Claude
Debussy
David J. Code
Claude Debussy
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures
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Edgar Allan Poe
Kevin J. Hayes
Claude Debussy
David J. Code
reaktion books
For Nic, for being there
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2010
Copyright © David J. Code 2010
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Code, David J.
Claude Debussy. – (Critical lives)
1. Debussy, Claude, 1862-1918
2. Composers—France—Biography
I. Title II. Series
780.9’2-dc22
isbn: 978 1 86189759 6
Contents
Introduction 7
1 A Music that Clothes the Poetry 15
2 A Dream from Which One Draws Back the Veils 52
3 The Art of a Curious Savage 92
4 Something New, Which Surprises Even Ourselves 133
Epilogue 183
References 190
Select Bibliography 206
Select Discography 211
Acknowledgements 215
Photo Acknowledgements 216
Debussy, watercolour portrait by Paul Robier.
Introduction
A brief glance at the map of Paris discerns some characteristic
acumen behind the location of the rue Claude-Debussy in the city’s
north-western seventeenth arrondissement. Only a few steps away
from the junction of this short thoroughfare with the Place de
la Porte Champêtre, opening from another place named for the
American symbolist poet Stuart Merrill, a broader avenue bears
the name of Merrill’s far more influential teacher, Stéphane
Mallarmé. Here is a near-juxtaposition Debussy would surely have
appreciated. Like all composers who passed through the Paris
Conservatoire he was trained to aspire to the literary-musical
hybrid of opera as the pre-eminent genre. But it was through his
intensive readings of contemporary poets, from Théodore de
Banville and Dante Gabriel Rossetti through Charles Baudelaire,
Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, that he primarily refined the
literary sensibility that was to render him one of the finest musical
readers of poetic and dramatic language. And it was through close
collaboration with Mallarmé in particular, in the years around
his thirtieth birthday, that this sensibility first achieved the extraordinary sophistication – as exemplified in the Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune – that was to secure him the pivotal place he now occupies
in all histories of modern composition.
Perhaps the position of the rue Debussy gives clear evidence
that the composer’s ties to what is generally termed the Symbolist
movement in literature are by now firmly established. But the fact
7
that the Parisian planners chose to emphasize this particular affinity
remains worthy of note. From countless cd inserts, sheet music
covers and popular music histories, it seems the ostensible links
between Debussy’s music and the painterly aesthetic of Claude
Monet (to give one example) have lodged more solidly in the
cultural imagination, leaving Debussy stuck with the label of
pre-eminent musical Impressionist. Given that all such ‘-isms’
tend to obscure at least as much as they illuminate, it is useless to
argue in general terms for the validity of any one over any other.
But while it seems unlikely that this one can ever be dislodged –
these days, to compose in an ‘Impressionist’ manner means simply
to compose somewhat like Debussy – there may still be some value
in consciously considering the distortions it can impose over an
encounter with the oeuvre.
One vivid example of such distortion can be found by setting
out from Debussy’s last home on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne
in the sixteenth arrondissement and wandering south-west,
towards the Bois, about the same distance that would take the
proverbial crow (flying north) to the rue Claude-Debussy. This, in
fact, was a journey he often took, as he noted with characteristic
flippancy during one of many periods of creative frustration:
Music is sometimes malicious, even to those who love it the
most! Thus, I take my daughter and my hat, and I go for a walk
in the Bois de Boulogne, where one meets people who have
come from very far away in order to be bored in Paris!1
These days, those who cross the Boulevard Lannes towards the
Périphérique and the first line of trees beyond will discover, within
the small square identified as the Jardin Claude Debussy, a much
more striking memorial to the composer than that drab bit of road
up in the seventeenth.
8
The 1932 monument to Debussy by the Art Deco sculptors Jan and Joël Martel,
in the Jardin Claude Debussy in Paris.
At once tomb, temple and triumphal arch, to borrow the words
of Émile Vuillermoz (an editor of Debussy’s journalism, and a
member of the memorial committee), this elaborate monument
by the art deco sculptors Jan and Joël Martel faces visitors to the
Jardin from the back of a long basin bordered by rosebushes. Its
large central panel, carved with a bas-relief of imagery associated
with Debussy’s works, is flanked by sculpted nymph-musicians
atop side-panels bearing a dedication that invokes the patriotic
signature he adopted late in life: ‘À Claude Debussy / Musicien
Français’. These are the only words visible from the front. But
to step around to the back is to discover more textual apparatus
accompanying another relief of the composer at the piano before
a tableau of musicians. A phrase Debussy once attributed to his
critical alter-ego ‘Monsieur Croche’ – ‘it is necessary to seek for
discipline in liberty, to listen for advice from no-one except the
9
wind that passes, telling us the history of the world’ – and a notation
of the famous opening flute solo from his Mallarméan Prélude sits
atop a list of contributors to the monument; a list of works fills the
panels beneath the nymphs.2
Nowhere do these blocks of text mention Impressionism or
Symbolism. But while the musical excerpt seems to reaffirm the
literary affinity inscribed into the city’s streets, the terms in which
Vuillermoz, for one, noted his approval of the design exemplify
just how firmly the painterly label, instead, had become fixed by
the dedication in 1932:
This monument . . . eternalizes . . . the love that the Impressionist
master had for the reflections in the water, the clouds, the flowers,
the leaves and the branches. It is reflected in the crystal mirror
of a basin that evokes that of the Promenoir des Deux Amants.
Two sheets of shimmering water emerge to ripple beneath the
feet of the musician-naïads. The quivering foliage of the Bois
de Boulogne just alongside will murmur the infinite melody
that Debussy loved to listen to and to draw into the great universal symphony of nature. This was indeed the perfect way
to commemorate the genius of a poet of timbres and a painter
of sounds.3
While the last pairing – ‘poet’ and ‘painter’ – seems reasonably
balanced, the nature imagery earlier in the paragraph is tellingly
selective. ‘Reflections in the water’ and ‘Clouds’ both name Debussy
works that could well be heard as tone paintings (Reflets dans l’eau
from the Images for piano; Nuages from the Nocturnes for orchestra).
But each belongs to a triptych that also includes more culturally
invested evocations: Hommage à Rameau in the Images; Fêtes and
Sirènes in the Nocturnes. The rest of the list – ‘the flowers, the leaves,
and the branches’ – is even more blatantly severed from its context
in Verlaine’s poem ‘Green’: ‘Here are the fruits, the flowers, the
10
leaves, and the branches, / And here is my heart, which beats
only for you.’ No simple nature painting, Debussy’s early setting
of this poem revisits the pastoral trope of natural abundance as
a token of passion. Perhaps Vuillermoz restores some explicit
literary inflection when he lets the ‘crystal mirror’ of the basin
inspire a nod to the late song triptych Le Promenoir des deux amants.
But in this case, he isolates some background scenery from a set
of three poems Debussy carved out of a larger, seventeenth-century
original in order to trace delicately poised stages of intimacy between
two lovers.
If this one paragraph perfectly exemplifies the tendency, under
the Impressionist cliché, to underplay the degree to which Debussy’s
‘representational’ music taps timeless humane concerns (cultural
identity; desire; lyrical expression; intimacy), the monument that
inspired it can actually be seen to suggest a more appropriate
approach. To be sure, the Martel brothers include plenty of leaves,
clouds and water in the background of their central panel. But they
give central importance to a column of figures taken from three
ambitious compositional readings. At bottom right a disrobing
nymph glances up to meet the lustful eyes of a flute-playing faun.
Just above, the young Pelléas luxuriates in the tresses of his brother’s
wife, Mélisande, as she leans from her tower window. And atop
the relief, a haloed androgynous figure shows the Christ-like Saint
Sebastian, who was martyred by his own archers for refusing to
foreswear his faith.
References to other works fall into secondary positions around
these evocations of exceptional Debussyan readings from three
decades: the Mallarmé Prélude (1894); the Maeterlinck opera Pelléas
et Mélisande (1902); and the quasi-religious ‘mystery’ on a text by
Gabriele d’Annunzio, Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien (1911). If the
status of the third of these works remains more contested than
the other two, and if the literary tower is missing a foundation in
the decade in which Debussy first found his voice as a musical
11
reader, the bas-relief nonetheless offers a salutary summons to
anyone who wishes to hear more than a ‘symphony of nature’ in
his music. In other words, a critical biography might well draw
on the same structural insight as the Martel twins, and restore
Debussy’s readerly acuity to the centre of his oeuvre – not just by
reappraising the musical poetry in such works as the Prélude and
Pelléas, but also by considering how that poetic sensibility radiated
out into works of less obvious literary affinity.
It remains to consider how this artistic sensibility might relate
to the life represented, on the back of the monument, by that
figure at the piano. Here again, the focus on Debussy as reader
can be of help, if only to note that the occasions of his song-writing
occasionally bore some direct relationship to the vagaries of his
personal life. The fact that he was a pianist, too, is clearly of significance. Although he failed by the Conservatoire’s implacable
measures to attain official virtuoso status, his creative engagement
with the instrument was to prove a crucial resource in years of
penury, and a fertile means to explore the relationship between
esoteric and public pleasures at a pivotal moment in the history
of modern music. Perhaps, to recall the words of ‘Monsieur Croche’
on the monument, this is a limited way to inscribe his life and
work within ‘the history of the world’. But in a wider view, any
consideration of Debussy’s formative immersion in the richly
allegorical writings of Baudelaire and Mallarmé brings with it
questions about the degree to which his music, like their poetry,
might embody oblique reflections on the experience of nascent
modernity in fin-de-siècle France.
