utilized the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales, such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony.

The poem "The Afternoon of a Faun" Mallarmé's by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé inspired Debussy to write one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. It is not written for a large late-Romantic orchestra but for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing orchestral colors and timbres of the instruments. Even if Mallarmé himself and Debussy's colleague and friend Paul Dukas were impressed by this piece, which brought Debussy to the spotlight, the work caused controversy at its premiere; the composer Camille Saint-Saëns for example thought it "pretty" but lacking any "style".

In reaction to Wagner and his highly elaborate late-Romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would become his sole completed opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, it caught attention and of the younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. Pelléas, with its rule of understatement and deceptively simple declamation, also brought an entirely new tone to opera — but an unrepeatable one. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.

Nevertheless, Debussy protested his label as Father of Impressionism in music, and academic circles too believe that the term might be a misnomer. In a letter dated from 1908, the composer wrote "I am trying to do 'something different'—in a way realities—what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics." His passions ran high whenever he was called 'Le Whistler de la Musique.' Besides, his favorite painters were not Impressionists but pre-Raphaelites, authored by painters such as Turner and Botticelli.

Musical Heretic

Debussy was also viewed as a musical heretic. Already at the Conservatory he shocked his teachers with unresolved seventh chords, parallel fifths, and counterpoint in parallel motion, to which he responded, "I can only make my own music." And his own music he did, not being subservient to restrictions of Classicism and Wagnerian excesses. Subject matter to him was secondary in importance, whereas light, color, nuance, and atmosphere were superior. To that end he assigned specific effects to individual chords, as a means of projecting color rather than for their relationship to chords that preceded or followed them. Saint-Saëns reportedly advised his friend Fauré to look at Debussy's pieces for two pianos with words that it is unbelievable and the composer should be barred at all costs from entering the Institut for his atrocities. Saint-Saëns was right to the extent that the Institut sought to maintain the classical harmonies and structures, which Debussy would abandon to bring out tone color and mood.

Although the composer's greatest works are built on a classical structure, such as a sonata, they also appear to have been structured around [mathematics|mathematical]] models, as Howat observed. He suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. At times these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure; elsewhere they appear to mark out other significant features of the music. The 55-bar long introduction to "Dialogue du vent et la mer" in La Mer, for example, breaks down into five sections of 21, 8, 8, 5, and 13 bars in length. The golden mean point of bar 34 in this structure is signaled by the introduction of the trombones, with the use of the main motif from all three movements applied in the central section around that point.

Perhaps the best example of this comes with La cathédrale engloutie. Missing from published editions is the instruction to play bars 7-12 and 22-83 at twice the speed of the remainder, exactly as Debussy did himself on a piano-roll recording. When analyzed with this alteration, the piece then follows Golden Section proportions and is much less daunting to perform. Debussy's manuscripts or sketches do not contain any evidence of such calculations though.

Debussy's harmonies were viewed as radical by his contemporaries but had an impact on almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. He also held sway on Jazz musicians, most notably Duke Ellington and Bill Evans. Ravel once remarked that upon hearing Debussy's music, he first understood what real music was.. He did find Debussy displeasing though not only for his philosophy when it came to relationships but also because of Debussy's recognition as the composer who developed avant-garde music, which Ravel maintained was plagiarism of his own Habanera.

Non-Western Influences

Another major influence on his style was the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra comprising bells, gongs, and percussions, which he became familiar with in 1889 thanks to his artistic contacts in Paris. He became mesmerized by it, as did Ravel. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures are not noticeable in any of Debussy's own compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward. As Ewen noted, Debussy's sensitive and refined melody was achieved through the use of these exotic oriental scales, church modes, and his signature whole-tone scale. He was the only composer to use the whole-tone scale, made up entirely of whole tones and the octave divided into six equal parts, to such an extent and with such artistry. This enabled him to convey nebulous and haunting melodies, whose textures, sensations, images, and nuances in sound were unprecedented in his time.

To cite Rudolph Réti, Debussy's greatest accomplishment was the enrichment of [monophony]] based melodic tonality with harmonies that differed from those of harmonic tonality. He established a new concept of tonality in European music, exemplified by the frequent use of long pedal points; glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from an occasional absence of tonality; parallel chords that function more as chordal melodies and enriched unisons rather than harmonies per se; bitonality or bitonal chords; the whole-tone scale; and unprepared modulations. The three Nocturnes for Orchestra, Pelleas and Melisande, La Mer, and Images established his reputation as one of the most influential composers in post-Wagnerian and the 20th century music.

Compositions

Orchestral music: Les nocturnes, La Mer, Images

Among Debussy's major orchestral works are:

• The three Nocturnes (1899), characteristic studies in veiled harmony and texture ('Nuages'), exuberant ('Fêtes'), and whole-tone ('Sirènes').
• La Mer (1903-1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement (Jeux de vagues) proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour.
• The three Images pour orchestre (1905-1911) are more loosely linked, and the largest, Ibéria is itself a triptych, a medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions.
• The little known Danses pour harpe et orchestre à cordes, also known as Danses Sacrée et Profane, for harp and string orchestra (1903).

Music for piano

During this period Debussy wrote much piano music.

