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. Debussy was not only one of the most important French composers but was 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 20th century modernist music.

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 self-centeredness 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 Fantaisie was still indebted to Franck's music and was withdrawn by the composer himself.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.

in 1899, Debussy married Rosalie Texier, who was distant from his cultural taste and experience, only to leave her five years later for the then-married Emma Bardac and later married her. However, before that happened, while away with Bardac, his wife resorted to suicide, unsuccessfully, for which many of his friends turned away from him. The relationship with Bardac brought happiness to his life, and particularly their only child, Claude-Emma, nicknamed Chouchou, whom he loved dearly and dedicated Chidlren's Corner for piano to her. She would help him out of his depressions. She died prematurely at the age of 14, 16 months after her father. Debussy had several affairs with women before his marriage, some of them married, and he would start an affair before ending the previous one. Those who knew him described him as very egocentric and a constant borrower of money from friends and relatives without bothering to return it, who was only after pleasure, unwilling to sacrifice for anything. His own words, "I intend to live according to my wishes" , testify to that. Ravel is thought to have contributed to a fund for Rosalie.

Debussy's last years of life were marked by a struggle with cancer and physical pain just before Paris was occupied by the Germans. Claude Debussy died in Paris on March 25, 1918 from rectal cancer, during the bombardment of Paris by airships and long-distance guns during the last German offensive of World War I. He had been battling the disease from 1909. This was a time when the military situation of France was considered desperate by many, and these circumstances did not permit his being paid the honor of a public funeral, or ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets as shells from the German guns ripped into his beloved city. It was just eight months before victory was celebrated in France. He was interred there in the Cimetière de Passy, and French culture has ever since celebrated Debussy as one of its most distinguished representatives.

Debussy's music has been used countless times in film and television.

Compositions

The first masterpieces

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

Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner's style and heavy emotionalism. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. Debussy's 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.

Influenced by the contemporary symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy wrote one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune set to Mallarmé's poem "The Afternoon of a Faun". In contrast to the large late-romantic orchestra, Debussy wrote this piece 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, the work caused controversy at its premiere; the composer Camille Saint-Saëns for example thought it "pretty" but lacking any "style". It subsequently launched Debussy into the spotlight as one of the leading composers of the era.

Pelléas et Mélisande

In reaction to Wagner and his highly elaborate late-romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would be his only finished opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be immensely influential to 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.

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.

Musical Style

France between the Commune and the World War I changed 60 governments, wine production was decimated by a disease, the bank to which many farmers had entrusted their savings went banrkupt, and there was an exodus from villages to towns. French society gave in to caste snobbery, with the old nobility considering themselves superior to the empire nobility, who in turn looked down upon the financiers and businesspeople. His own musical style started emerging, under the influence of Satie, the Impressionist painters, and Symbolist poets, and this was the birth of musical Impressionism. 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 Impressionism. The works that followed — the three Nocturnes for Orchestra, Pelleas and Melisande, La Mer, and Images, made him one of hte most influential composers in post-Wagnerian music.

With his visits to Bayreuth, Germany (1888, 1889) Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which was to have a lasting impact on his later work. Wagner's influence is evident in the La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1889) but other songs of the period, notably the settings of Verlaine (Ariettes oubliées, Trois mélodies, Fêtes galantes, set 1) are in a more capricious style.

Thanks to his artistic contacts in Paris, in 1889 he heard the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra comrpising bells, gongs, and percussions, and became mesmerized by it, as did Ravel. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward.

As the father of Impressionism in music, Debussy was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, although he opposed to this label, and even academic circles largely believe that the term is a misnomer. In a letter of 1908, he 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.' The paintings he enjoyed were not Impressionist but of the pre=Raphaelites — such as Turner and Botticelli.

His rebellious ways dated back to the Conservatory, where he shocked his teachers with unresolved seventh chords, parallel fifths, and counterpoint in parallel motion, to which he said, "I can only make my own music." Back in Paris he absorbed music of the enfant terrible of French music, Erik Satie, and met with the Impressionist painters and Symbolist poets, which helped him channel his restless and visionary proclivities into music that was not subservient to restrictions of classicism and Wagnerian excesses. He criticized realism and programmatic writing, instead envisioning a style that would be to music what Manet, Renoir, and Cezanne were to painting and Mallarme to poetry. In his music, subject matter was secondary in importance, whereas light and color, and nuance and atmosphere were paramount.

The Impressionists rejected representation in painting, while Symbolists denounced the importance of ideas. "Chords became for him a means of projecting color and thus were used individually for their own specific effect rather than for their relationship to chords that preceded or followed them." As Ewen noted, Debussy's sensitive and refined melody was achieved through the use of exotic oriental scales, church modes, and the whole-tone scale. The whole-tone scale is his signature, as he was the only composer to use it to such extent and with such artistry. The whole-tone scale is made up entirely of whole tones, with the octave divided into six equal parts. It is a good fit for melodies that have a nebulous and haunting character. Debussy was the first outstanding painter in music and the first to introduce new textures, sensations, images, and nuances in sound.

Rudolph Réti points out these features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":

1. Frequent use of long pedal points;
2. Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
3. Frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons";
4. Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
5. "Use of the whole-tone scale";
6. Unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge."

He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality" (Reti, 1958).

On the other hand, the same composer was viewed as the heretic in music. Saint-Saëns advised his friend Fauré to look at Debussy's pieces for two pianos with words that it is unbelievable and the composer sould 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, while tone color and mood were of higher importance to Debussy.

Ravel once remarked that upon hearing Debussy's music, he first understood what real music was.. He did find Debussy displeasing though for many reasons, not only his approach 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.

Mathematical structuring

Given that Debussy's music is apparently so concerned with mood and color, it is somewhat unexpected to discover that according to one author many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even when they apparently also use a classical structure such as sonata form. Howat (1983) 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. Sometimes these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure, in other pieces 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 5 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 used in the central section around that point (Howat, 1983).

The only evidence Howat induces to support his claim appears in changes Debussy made between finished manuscripts and the printed edition, with the changes invariably creating a Golden Mean proportion where previously none existed. Perhaps the starkest 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 analysed with this alteration the piece then follows Golden Section proportions (and is a lot easier to play as well!). It must be said, however, that Howat also admits that in many of Debussy's works he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably the late works) and that none of the extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.

Influence on later composers

Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to 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 influenced many important figures in Jazz, most notably Duke Ellington and Bill Evans.

Notable compositions

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 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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