The following chapters, in retracing those events from the life
that seem most crucial to an understanding of Debussy the man,
will try to demonstrate through selective examples how even a
partial appreciation of the layers of poetic and allegorical meaning
in his works requires a willingness to listen to them with close,
readerly attention. Such a suggestion may fly in the face of his
12
occasional breezy claims to an ideal of expressive simplicity. But
one subsidiary theme of any Debussy biography will inevitably be
the unreliable, contradictory guidance he left us about his artistic
ambitions. Even the nationalistic signature ‘musicien français’ that
now runs across the Martel monument can only seem a slightly
deceptive rhetorical gesture in light of the diverse influences that
actually combined to forge this ‘French’ musical voice, which may
have indulged in patriotic bombast on one or two occasions but
more often sought to evoke what Debussy once called ‘an imaginary country, forever impossible to locate’.4
13
Debussy’s house of birth at 38 rue au Pain, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, now the Musée
Claude Debussy.
1
A Music that Clothes the Poetry
Childhood and First Musical Steps
It might seem logical to begin a search for the roots of Debussy’s
literary and musical inclinations by taking a short rer trip to SaintGermain-en-Laye, tucked in a broad loop of the Seine about a
dozen miles north-west of Paris. Birthplace of three French kings,
including the ‘Sun King’ Louis xiv himself, this rather grand suburb
today houses in a seventeenth-century house at 38 rue au Pain both
the offices of the tourist board and the numerous photographs,
documents and objets d’art that make up the Musée Claude Debussy.
It was in this same house that a first son, christened Achille-Claude,
was born on 22 August 1862 to the struggling proprietors of a china
shop, Manuel and Victorine Debussy.
The fact of birth aside, however, it is doubtful whether the air
of this elegant suburb retains much trace of the atmosphere that
first nourished an artistic sensibility. In truth, a seeker after those
originary scents might do better, first of all, to return to the metropolis and walk the streets of the Clichy district where, their
shopkeeping venture having failed, the family (augmented by
a daughter Adèle in 1863) moved two years after the birth of their
eldest child. And then, after following the Debussys (joined by a
second son, Emmanuel, in 1867) on a further move in 1868 to 69
rue St.-Honoré, not far from Manuel’s latest employment at a
printing company in the Magasins du Louvre, our seeker could
15
Achille-Claude
Debussy at the age
of five.
perhaps be persuaded to attempt a longer jaunt to Cannes in
the sunny south, where, during a stay with his mother’s sister
Clémentine some time in 1870 or 1871, music first entered the
life of Achille-Claude.
Apparently it was Debussy’s aunt Clémentine who ‘had the
strange idea’ of getting him to learn piano, which he began to do,
first of all, with an ‘old Italian professor named Cerutti’ – in fact,
as later biographers have established, a violinist in his early forties
then resident in Cannes.1 These first ventures showed promise
enough that the family began entertaining the possibility of an
alternative career for Achille than that initially envisioned as a
sailor. The next step in the unfolding of that career arose, ironically,
from the misfortune of his father back in Paris. While imprisoned
for his participation in the battles of the Commune against the
Thiers government, Manuel Debussy met the communard composer
16
of operettas and popular songs Charles de Sivry. On hearing of
young Achille-Claude’s musical gifts, de Sivry recommended as
a piano teacher his own mother, Antoinette Mauté.
The jury remains out regarding the precise shades of half-truth
in Mme Mauté’s claim to be a piano student of Frédéric Chopin.2
But whatever pedigree stood behind her methods, they were
remarkably successful in nurturing Debussy’s raw talents, over
little more than a year, to the point at which he could present
himself in 1872 for admission to the Paris Conservatoire. Whether
or not his success in securing one of the 33 places granted to the
157 applicants had something to do with a supporting letter his
father obtained from the senior composer Félicien David, it was
with dreams of a virtuoso career that the ten-year-old Debussy first
entered the most renowned institution of musical and dramatic
education in France.3
While it is easy enough to ‘join the dots’ from Debussy’s early
childhood to this entry into professional musical instruction – a
solicitous aunt; a first stab at musical rudiments with a jobbing
violinist; a fortuitous introduction to an inspiring teacher – the
sources of his literary affinities have proven harder to trace. The
oft-noted fact that he received no official education prior to his
studies at the Conservatoire was, in truth, hardly exceptional,
for compulsory childhood education would not be introduced in
France until 1881–2, with the passing of the so-called ‘Jules Ferry
laws’ (named for the reforming Minister of Education and Prime
Minister). About the family environment in which most early
education must have taken place we know very little. Manuel’s
enthusiasm for the operetta of Offenbach may have smoothed
his contact with de Sivry but hardly prefigured his son’s musical
ideals; Victorine’s aesthetic inclinations remain unknown. Still,
evidence of a home environment hospitable to the seeds of erudition might be extrapolated from the fact that the youngest
surviving son, Alfred (born 1870) later published a translation
17
of a different work, ‘The Staff and Scrip’, by the same Pre-Raphaelite
poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poem ‘The Blessed Damozel’
would be set by his brother in the early cantata La Damoiselle élue.4
The most tantalizing hint of early literary stimulus must again
be located in the person of Mme Mauté, Debussy’s piano teacher,
who was also the mother-in-law of Paul Verlaine – the one poet
the composer, in his mature years, would most often set to music.
Exactly at the time of Debussy’s piano lessons Verlaine was living
with his new wife, Mathilde, in her mother’s apartment at 14 rue
Nicolet, a few blocks from the Debussy household at 59 bis rue
Pigalle. Still, no-one has found evidence of contact between poet
and young pianist – let alone of any awareness on the latter’s part
of the torments Mathilde Verlaine was to suffer with the advent of
Arthur Rimbaud into her husband’s life in late 1871. At any rate,
not long after that infamous fin-de-siècle literary couple began its
extended spiral into tragedy by decamping to London in September
1872, Debussy left the first stage of his studies behind when he
joined the piano class of the respected Conservatoire professor
Antoine Marmontel.
Conservatoire i: Failure as a Pianist
The reminiscences that have come to us from Debussy’s student
colleagues portray an eccentric, clumsy figure, with a habit of
arriving late and breathless at Marmontel’s thrice-weekly piano
classes and playing in a bizarre, forced manner.5 Within a year or
two Marmontel seems to have had some success in bringing this
wildness under control, as evidenced by his reports on his pupil’s
‘true artistic temperament . . . with a promising future’.6 As if to
confirm this prediction, Debussy began to attain success on the
long ladder of awards with which the Conservatoire, through
annual competitions, marked the progression of its charges.
18
The piano competitions began well enough, when a ‘second
certificate of merit’ was awarded to the performance of Chopin’s
F minor concerto in 1874. But Debussy’s greater success, at this
point, came with a ‘third medal’ in solfège, his second main course
of study. Essentially, solfège (like the ‘tonic sol-fa’ method familiar
from ‘Doh, a deer’ in The Sound of Music) refers to the principle
of assigning syllables to musical pitches to facilitate sight-singing.
But the rigorous Conservatoire course extended far beyond singing
exercises to embrace a panoply of ‘aural gymnastics’ whose value to
Debussy’s development has been argued by one of his classmates,
Maurice Emmanuel:
There is no more effective assistant, for the creative imagination,
particularly if it is a quick-witted one, than the instantaneous
analysis – honed to an effortless facility – of a harmonic combination of sounds, however complex it may be. Because that
immediacy of perception has as a corollary a faculty of mental
representation that permits the musician to ‘hear,’ without
actually producing, the sound that he imagines.7
Emmanuel further notes how fortunate Debussy was in his teacher
of this ostensibly dry subject. Apparently Albert Lavignac (then only
27 years old, and a recent appointment) recognized a gifted pupil’s
exceptional interest in exercises that discouraged most others and
‘let him run ahead’ of the course as he searched in new chordal combinations for ‘true emotions’. Lavignac further assisted Debussy by
guiding him to compositional models that could best support such
a search: at one point, teacher and student became so involved in a
read-through of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser at the piano that they
had to stumble out through the darkened Conservatoire after it had
officially closed for the night.8
The combination of native gifts and Lavignac’s guidance lifted
Debussy quickly up this particular ladder, to a ‘first medal’ in solfège
19
in 1876. But the piano competitions did not proceed as smoothly.
1875 saw a single upward step, with a ‘first certificate of merit’; in
January of the following year, a first recorded public appearance at
a typical fin-de-siècle ‘concert-spectacle’ in the town of Chauny (accompanying a singer and a cellist, and playing in a Haydn piano trio) saw
the thirteen-year-old hailed as a prodigy.9 But although a ‘second
medal’ in piano, won in 1877 after failure to gain any award in 1876,
may have seemed to re-establish the desired ascent, it was not to be
followed by further success in 1878 and 1879. Such failure effectively
marked the end of Debussy’s ambitions as a professional virtuoso.
From late November 1877, Debussy had also begun attending the
harmony class of Émile Durand, author of an important harmony
textbook, and described by Emmanuel as the ‘dullest of pedagogues’.10 There is no doubt that Debussy chafed under Durand’s
strictures: years later, he would disdain textbook harmony for
‘unifying musical writing to the point that all musicians, with
very few exceptions, harmonize in the same manner’.11 But by
some accounts, Durand was able to express bemused interest in
the unorthodox experiments of this student.12 And on the evidence
of an offhand remark later reported by Emmanuel – ‘I don’t write
in the fugal style because I know it’ – Debussy was well aware that
his flouting of conventions was built on secure foundations.13 His
appreciation for the assistance of this ‘dullest’ of harmony teachers
in securing those foundations can be deduced from the amicable
dedication to Durand of his first large-scale composition, the Piano
Trio in G major of 1880.