• The Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls, in Verlainian fashion, rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement. This suite contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, "Clair de Lune."
• The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano, (1901) utilises rich harmonies and textures which would prove important in jazz music.
• His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905), combine harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion. "Reflets dans l'eau" is a musical description of rippling water. "Hommage à Rameau", the second piece, is a slow, beautiful and yearningly nostalgic masterpiece. It takes as its inspiration a melody of Jean-Philippe Rameau, from Castor et Pollux.
• The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations, such as an Asian landscape in the pentatonic "Pagodes", and of Spain in "La soirée dans Grenade".
• Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1909) for his beloved daughter whom he nicknamed Chou-chou. These beautiful and poetic pieces recall classicism as well as a new wave of rag-time music. Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner in the popular piece Golliwogg's Cake-walk. For information relating to the racist history of this piece's inspiration, see Golliwog's Cakewalk by Charles T. Downey, Ionarts, 25 February 2004.
• The first set of Preludes, (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful set of pieces for piano, frequently compared to Chopin's famous set of preludes. These masterpieces of subtlety and description are filled with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular "La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin" and "La Cathédrale Engloutie".

Le martyre de St. Sébastien, Jeux, and a second volume of Preludes

The harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, Debussy no longer hides discords in lush harmonies. The forms are far more irregular and fragmented. The whole tone scale dominates much of his late music.

The music for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911) a lush and dramatic work and written in only two months, is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.

The last orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its own field of motivic connection. At first Jeux was overshadowed by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, composed in the same year as Jeux and premiered only two weeks later by the same ballet company. Decades later, composers such as Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué pointed out parallels to Anton Webern's serialism in this work. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet, who also helped Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre de St. Sébastien.

The second set of Preludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, sometimes utilising dissonant harmonies to evoke moods and images, especially in the mysterious Canope; the title refers to a burial urn which stood on Debussy's working desk and evokes a distant past. The pianist Claudio Arrau considered the piece as one of Debussy's greatest preludes: "It's miraculous that he created, in so few notes, this kind of depth." [1]

Late music: En blanc et noir, the Etudes and the three Sonatas

His two last volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915) interprets similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises and includes pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

With the sonatas of 1915-1917, there is a sudden shift in the style. These works recall Debussy's earlier music, in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. Despite the thinner textures of the violin sonata (1917) there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves. This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism which was to become popular after Debussy's death. Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in 1918.

Works

Piano

• Deux Arabesques (1888)
• Petite Suite (1889)
• Suite bergamasque (1890)
  • including Prélude, Menuet, Clair de Lune, and Passepied
• Rêverie (1890)
• Valse romantique (1890)
• Nocturne (1892)
• Pour Le Piano (1899)
• Estampes (1903)
• L'Isle Joyeuse (1904)
• Images, sets one and two (1905, 1907)
  • a very notable piece being Reflets dans l'eau
• Children's Corner|Children's Corner Suite (1909)
• Préludes, book one and two (1910-1913)
  • including La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, La Cathédrale Engloutie and Canope
• La plus que lente (valse pour piano) (1910)
• Etudes, book one and two (1915)

Two pianos or piano, four hands

• Six épigraphes antiques for piano, four hands (1914, from the music for Chansons de Bilitis)
• En blanc et noir for two pianos (1915)

Opera

• Pelléas et Mélisande (1893-1902)

Cantatas

• L'enfant prodigue for soprano, baritone, and tenor and orchestra (1884)
• La demoiselle élue for two soloists, female choir, and orchestra (1887-1888, text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
• Ode à la France for soprano, mixed choir, and orchestra (1916-1917, completion by Marius Francois Gaillard)

Orchestral

• Le printemps for choir of four voices and orchestra (1884)
• Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, (tone poem) for orchestra (1894)
• Nocturnes for orchestra and chorus (1899)
• Danses Sacrée et Profane for harp and string orchestra (1903)
• Music for Le roi Lear, two pieces for orchestra (1904)
• La Mer, esquisses symphoniques (Symphonic Sketches) for orchestra (1905)
• Images pour orchestre (1905-1911)
• Le martyre de St. Sébastien, fragments symphoniques for orchestra (from the music for the play by d'Annunzio, 1911)
• Khamma, ballet (1911-1912, orchestrated by Charles Koechlin)
• Jeux, ballet (1913)
• La boîte à joujoux, ballet (1913, orchestrated by André Caplet)

Music for solo instruments and orchestra

• Fantaisie for piano and orchestra (1889-1890)
• Premiere Rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra (or piano) (1909-1910)
• Petite pièce for clarinet and orchestra (or piano) (1910)
• Rhapsody for alto saxophone and orchestra (or piano) (1901-1911)

Chamber music

• String Quartet in G minor (1893)
• Music for Chansons de Bilitis for two flutes, two harps, and celesta (1901, text by Pierre Louys)
• Syrinx for flute (1913)
• Sonata for cello and piano (1915)
• Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915)
• Sonata for violin and piano (1917)

See also: List of compositions by Claude Debussy

Media

Dieu qu'il l'a fait bon regarder (file info) ("God, how He has made her good to behold") Quant j'ai ouy le tambourin (file info) ("When I heard the tambourine") Mazurka (file info) ("Mazurka") Problems listening to the files? See media help.

References and Further Reading

• Barraqué, Jean. Debussy (Solfèges), Editions du Seuil, 1977. ISBN 2-02-000242-6.
• Ewen, David (Edited by). The Complete Book of Classical Music. London: Hale, 1966. ISBN 0-709-03865-8.
• Fulcher, Jane (Edited by). Debussy and His World. Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-09042-4.
• Howat, Roy. Debussy in Proportion: A musical analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-521-31145-4.
• Reti, Rudolph. Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A study of some trends in twentieth century music. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1958. ISBN 0-313-20478-0.
• Steen, Michael. The Lives and Times of the Great Composers. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003. ISBN 1-840-46485-2.
• Trezise, Simon (Edited by). The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-65478-5.

External Links

• IMSLP - International Music Score Library Project's Debussy page.
• Free scores by Claude Debussy in the Werner Icking Music Archive
• Claude Debussy and Impressionism
• Claude Debussy at MusicBrainz
• Steve's Debussy Page
• BBC: Debussy
• List of Debussy's works

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