Conservatoire ii: The Compositional Vocation
The fact that the eighteen-year-old Debussy saw fit to complete the
ample four-movement structure of this trio (published in a modern
edition in 1986) testifies to the conviction with which, at the end of
20
the 1870s, he turned from his dreams of a piano career to a new,
compositional vocation. Some of the impetus for this decision can
be located outside the Conservatoire, in a series of performing
positions Debussy undertook even as his dreams of official prizes
came to nothing. First, Marmontel secured him a summer placement playing piano at the splendid sixteenth-century castle of
Chenonceaux in the Loire valley, which had been purchased by the
wealthy Scottish engineer Daniel Wilson as a gift for his daughter.
With Marguerite Pelouze-Wilson, his employer through the
summer of 1879, Debussy encountered a particularly colourful
example of well-heeled artistic obsession. There is cause to believe
that each of her three passions – Flaubert’s writing, Italian painting
and the music of Wagner – left a trace on his developing aesthetic.
Debussy would later single out Flaubert as a favourite prose author;
one of his early works, Printemps, would be inspired by Botticelli’s
Primavera. But the more significant impact undoubtedly came from
Mme Pelouze-Wilson’s fervid advocacy of Wagner. Along with such
leading wagnéristes as the composers Vincent d’Indy and Augusta
Holmès, she had been part of the small group of ‘pilgrims’ from
France to Bayreuth for the inauguration of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876; she would repeat the same pilgrimage for five years in
succession even as she dissipated her fortune in grand parties and
decorative projects. As biographer François Lesure has suggested, it
is hard to imagine that this enthusiasm, encountered at white heat
by a young musician already drawn into the Wagnerian orbit by
his explorations with Lavignac, would not have played a key role
in consolidating his new vocation.14
The initial fruits of the new vocation were slender enough:
according to the reminiscences of a student colleague Paul Vidal,
Debussy’s first compositions, the songs ‘Madrid’ and ‘Ballade à la
lune’, can be dated to late 1879.15 While it is at least worthy of note
that Debussy began his career with song-writing, little in the fragments that remain of these settings of Alfred de Musset’s Romantic
21
poetry is particularly prophetic of future exquisite musical readings.16 Meanwhile, on the official side of things, Debussy found
himself up against another of the Conservatoire’s rules. Entry to
a composition class required a first prize in one of the officially
recognized ‘theory’ classes. After two years with Durand, it would
have been clear how unlikely he was to gain any such honour in
the realm of harmony. His decision to enrol in the accompaniment
class of Auguste-Ernest Bazille, on the other hand, quickly led to the
required result.
Here again, in this organist and former singing coach at the
Opéra-Comique Debussy seems to have found a teacher willing to
tolerate a certain amount of idiosyncrasy in a student who demonstrated ‘great facility’ along with ‘initiative and verve’.17 And here
again (as Emmanuel insisted) the dry label ‘accompanying’ belies
the value of a course whose rigour and range, under Bazille’s tutelage
– the improvisation of accompanying parts to a bass line or melody;
the transposition at sight of contemporary works; the pianistic
realization of complex orchestral scores – can well be described as
a ‘progression towards an integrally acquired métier’.18 Debussy’s
first prize, in 1880, sign of such a fluent, integrated métier, opened
the door to further study in composition.
But first, another summer abroad intervened. This time, Marmontel recommended him to the rich Russian widow Nadezhda
Filaretovna von Meck, who was seeking a piano teacher and vocal
accompanist for her children, as well as someone to share at the
piano her passion for the music of Tchaikovsky. In July 1880
Debussy joined Mme von Meck’s extensive ménage of family and
servants on one of her habitual peregrinations through European
luxury spots – first to Interlachen in Switzerland; then to Arcachon
on the French Atlantic coast; finally (via several interim stops) to
the opulent Villa Oppenheim in the hills above Florence. Writing
to Tchaikovksy (of whom she was a generous supporter) Mme
Meck singled out for praise not just the fluent score-reading ability
22
Nadezhda Filarotevna von
Meck, patron of
Tchaikovksy, and Debussy’s
employer for three summers while he was a
student at the Paris
Conservatoire.
of her Parisian ‘gamin’, but also the fact that he was ‘delighted’ with
Tchaikovksy’s music.19 The compliment would not be returned when,
having sent Debussy’s Danse bohémienne for piano to her hero, she
received by return only a sneer that ‘not a single thought is developed
to the end, the form is bungled, and there is no unity’.20
Besides this little Danse (and the four-hand arrangements from
Swan Lake for Mme von Meck, which apparently gained Debussy
a first publication) the more substantial compositional production
of this summer was the piano trio Debussy dedicated to Durand,
which was written for an ensemble – himself at the piano with two
Russian string players – Mme von Meck had set up to play for her
every evening in Florence.21 While undoubtedly light years removed
from the fully fledged mastery of, say, Mendelssohn’s Octet (another
chamber composition by a far more precocious teenager), this work
gives a pretty good illustration of the ‘imagination and verve’ Bazille
23
had admired in Debussy’s improvisatory explorations. The thematic
character of each movement is relatively well defined; the ensemble
treated with some flexibility; the inventive approach to traditional
forms only slightly marred by a few clumsy seams. Beyond the evidence of imagination and ambition in this one piece of juvenilia
it has occasionally proven tempting, in light of Mme von Meck’s
comment to Tchaikovksy that ‘I play [for him] constantly, and
everything I play is new to him’, to extrapolate a more general
significance from the three summers Debussy ultimately spent
in this peripatetic entourage.22 But her uneven appreciation for
the most recent music of her own country clouds any assumption
about the role of these private audiences in Debussy’s discovery
of the modern Russian music that was to prove a crucial counterweight to the Wagnerian seductions he had already begun to sense.23
A Teacher, a Muse and a Prize
Early in his correspondence with Mme von Meck, Debussy seems
to have embroidered his credentials by claiming to be a ‘premier
prix’ in piano and a composition student of Massenet, the most
eminent teacher at the Conservatoire.24 But after returning to his
studies in November 1880 he instead joined the newly established
class of Ernest Guiraud, a composer now known primarily for the
recitatives he composed to replace the spoken dialogue in Bizet’s
Carmen. Whether we choose to accept Vallas’s generous attribution
of a ‘broad-minded’ approach or Emmanuel’s accusation of an
‘incurable indolence,’ Guiraud was to prove a congenial teacher
who would shepherd Debussy through his three attempts at the
Conservatoire’s highest honour, the Prix de Rome, and remain a
friend up to his death in 1892.25
From the Conservatoire archives it is apparent that Debussy also
audited the organ classes of César Franck, then a highly influential
24
figure in the Société Nationale de Musique, founded a decade earlier
to foster the revival of French musical pride after the humiliations
of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Although we might expect Franck’s
emphasis on improvisation to have had some appeal, Debussy’s
patience for the Belgian composer’s endless ‘modulations’ (that is,
moving from key to key) seems to have quickly worn thin.26 The
more important influence on Debussy around 1880–81 again came
from outside the Conservatoire. Although he was still living in
the family home, his fondness for books and trinkets demanded
a regular income. On the recommendation of Vidal he took up a
position as accompanist for a singing school run by a former opera
singer, Victorine Moreau-Santi, for young well-to-do women.
Soon enough, in one not-quite-so-young student, Marie Vasnier
(the 32-year-old wife of an older ‘inspector of buildings’ Henri
Vasnier), Debussy encountered a woman who would become, over
the next few years, both his first significant romantic passion and
his first important muse. To be sure, between 1881 and the 1884
Prix de Rome, Debussy spent considerable time on instrumental
composition, completing four-hand versions of a Symphony in B
minor for Mme von Meck (of which only one movement survives)
and a few other orchestral works, as well as a Nocturne et scherzo
for cello and piano. But it was the 23 songs for voice and piano
he wrote for Marie Vasnier, along with about the same number
for other (or unnamed) dedicatees, that offered the most extensive
evidence of his developing compositional sensibility and the literary
interests that sustained it.
Imprecision about exact dates aside, some general trends can
be noted in this evolving literary exploration. First of all, Debussy
was much less interested in early Romantic poets than in the more
recent work of the Parnassian Théodore de Banville, who received
fully twelve settings between 1880 and early 1882 (including
Debussy’s first published song, ‘Nuit d’étoiles’). This particular
poetic penchant was to prove beneficial in indirect ways: one of
25
Paul Baudry’s 1882 oil
portrait of Marie Vasnier,
wife of an important supporter, early love interest
and dedicatee of many
youthful songs.
the composer’s closest friends, Raymond Bonheur – who had
come to Durand’s harmony class after beginning dramatic studies
at the Conservatoire – later recalled that he had first been drawn
to Debussy by the extraordinary sight in that context of a volume
of Banville in his hand.27 Amidst the poets he set less often in these
years, it is striking to note, alongside the other Parnassian Leconte
de Lisle, a writer much closer to Debussy’s own generation, Maurice
Bouchor (born 1855). Then, from late 1882 onwards, Banville would
be put aside as Debussy turned to a first cluster of settings of
Verlaine, a single setting of Mallarmé, and no less than eight settings of another nearer contemporary, Paul Bourget (a writer and
critic whose enthusiasm for English literature was likely influential
on Debussy), composed through late 1883, 1884 and into 1885.28
In light of their effusive dedications – for example, ‘To Madame
Vanier [sic], the only muse that has ever inspired me to something
26
resembling a musical sentiment (to speak only of that)’ – it is easy
to see some of these songs as direct emanations from the love affair
with Marie Vasnier.29 Compositionally, while the earliest songs
largely evince a relatively simple, Massenet- or Gounod-inspired
lyricism, the first settings of Verlaine (many of which were revised
years later) contain more than a hint at the refinement this poet
would inspire in the mature Debussy. Still, the most audacious
choice for a song lyric was undoubtedly Mallarmé’s early poem
‘Apparition’, whose serpentine, sonorously compacted sentences
hardly seem to invite melodic declamation:
La lune s’attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs
Rêvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs
Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes
De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles.
[The moon was grieving. Seraphim in tears / Dreaming, bow
in hand, in the calm of vaporous / Flowers, drew from faltering
viols / White sobs sliding over the blue of corollas.]
Debussy’s 1884 setting of these arch-Symbolist lines begins with
some anticipation of the delicacies and depths the same writer was
to inspire a decade later in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
Indeed, some characteristic inflections of his song style are already
audible in the dreamy, one-note incantation of the first three words
over delicately oscillating accompaniment (though the full-blooded
salon lyricism that launches the second stanza – ‘It was the blessed
day of your first kiss’ – is less prophetic).
Besides the liaison with Marie Vasner – and indeed, with the
whole Vasnier household, which became a second Parisian home
for Debussy – the years 1880–82 had also seen further travels with
Mme von Meck. The summer of 1881 had begun with a first trip to
Russia. For two months the family was largely based in Moscow,
27
but it seems Debussy joined them on at least one trip to the grand
estate of Mme von Meck’s daughter at Gourievo.30 Subsequently,
Mme Meck’s travels during October and November again brought
him to several great European cities – Vienna and Trieste, Venice
and Rome – before the entourage settled again, briefly, in Florence.
A particularly late return to his studies met with the censure of
Guiraud, in spite of Debussy’s dedication to his teacher of one
recent composition (an Ouverture Diane). Nonetheless, his newfound compositional fluency seems to have given him enough
confidence to attempt, for the first time, the preliminary test for
entry to the Prix de Rome competition.
The four-voice fugue and choral work (‘Salut, printemps’)
written for this first attempt did not win Debussy through to the
official competition. Undeterred, he proceeded to draft a series of
works through the spring and summer of 1882 (including further
piano pieces inspired by Banville, and a cantata Daniel), before
tearing himself away from the Vasniers’ summer villa in Ville
d’Avray for a third and last summer sojourn with Mme von Meck,
now at her estate outside Moscow. The most significant musical
discovery, this time, was likely the songs of Balakirev, which she
praised to Tchaikovksy not only for their ‘picturesque character,
which speaks to the imagination’ but also for the way their melodic
line ‘detaches itself against a distinct background’.31 It could be that
this latest Russian musical inspiration conjoined with the latest
poetic discovery in securing the artistic advance in the Verlaine
settings ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Mandoline’ Debussy brought back from
Russia. Another late return to Guiraud’s class found the teacher
newly back from Bayreuth, annoyed at the quasi-religious fervour he
had encountered – ‘If only you knew how terrible these Wagnerians
are!’ he complained to one correspondent, ‘even enthusiasm is
frowned upon . . . only ecstasy is tolerated’ – but bowled over by
the ‘beauties of the highest order’ in Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal.32
But of Debussy’s reactions to Guiraud’s reports of a work that
28
would remain, with Tristan und Isolde, a central touchstone of his
own ambitions we unfortunately know nothing.
In the spring of the same year, in the face of a report from
Guiraud that accused him of ‘writing music badly’, Debussy first
attempted a setting of a dramatic work by Banville, the ‘heroic
comedy’ Diane au bois.33 But Guiraud was quick to dissuade him
from this idiosyncratic venture in view of the more pressing need
to confront again the test for the Prix de Rome competition. This
time, Debussy’s fugue and choral setting of Lamartine’s ‘Invocation’
won him through to the competition proper. As was customary, the
five finalists were provided with a text for a cantata – Le gladiateur
by Emile Moreau – and housed in the Château de Compiègne just
outside Paris for 25 days to compose. When the resulting works
were performed before the Institut, the first prize was promptly
given to Debussy’s friend Paul Vidal. After lengthy debate, the jury
awarded the second prize to Debussy. (Some critics agreed, but at
least one recognized in his work the ‘most original personality’.34)
Debussy was gracious enough in defeat to invite Guiraud and Vidal
to a celebratory meal with his family, who fêted Vidal as warmly as
if he were one of their own children.35
Another paid appointment was the indirect result of the failure
to win top prize, for when Vidal left for the Rome residency that
came with his victory he put Debussy forward to replace him as
the regular accompanist for an amateur choral society. It is clear
from his letters of excuse to the choir’s director that Debussy was
not diligent in his attendance at weekly rehearsals. But he did
enough to hold onto a position that, beyond supplementing the
wages he was still receiving from Mme Moreau-Santi, also involved
him in the preparation of a vast range of choral repertoire extending from Palestrina to Gounod via Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn
and Liszt. Such hands-on experience was undoubtedly of value
as he approached, again, the last rung on the Conservatoire’s
ladder to success – especially in light of the vivid accounts we
29
Marcel Baschet’s 1884 pastel portrait of Debussy: the composer as Prix de
Rome laureate.
have received of his growing tendency, during the last year of study,
to entertain his peers with impishly rebellious improvisations.36
Guiraud managed to tame such indulgences enough for
Debussy to make it through the initial tests and into the Château
de Compiègne, again, as one of the five finalists for the 1884 Prix de
Rome. This time, his three weeks of work on the cantata L’Enfant
30
prodigue, with a text by Édouard Guinand, saw him crowned with
the first grand prize. Many have seen this success as the result of
a deliberate prize-winning strategy of conformance to official
expectations; indeed Debussy himself noted, on returning to the
cantata years later, the corrections needed to remove its odour of
‘the Conservatoire, and boredom’.37 But however clear its debts to
Gounod and Massenet may be, L’Enfant prodigue nonetheless projected enough artistic personality for at least one critic to recognize
the refined literary sensibility through the well-mannered veneer.
‘In making, so to speak, an abstraction of the assigned text,’ A. Héler
wrote in L’Art musical, ‘[Debussy] has dared to seek the colour of
the poetry.’38
Such a response is all the more striking in view of the relatively
colourless text Debussy had to work with. The parable in the Gospel
of Luke of the father who celebrates the return of his wayward
younger son (in spite of the eldest’s resentment) was significantly
adapted to official purposes by Guinand. Most notably, his addition
of the character of Lia, mother of the prodigal son Azaël, to the ‘scène
lyrique’ he concocted from the biblical original largely dissipates the
focus on an act of paternal forgiveness that had inspired, among
other things, one of the most touching of Rembrandt’s canvasses.
The emotional core of Guinand’s text becomes, instead, the moment
when Lia, bewailing her lost son, belatedly recognizes a ‘poor
stranger’ asleep on a riverbank.
Debussy’s treatment of this scene makes the most of what colour
there was to find in Guinand’s poetry. His progression from delicate
orchestral ‘light’ effects at ‘open your eyes’ through the swelling
sentimentality of the duo ‘Fortunate hours’ (culminating in the
joint pronouncement ‘Just like before, gives you her/his love!’)
demonstrates a fluency with broad emotional strokes, from operatic distress to the passionate warmth of maternal-filial union. But
Debussy’s ingenuity cannot quite save the first (maternal) moment
of forgiveness from seeming a bathetic irrelevance amidst the mutual
31
heart-on-sleeve effusions; the poignancy of a second, paternal
bestowal of mercy – already dulled by the faint sense of repetition
– is further undermined by Guinand’s decision to construct the
father, Siméon, as a rather portentous patriarch. Finally, the group
genuflection to a beneficent God Guinand tacked on as a finale may
have given Debussy a chance to show that his emotional palette
extended to tub-thumping joy, but it hardly did much for the
humane subtlety of the cantata as a whole.
Whatever its failings, L’Enfant prodigue amply demonstrated
Debussy’s ability to find rich musical equivalents even to poetic
colours less congenial than those painted by his preferred verbal
artists Banville, Verlaine and Bourget. Still, he seems to have been
aware that this last, successful negotiation of the Conservatoire’s
maze of rules and requirements was only the first step in a long
and difficult accommodation of his art to the strictures of French
musical officialdom. Years later, he recalled that after the performances of the cantatas he stepped away from the Institut to gaze
over the play of sunlight on the Seine from the Pont des Arts. When
a colleague broke his reverie to inform him of his success his first
feeling was that ‘all his joy was over’.39 His reluctance to abandon
Paris and his muse Marie Vasnier for two years is clear from the
fact that he delayed his departure for Rome until 28 January 1885
– and thus barely took up his residency before the last possible
date (31 January) stipulated by the rules.
When in Rome . . .
The idea that an ambitious young composer might profit from a
two-year residency in Rome may seem uncontroversial enough. But
it is worth noting that the Prix de Rome had originally been founded
(in 1663) out of reverence for the painting, sculpture and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. The 1803 expansion of the prize’s
32
remit to include music alongside the three initial fields rested
on less solid grounds. Given that Paris, not Rome, was the more
vibrant musical centre for a musician of Debussy’s ilk, it is easy
to understand his resistance to two years of ‘imprisonment’ in the
Villa Médicis. In their endless complaints of tedium and inability
to work, and their melodramatic comparisons of the Villa and its
directors to a prison and its gaolers, the letters he wrote to Paris
throughout the first months of his residency prove, at times, rather
tedious reading themselves. But they also hold forth intriguing
glimmers of the particularly exacting aesthetic inclinations that
were to nourish his mature style.
Henri Vasnier, the recipient of many plaintive missives, was
to prove a particularly important supporter through these years.
It was Vasnier who dissuaded Debussy more than once from giving
up on the hated residency, with its requirement of a series of works,
or envois, to be submitted yearly to the Institut des Beaux-Arts in
Paris. And it was to Vasnier that Debussy offered this candid glimpse
of his compositional vision as he wrestled with the ‘great, idiotic
verses’ of his first envoi, Zuléïma, based on a French adaptation of
Heinrich Heine’s Spanish-themed historical ballad Almansor:
I believe that I will never be able to enclose my music within an
overly rigid mould – I hasten to say that I am not speaking of
musical form, but simply from a literary perspective. I would
much prefer the kind of thing in which, so to speak, the action
will be sacrificed to a deliberately pursued expression of the sentiments of the soul, it seems to me that in that case music could
make itself more human, more like lived experience, and that
one could hollow out [creuser] and refine the means of delivery.40
Not only would the emphasis, here, on the ‘literary perspective’
recur again and again in these letters, but the final turn of phrase,
echoing Mallarmé’s obsessive desire to ‘creuser le vers’ (hollow out
33
the poetic verse), underlines the aesthetic affinity dimly exemplified
in the recent setting of ‘Apparition’.41 Already, Debussy is envisioning
a music of extreme literary refinement, and a ‘hollowing out’ of aesthetic means, based not on any wilful urge to preciosity but rather
on an ideal of the most ‘human’ expression of lived emotional
experience.
Mallarméan glimmers aside, at this early age Debussy’s ‘literary
perspective’ clearly admitted of other, equally strong beacons of
influence. For one thing, the similar ideal he expressed (in a slightly
later letter to Vasnier) of a music ‘supple enough, forceful enough,
to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul and the caprices
of dreams’, echoes the preface to Charles Baudelaire’s collection
Petits Poèmes en Prose so closely as to read like a misremembered
quotation.42 And as Debussy wearily testified to the intractable
nature of Zuléïma (which would be submitted, to withering critique,
but subsequently lost) he also returned again and again to discuss
similar struggles with Banville’s Diane au bois, a text whose greater
appeal was due in some part to the fact that it ‘did not in the slightest
recall the kind of poems that usually served for an envoi’.43
Although his setting of Diane au bois was to remain incomplete,
we owe to these more personally invested toils several further
succinct expressions of distinctive ambitions as a musical reader.
Vasnier, again, would receive a letter on the subject of Diane complaining of a ‘difficulty of inserting into as clear a form as possible
the thousand sensations of a character’.44 But it was to Claudius
Popelin, the father of one of Debussy’s comrades at the Villa, that
he scribbled one of the pithiest images of all. Rejecting a conventional approach to music for the theatre, Debussy claims to Popelin,
in late 1885, to be seeking ‘a music that, in a sense, clothes the poetry,
to convey the sensation of something truly lived’.45
For all its frustrations, the Rome sojourn thus offered Debussy
valuable time to temper his aesthetic ambitions. But any urge to
seek inspiration from the artistic riches on offer just outside the
34
Villa seems to have been short-lived. A letter of early 1885 expressed
Debussy’s awe before Michelangelo – ‘the modern pushed to its
ultimate limit’ – but soon enough, after the first of many brief
escapes to Paris, he was describing himself as ‘a man whom one
drags to the Sistine chapel as if to the scaffold’.46 As he agonized
between Zuléïma and Diane au bois over the ensuing months, the
efforts of the new director Hébert and his wife to enliven his stay
with cultural excursions only rendered the residency rather more
‘odious’ to him than it already was.47 By autumn, he was still
threatening demission, having temporarily lost the compositional
facility he had so recently possessed.
Musical inspiration was not wholly lacking. Debussy was often
called on to play at the Héberts’ social engagements – at times with
Vidal (Wagnerian explorations continued in four-hand performances of Die Meistersinger and Parsifal); at times accompanying
Hébert in Mozart’s violin sonatas; at times presenting his own
most recent songs. An experience of the Renaissance counterpoint
of Palestrina sung in a small, plain church reawakened the ideal of
musical-verbal alchemy: this music, Debussy enthused, ‘underlines
the sentiment of the words with an unheard-of profundity, and
occasionally, there are certain unrollings of melodic design that
convey the effect of illuminations of ancient missals’.48 In January
1886, a more up-to-date inspiration arrived at the Villa in the person
of the elderly Franz Liszt. The visit may not have begun on the
most auspicious note: as Vidal reported, Liszt fell asleep during
a performance of his Faust Symphony on two pianos by himself and
Debussy. Undeterred, they also performed for him the next day,
and were in the audience when he returned to the Villa to perform
three of his own pieces a few days later.49 The experience left
Debussy with a lifelong memory of Liszt’s distinctive pedalling
technique, which he described years later as ‘a kind of breathing’.50
Around the same time, the most recent Prix de Rome laureate,
Xavier Leroux, arrived to become with Debussy and Vidal an
35
‘inseparable trio’ who whiled away afternoons deciphering Bach’s
organ works and reciting Shakespeare and Banville.51 But such
congenial interactions in the Villa aside, it is clear that Debussy’s
aesthetic compass was still oriented towards Paris. The later months
of 1886 brought into view a new metropolitan correspondent in the
person of Émile Baron, bookseller in the rue de Rome. The letters
to Baron (which began, in September 1886, with the cry ‘I want to
see some Manet! And hear some Offenbach!’) are filled with requests
for books by various Symbolist authors – Moréas; Verlaine; Vignier;
Morice; Huysmans – as well as for issues of the numerous journals
that proliferated, at the time, in Parisian artistic circles.52 In light of
this further evidence of voracious, up-to-date literary interest, it is
surprising that Debussy, having abandoned Diane au bois, chose
for his second envoi a textless ‘symphonic suite’ for orchestra and
wordless chorus.
Describing this latest work, Printemps, in a letter to Baron
Debussy took pains to distance it from any literary programme:
I wanted to express the slow and difficult genesis of beings and
things in nature, then the expansive blossoming that culminates
in an explosive joy at being reborn to a new life, so to speak; all
this of course without programme, having a profound disdain
for music that is forced to follow some short literary work
which is solicitously provided to the audience on entering.53
Such disdain for music based on a ‘short literary work’ reads
strangely in retrospect given the refinement Debussy would produce half a dozen years later in his orchestral reading of Mallarmé’s
110-line poem L’après-midi d’un faune. More immediately, while
Debussy had also sought to avoid simple pictorialism (the title, he
claimed, should not imply a portrayal of spring ‘in the descriptive
sense’ but rather ‘from the human perspective’), one unfortunate
result of the second envoi was to be the first documented appearance
36
of the ‘Impressionist’ label that subsequently proved impossible
to dislodge. Debussy’s ‘feeling for musical colour is so strong that
he is apt to forget the importance of accuracy of line and form’,
asserted the official report on Printemps. ‘He should beware of this
vague impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies
of artistic truth.’54
Deceptive as it may be for the mature oeuvre, this first, critical
invocation of ‘impressionism’ was arguably a reasonable response
to Printemps. Given that Debussy did not actually complete the
envoi – he sent a partially orchestrated version, with a lame excuse
about the loss of the score in a fire – we know it now through a
much later version completed in collaboration with the younger
composer Henri Busser. Still, it is easy enough to understand why
this continuous proliferation of vaguely interrelated thematic wisps
across an awkwardly balanced two-movement form drew criticism
for amorphousness. Perhaps Debussy over-reached himself in
his desire, as he put it, ‘to give the most sensations possible’.55 Or
perhaps the grand canvas that stands behind this piece, with its
allegorical portrayal of Aphrodite and Cupid surrounded by Flora,
Zephyr and Mercury (among others), proved so capacious an
inspiration that Debussy’s music – which would later generally
show meticulous formal control – could only devolve into a diffuseness that ironically summoned reference to a pictorial aesthetic
radically different from Botticelli’s.
Back to Paris
Printemps would prove the last of the envois actually composed in
Rome, for in early 1887 Debussy left the Villa Medici for the last
time. Ironically, a first letter back to Hébert invoked the residency
with wistful nostalgia in the face of his peers’ more rapid achievements in the Parisian ‘bazaar of success’. But the same letter noted
37
Honoré Daumier’s 1868 caricature of typical wagnériste passions: ‘in munich:
After a solid hour of Wagner!!’
an intense re-engagement with Parisian culture. On the musical
side, a mixed orchestral programme at the Concerts Lamoureux
inspired Debussy to single out Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as ‘the
most beautiful work that I know, from the point of view of the
depth of the emotion, which embraces you like a caress, makes
you suffer’. On the literary side, a new production of Hamlet, with
the renowned actor Mounet-Sully, struck him as ‘just as beautiful
as ever’.56
Not long after Debussy’s return, the affair with Marie Vasnier
seems to have run its course. But at the same time, Debussy began
to find, or re-establish, friendships that would prove singularly
important through his early career and beyond. The younger
composer Paul Dukas was to prove particularly valued company
for his similar musical enthusiasms and a literary erudition that
extended to a shared admiration for Mallarmé. Around the same
time Debussy made the acquaintance of an older composer, Ernest
Chausson, a well-off student of Franck at the Conservatoire who
would become a key supporter over the next few years. The generosity of another wealthy acquaintance, Étienne Dupin, allowed
Debussy to take his first pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1888, where he
heard Parsifal and Die Meistersinger. The opportunity to socialize, on
the same trip, with many leading members of the Société Nationale
de Musique (which Debussy had officially joined in January) resulted
in a written agreement to provide a new orchestral piece for the
coming season.57
As it turned out, the first music by Debussy to be heard at a
Société nationale concert would actually be two of the five Verlaine
songs, Ariettes, he played with the tenor Maurice Bagès in Februrary
1889. Admirable early exemplars of his mature ‘Verlaine style’ as
these songs may be – revised in 1903 as Ariettes oubliées, the set
includes ‘C’est l’extase langoureuse’, one of the most sensuously
indulgent of all his songs – they can be seen as less significant in
the consolidation of his literary-musical sensibility than two other
39
musical readings that both took longer to find a hearing. The first
of these was his third Prix de Rome envoi, the cantata La Damoiselle
élue on Gabriel Sarrazin’s translation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
‘The Blessed Damozel’, which was completed and submitted in
1888 but not performed until 1893. The second was a more private
venture altogether: the Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, composed
over a year and more before eventually being published, in 1890, in
a privately funded luxury edition – and not given a complete public
performance until much later.
The choice of a Rossetti poem for the third envoi exemplifies the
fellow-feeling that flourished, briefly and intensely, between French
symbolist and English Pre-Raphaelite circles.58 Showing some of
the care for form and pacing that would later recur in his deft
excisions from Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy
pared down the poem’s 24 strophes to fourteen but retained the
basic three-part structure. An opening exchange between Chorus
and Narrator presents the eponymous ‘blessed damozel’ leaning
‘from the gold bar of Heaven’ amidst rising souls of recently dead
lovers; in a lengthy central solo she details her desire to be reunited
with her own lover ‘to live as once on earth with Love . . . for ever’;
a closing return to Chorus and Narrator notes the passing of the
light ‘fill’d with angels’, leaving her alone, face in hands, weeping.
Entering after an introductory series of exquisitely coloured
orchestral ‘panels’, Debussy’s four-part female chorus begins its
faintly hieratic declamation unaccompanied before proceeding
to gather, over time, a richly fluctuating garb of instrumental
support. The solo singing generally coils within narrow melodic
spans, only occasionally broadening (notably at the damozel’s
climactic invocation of Love ‘for ever’) to release a version of the
passion once given to Lia in L’Enfant prodigue. But the fleeting
appearance of such sentimental directness within this more
restrained environment only underlines the distance Debussy
has travelled between the two cantatas. The precious, mystical
40
imagery of the Pre-Raphaelite text allows for a sublimation of
lyrical expression to a higher, more oblique level – as, for example, in
the most captivating orchestral swell of the opening choral section,
which serves no emotive outburst but rather an eminently Rossettian synaesthetic image: ‘Her voice was like the voice the stars had
when they sang together.’
Lyrical details aside, the cantata also marked a significant step
forward in Debussy’s orchestral thinking. To usher in the damozel’s
solo, for example, a cor anglais passes its lilting melody to an oboe
that drifts down to a low note of arrival all-but inaudibly tinted by
an added flute. The pale flute hue then hovers briefly in isolation
until, after a brief breath of silence, the soprano voice enters (‘I
wish that he were come to me’) and retraces the same line of
descent. Similar deft timbral dialogue marks both the end of her
long utterance and the end of the entire poem, where, after the last
word ‘pleura’ (wept), a melody unfurls from cor anglais, to French
horn, to harp, before the strings utter a brief, hushed peroration.
Perhaps it was this fine attention to touches of orchestral
colour that led the members of the Institut, in revisiting the general
thrust of their critique of Printemps, to offer a telling new inflection.
This music, said the official report on La Damoiselle élue, was ‘not
without poetry or charm, for all that it again feels the effects of
those systematic tendencies currently fashionable in artistic
expression and form’.59 The querulous reference to ‘systematic
tendencies’ is striking: these were the years that saw the rise in
post-Impressionist circles of the so-called ‘pointillist’ style – that
is, the experiments by Paul Seurat and his followers in the systematic application of discrete touches of complementary colour.60
But whether or not Debussy would have secretly approved of this
implied association of his music with the most up-to-date painterly
explorations, his Rossetti cantata would ultimately remain more
securely associated with a different strand of post-Impressionism
due to the cover later provided for its first edition (1893) by the
41
young painter Maurice Denis. And when asked in 1889 to identify
his favourite painters for a questionnaire, Debussy named the
quattrocento muse of Printemps, Botticelli, along with Gustave
Moreau, then an éminence grise in Symbolist artistic circles whose
paintings of mythological scenes are more akin to the PreRaphaelites than to Seurat or Denis.61
In the same questionnaire, Debussy singled out Flaubert and
Poe as prose authors; Palestrina, Bach and Wagner as composers.
But in response to the question about favourite poets he gave only
one name: Baudelaire. This response reflects the centrality to his
thought, from late 1887 to early 1889, of the monumentally grand
Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, a set of five songs on poems
selected from the infamous collection Les Fleurs du mal. Given the
central role of Baudelaire’s writings in the growth of fin-de-siècle
wagnérisme from its marginal, partisan beginnings in the 1860s to
widespread mania in the ’80s it is appropriate that some of these
songs should feature Debussy’s most strenuous dialogues with
Wagnerian musical style.62 Debussy set his seal to this association
when, having secured a limited-edition publication through the
owner of an occult bookshop, Edmond Bailly, he dedicated the
songs to Étienne Dupin – a sponsor of the edition and also of his
first trip to Bayreuth in 1888.
Still, while the Wagnerian influence is unmistakable in the
uncharacteristically dense, quasi-orchestral writing of some piano
parts, the tendency to view these songs from this perspective alone
undersells their importance to Debussy’s development as a musical
reader. One early biographer, Louise Liebich, noted of La Damoiselle
élue that in spite of its riches, the cantata inevitably lacked any sense
of the finely crafted poetic ‘charm’ of Rossetti’s English original.63
In setting Baudelaire, Debussy now tackled some of the most potent
verbal music in French poetry. Of the five poems he selected from
Les Fleurs du mal, three pose direct challenges to compositional
ingenuity in their patterns of textual repetition. The other two are
42
sonnets, no less finely balanced between intensity of lyric utterance
and refinement of prosodic craft.
The challenge in the first poem, ‘Le Balcon’, arises from the selfenclosed, symmetrical structure of each stanza:
Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses,
O toi, tous mes plaisirs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!
Tu te rappeleras la beauté des caresses,
La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,
Mêre des souvenirs, maîtresses des maîtresses!
[Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses, / O you, all my
pleasures! o you, all my obligations! / You will remember the
beauty of caresses, / The comfort of the hearth and the charm
of the evenings / Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!]
This first stanza exemplifies the general principle whereby a
descriptive or declarative first-person utterance in the repeated
(first and last) lines frames a second-person address to the beloved.
A broad wave-like effect is created through the six stanzas, in which
an initial exclamation by the solitary lover on his balcony sets up,
each time, a dip into remembered intimacy, leading in turn to an
emergence to the same exclamation – now itself ambiguously
poised between reinforcement and recollection.
In Debussy’s reading of this formalized play with time and
intimacy, he keeps the vocal line the same for each of the repeated
lines but subtly varies the texture or harmony of the pianistic
backdrop. He further imparts his own formal rhythm to the whole
through audible interrelationships between the opening vocal
gestures of alternating stanzas. The low, declamatory style that
recurs for the second and fourth stanzas in stark contrast to the
sweeping soprano extravagances of the first and third, for example,
sensitively highlights Baudelaire’s long-range rhyme between ‘Les
43
soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon’ (evenings illuminated by the
glow of the coal, stanza 2) and ‘La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une
cloison’ (the night was thickening like a wall, stanza 4). The most
musical flexibility, finally, is appropriately saved for Baudelaire’s
closing stanza, where the voice, too, is partly freed from its repetitions to capture the altered expressive force from first line – ‘Ces
serments, ces parfums’ (those sermons, those perfumes) – to last:
‘O serments! ô parfums!’
The other songs show comparable ingenuity. In the second,
‘Harmonie du soir’ (whose third line ‘the sounds and perfumes
turn in the evening air’ would later provide the epigraph for one
of Debussy’s piano preludes), the poem’s pantoum form – where
the second and fourth lines of each four-line stanza become the
first and third of the next – draws the reader directly into the
‘languorous vertigo’ it evokes. Debussy sets the many repeated
lines with a fluctuation between near-exact recollection and unpredictable variation – thus enacting, in the evanescent sounds
of his music, the imperfection of reminiscence that is the poem’s
main theme. In the delicately lyrical third song, ‘Le Jet d’eau’, the
refrain that recurs between passionate stanzas to invoke a fountain
– ‘the spray of water that soothes its thousand flowers’ – draws from
Debussy a melody of simple, folk-like innocence. Having changed
one word of the refrain – ‘lueurs’ (glimmers) becomes ‘pâleurs’
(palenesses) – he saves his most delicate harmonic shudder for
this word’s last appearance.64 As for the two sonnets, finally, it is
enough to single out the similar depth of response to a single word
in ‘Recueillement’ (Contemplation), where, after the halting, fragmentary setting of the first line, the second – ‘You called for the
night; it descends; here it is’ – settles onto a crystalline chord of
arrival like a gift. A hint at the composer’s symbolic motivations
emerges when the same chord recurs, resonantly rescored, to launch
the beautiful final image: ‘And, like a long shroud trailing toward
the east / Hear, my dear, hear the footsteps of the gentle night.’
44
It has been said that the Baudelaire songs stand somewhat
outside the mainstream of Debussy’s development, and there is
no doubt that Verlaine’s understated verse proved a more lasting
resource in his consolidation of a song style oriented more towards
‘declamation’ than traditional ‘singing’.65 (A crucial step in this
consolidation was to occur with his return to Verlaine in 1890–91
for the Trois mélodies de Paul Verlaine and the first volume of Fêtes
galantes). But to recall Debussy’s Baudelairean invocation to Vasnier
of an ideal music ‘supple enough, forceful enough, to adapt itself to
the lyrical movements of the soul and the caprices of dreams’, the
prosodic suppleness and expressive force of his selections from Les
Fleurs du mal offered him an ideal textual forum to test the limits
of his lyrical powers as he grappled head-on with the overweening
model of Wagner. Alongside the orchestral refinement of La
Damoiselle élue, the formal ingenuity of his Cinq Poèmes invaluably
tempered Debussy’s readerly resources as he moved on to even
richer acts of poetic appropriation.
A Pivotal Time
During the few years just before and after 1890 several new inspirations came into Debussy’s life. All through the summer of 1889,
the brand new Eiffel Tower – iron-strutted monument to industrial
modernity – presided over the International Exhibition on the
Champ de Mars. Debussy spent long afternoons with his old
friends Bonheur and Dukas and a newer acquaintance, Robert
Godet (a Swiss linguist who would become a lifelong correspondent), perusing the exotic musical entertainments clustered on
the Left Bank of the Seine. In part, this was an opportunity to
refresh his enthusiasm for Russian music, and add a first taste
of Mussorgsky, at the orchestral concerts conducted by Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov. But more startling revelations came from two
45
Far Eastern productions: the intricate percussion music of the
Javanese gamelan – years later Debussy would recall the ‘counterpoint that makes Palestrina look like child’s play’ – and the theatre
troupe from Annam (now Vietnam) whose dramatic spectacle and
piercingly expressive instrumentation inspired Debussy, according
to Godet, to ‘irreverent comparisons with Bayreuth’.66
Coming exactly at the time of his Baudelaire songs, these
revelations of radically different musical conceptions may have
played some role in Debussy’s attainment, around this time, of
a more manageable aesthetic distance from Wagner. A second
trip to Bayreuth in August 1889 resulted in a letter to Guiraud
sarcastically bemoaning the fact that Wagner had not ‘supped
with Pluto’ after composing Meistersinger – that is, before finishing
the ‘tricky contraption’ of Der Ring des Nibelungen – and woefully
admitting a growing detachment even from his ‘beloved Tristan’.67
But Debussy was never to resolve his relationship to this particular precursor in any simple fashion. Soon after the second
Bayreuth trip, Emmanuel jotted down some conversations between
Debussy and Guiraud that clearly encapsulated his lasting ambivalence. On one hand, Debussy was eager to relegate Wagner to
a ‘classical’ past:
Wagner develops in the classical manner. In the place of the
architectural themes of a symphony, occurring at specified
points, he has themes representing things and people, but he
develops these themes in a symphonic manner. He derives
from Bach and Beethoven, as we see in Tristan and Meistersinger
– to say nothing of his orchestra which is a development and
enlargement of the classical orchestra.68
But on the other hand, he continually evokes Tristan as a model
for musical themes that ‘do no violence to the action’ and even
‘suggest the visual scene’.69 This contradictory perspective on
46
Wagnerian ‘themes’ would persist right through to his polemical
defences of his own opera over a decade later.
To his credit, Debussy was willing to acknowledge his own
contradictions. As Emmanuel reports it, after his ringing calls
for a music ‘neither major nor minor’ whose ‘rhythms cannot
be contained within bars’ led him in turn to a series of portentous
claims – ‘there is no theory’; ‘pleasure is the law’; ‘music cannot be
learnt’ – Guiraud saw fit to remind him that he had, actually, spent
ten years at the Conservatoire. ‘I can’t reconcile all this’, Debussy
frankly admitted, and acknowledged that he could only claim such
freedom ‘because I have been through the mill’.70 In truth, by this
point he had not quite emerged from the ‘mill’, for it was only in
1890 that he completed his fourth and final Prix de Rome envoi, a
Fantaisie for piano and orchestra in which many have heard the
most direct influence, in any of his works, of the Javanese gamelan.71
The Fantaisie was another work that long remained unperformed, for on learning that Vincent d’Indy, the conductor of
the intended Société nationale premiere, was planning to cut two
of the three movements for reasons of timing, Debussy withdrew
the orchestral parts. His explanation, that he would prefer ‘a
sufficient performance of three movements over a satisfying one
of the first alone’, is understandable given that the work makes
use of the ‘cyclic’ principle of unity d’Indy himself championed,
on the model of César Franck, for French instrumental music.72
(To put it simply, cyclic works feature a recurrence of the main
thematic material from movement to movement.) But there may
have been deeper reasons for the decision, for while the Fantaisie
was to find a marginal place in the concerto repertoire after its
posthumous premiere, the shallow influence of gamelan style
arguably does little to enrich the problematic dramatic unfolding
later characterized by Debussy in a letter to the younger composer Edgard Varèse as a ‘slightly ridiculous struggle’ between
piano and orchestra.73
47
With Debussy’s failure to submit the Fantaisie to the Institut
and his refusal to write an overture for an official concert of his
envois, his Conservatoire years dwindled to an anticlimactic close.
Supporting himself in part by hack work writing piano arrangements of Saint-Saëns, Schumann and Wagner for the music
publishers Durand, and in part by selling several minor piano
pieces, he turned enthusiastically to the Bohemian nightlife of
Paris’s cafés, cabarets and taverns. An encounter with dramatist
Gabriel Mourey at the Taverne Weber would lead to various
abortive proposals for collaboration; at the Chat Noir, a nightclub
famed for exotic entertainments, he met a more significant musical
friend in the eccentric pianist and composer Erik Satie. Some have
argued that Satie’s iconoclastic music – forged in part on a cabaret
piano, in part at the ‘Salon de la Rose et Croix’ of the Sâr Peladan,
one of the fin de siècle’s many self-aggrandizing mystics – had a
catalysing influence on Debussy’s radical harmonic explorations;
indeed Satie would later style himself ‘The Precursor’. While the
depth of this influence has arguably been overstated, it is clear
from a dedicated copy of the Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire –
‘For Erik Satie, graceful medieval musician, who has strayed into
this century, for the joy of his beloved friend Claude-A Debussy’ –
that Debussy found much inspiration in this interaction with a more
resolutely marginal model of avant-garde musical life, even as he
struggled to find a place for his more refined radicalism within
Paris’s mainstream musical institutions.
The struggle was to be aided in unpredictable ways by the
circulation of the Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire in musicoliterary circles. In the first place, the arch-wagnériste poet, novelist
and playwright Catulle Mendès was so struck by the experience of
Debussy’s ‘musiques baudelairiennes’ at a private performance chez
Chausson that he sought him out with an opera libretto cobbled
together out of various sources including Corneille’s Le Cid. The
cultural prominence of Mendès, who had previously provided
48
librettos for operas by Chabrier and Massenet (and later became
a chronicler of literary Symbolism), may partly explain Debussy’s
agreement to begin work on the opera, Rodrigue et Chimène.74 But
his persistence with the project through nearly three years of exasperated labour is nonetheless somewhat baffling from a literary
and musical perspective.
In his conversations with Guiraud not long before, Debussy
had sketched a vision of his ideal librettist:
One who only hints at what is to be said. The ideal would be
two associated dreams. No place, nor time. No big scene. No
compulsion on the musician, who must complete and give
body to the work of the poet . . . A painting executed in grey is
the ideal. No developments merely for the sake of developments
. . . No discussion or arguments between the characters whom
I see at the mercy of life or destiny.75
Eerily prophetic of the Maeterlinck play Debussy would eventually
set in Pelléas et Mélisande, this description could not be further
removed from the Mendès libretto Dukas described as a ‘motley
assortment of Parnassian bric-à-brac and Spanish barbarism’.76
In fact, Mendès had once propounded, in an 1876 article on ways
to avoid slavish Wagnerian imitation, a few general points about
operatic aesthetics – for example the need to draw ‘poetry and
music into intimate union’ and to break ‘the framework of the old
symmetrical melody’ – vaguely in line with Debussyan ideals. But
beyond such superficial overlap the true aesthetic distance between
the two is clear, for example, from Mendès’s description of the
modern orchestra as a ‘great vat, in which all the molten elements
of the drama may be heard seething together’ – and indeed his
emphasis on a ‘lofty heroic action’ and a ‘great final emotion’.77
It is impossible to judge Debussy’s instrumental conception of
Rodrigue et Chimène against Mendès’s ‘great vat’, for he had not yet
49
orchestrated his draft of three acts when he abandoned the opera
some time in 1893. Regarding his handling of action and emotion,
on the other hand, it is clear from the performing version by musicologist Richard Langham Smith and composer Edison Denisov
(premiered in 1993 by the Opéra de Lyon) that Debussy’s lengthy
period of work on ‘this Opera, in which everything is against me’
was not without value.78 Seen as a kind of personal ‘test opera’
that reached reasonably complete dramatic shape, at least, before
Debussy put it aside in favour of a more congenial libretto, there is
actually plenty in Rodrigue to admire. Apart from certain longueurs
(not all solely attributable to Mendès) the pacing within and
between scenes is generally deft; the range of affect is broad,
extending from delicately hieratic choral writing reminiscent of
La Damoiselle élue through to a boisterous drinking song and a
blazingly bombastic crowd scene.
One particularly effective portrayal of ‘the thousand sensations
of a character’ – to recall Debussy’s vision for Diane au bois – occurs
at the pivotal moment of Act ii when the hero Rodrigue, summoned
to revenge an insult to his father Don Diègue by Don Gomez, father
of his beloved Chimènes, is plunged into tortured indecision over
the conflicting pressures of duty and love. Mendès could hardly
have marked out the conflict more broadly. But even so, Debussy’s
sensitive pacing, for example in the delicately poised silence after
‘The father of . . .’ and the soft vocal blossoming on ‘Chimène’
when Rodrigue finally utters the name several dramatic phrases
later, helps unearth as much ‘character’ as could be found in the
hackneyed language. Later, he also manages to impart considerable
nobility to the dying breaths of Don Gomez, dramatically offsetting
the unaccompanied cry when Chimènes realizes that she is bound
by custom to seek her lover’s death in return.
Such evidence of dramatic care aside, the possibility that Debussy
set some store by his labours on Rodrigue et Chimène is borne out
by his dedication of the draft score to a significant new figure in his
50
life. ‘To Mademoiselle Gabrielle Dupont’ reads the dedication on
the first act, dated April 1890. A green-eyed milliner from Normandy
described by Debussy’s friend René Peter as ‘the least frivolous
blonde he ever met’, Gabrielle, or Gaby, who met him early in
1890, soon became involved in a romantic partnership that would
last almost to the end of the century.79 No doubt their relationship
was a key stimulus for Debussy’s decision, finally, to leave the family
home. In June 1891, he and Gaby moved together into a sparsely
furnished apartment at 42 rue de Londres.
Flimsy recompense as it might seem, the dedication of Rodrigue
can thus be read as an initial sign of the gratitude Debussy would
eventually owe Gaby for her stoic support during the years in which,
from the shakiest of material circumstances, he produced the compositional readings that secured his place in music history. The
first of these arose, again, from the impact of the Baudelaire songs.
During a meeting at a café, the symbolist poet A.-Ferdinand Hérold
told Debussy he had shown the songs to another writer closely
connected to French wagnériste circles. Apparently Stéphane
Mallarmé – who had composed a profound homage to Baudelaire
in his prose ‘Literary Symphony’ as long ago as 1865 – was so struck
by the musical ambition in these settings from Les Fleurs du mal
that he implored Hérold to ask Debussy to collaborate on a musicodramatic presentation of his own famous Eclogue, L’après-midi d’un
faune.80 Although this production was never to take the stage, the
opportunity to work closely with the most exacting literary thinker
of his day was to prove of crucial significance in Debussy’s ongoing
search for a music that ‘clothes the poetry, to convey the sensation
of something truly lived’.
51
2
A Dream from Which One Draws
Back the Veils
An effusive letter of February 1893 from Debussy to the wealthy
businessman and fellow Mallarméan André Poniatowski captures
the combination of professional insecurity and aesthetic intransigence with which he entered into his thirties. On the material side
of things, he complained of the ‘war of pinpricks’ he was suffering
from his family, who found him ‘a much too unproductive son,
at least as concerns glory’. But even as he acknowledged that the
‘castles in Spain that had been built on the anticipation of my
future glory have sadly collapsed into the water’, he gazed out
on the more successful musical productions of the season with
a jaundiced eye.1
Established figures and newer arrivals were equally subject to
scorn. The premiere of Massenet’s opera Werther, based on Goethe’s
novel, inspired a harangue against the misappropriation of great
literature:
[It exemplifies] that deplorable habit that consists in taking
something that has its own high quality, and mistranslating
its spirit into facile, amiable sentimentalities; it is the same
old story of Faust butchered by Gounod, or Hamlet unluckily
deranged by M. Ambroise Thomas. Truly one condemns
such people who fabricate false bank notes out of the work
of their betters.
52
To this premonitory hint at the respect with which he himself
would approach the work of his literary ‘betters’ Mallarmé and
Maeterlinck, Debussy added a prudish sniff at recent ‘realistic’
musical trends. ‘What you cannot imagine’, he wrote about the
‘symphony-drama’ La Vie du Poète by a close contemporary Gustave
Charpentier, ‘is the lack of taste shown by the work. To give a
little example, the last movement of the symphony represents the
Moulin-Rouge, where the Poet (hard to believe, I know) has washed
up in failure; there is even a prostitute uttering orgasmic cries!’ In
the face of such shallow literalism, and of the ‘snobs’ who ‘in fear
of passing for cretins’ hailed Charpentier’s work as a masterpiece,
Debussy hurled a characteristic outburst: ‘Music! It is a dream
from which one draws back the veils! It is not the expression of
a sentiment, it is the sentiment itself!’
It is not always easy to imagine from such assertions what
would have qualified as music that attained to Debussy’s dream.
Here, while excoriating Charpentier for ‘dragging music through
the mud’, he raised the familiar foil of Palestrina, in whose music
‘the emotion is not translated (as it has come to be since) by cries,
but by melodic arabesques – in other words, we might say, by the
actual contour’. The ensuing decade was to see the completion of
several works that, in their deployment of flexible melodic contour,
would come to define the Debussyan ‘arabesque’. In the shorter
term, the letter to Poniatowski ended by prematurely announcing
the completion of a string quartet and a set of songs. The quartet
was to become a central work in the repertoire. The songs, ironically,
proved less successful.
The irony springs from the fact that the texts for the Proses
lyriques were written by Debussy himself. This Wagnerian adoption
of a double role might have been expected to deliver a strong
exemplification of the strict standards he was applying to others.
But while the texts were deemed at the time of enough merit to be
published in a journal edited by the poets Francis Vielé-Griffin and
53
Henri de Régnier, they read now as the predictable pastiches of a
secondary literary métier.2 Alongside their Baudelairean sensuality,
Verlainian delicacy and Rossettian mysticism, the most striking
addition to Debussy’s poetic palette in the Proses lyriques is the
glimpse, in the last, of a more up-to-date, realistic sense of modern
urban recreation:
Sunday, the stations are crazy!
Everyone is under way
For the suburbs of adventure,
Saying goodbye to each other
With bewildered gestures!
Sunday the trains run quickly,
Devoured by insatiable tunnels;
And the good signals on the roads
Exchange with a single eye,
Mechanical impressions.
The kinship between this vision of Sunday departures and the
famous depiction of the ‘suburbs of adventure’ in Seurat’s 1886
canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte suggests
some sensitivity, on Debussy’s part, to contemporary social concerns.3 But musically, several moments in these songs bring to
mind his own strictures about expression. In the closing lines of
the first (‘Of Dream’), for example, a restrained setting of the nod
to Parsifal (‘The knights have died / On the road to the Grail!’)
prepares a bizarre image (‘Hands so mad, so frail, / In the days
when swords sang for them!’) expressed through overwrought
climactic leaps. Similar bathetic excess emerges for the imprecation
‘Come! Come! Hands of salvation!/ To break the panes of falsehood,
/ To break the panes of wickedness’ late in the fourth song (‘Of
flowers’). To put it ungenerously, the Proses lyriques can be said to
illustrate the degree to which Debussy was dependent upon verbal
54
material crafted by his literary betters as a stimulus to effective
compositional readings.
At this point, indeed, his work on the most challenging of
all such material, Mallarmé’s long poem L’après-midi d’un faune,
was well under way. According to Poniatowski, ‘long discussions’
between poet and composer had begun as early as 1890.4 But the
fruit of these discussions had yet to find its final form. When the
vocal score of La Damoiselle élue was first published in 1893 it
included an announcement of a forthcoming multipart work:
‘In preparation, Prelude, Interludes, and Final Paraphrase for
L’après-midi d’un faune’.
A Concert, a Play and a New Friendship
While the Prélude Debussy eventually distilled from this elaborate
vision would not be heard for many months, La Damoiselle élue
belatedly received its premiere at the Société nationale on 8 April
1893. The warm response of Vincent d’Indy, director of the Société,
was to prove of great practical value. Amidst the mixed responses
of the critics, at least one – Charles Darcours, in Le Figaro – was
able to celebrate this ‘sensual, decadent, even somewhat over-ripe’
work as a valuable infusion of new blood to the venerable society.5
But the most immediate benefit of the concert was a more private
one. The close contact between Debussy and Ernest Chausson,
whose Poème de l’amour et la mer appeared on the same programme,
led to a significant deepening of their friendship. Over somewhat
more than a year, dozens of letters would testify to the importance
of a relationship which, though never attaining the intimacy of a
tutoiement, was to prove a crucial support during difficult times.
In the weeks following the Damoiselle premiere Debussy, who
had not yet abandoned Rodrigue et Chimène, took part in another
of Mendès’s wagnériste projects. A series of public lectures on Das
55
Rheingold and Die Walküre featured musical examples played on
two pianos by Debussy and Raul Pugno, a one-time prodigy who
was then reviving his virtuoso piano career. Although widely seen
as a great success this venture only deepened Debussy’s disillusionment with his librettist’s inveterate self-aggrandizement. In a wry
note to Chausson about Mendès’s tendency to glorify Wagner’s
poetry over his music, Debussy suggested that it all seemed a
roundabout way of saying that ‘if he, Mendès, had not made any
music, that was because one could do quite well without it’.6
Happily, just as his exasperation with Mendès was becoming
terminal, Debussy first encountered a play that seemed the perfect
embodiment of the dramatic ideals he had envisioned in discussion
with Guiraud. He had, in fact, previously sought unsuccessfully
to use a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, La Princesse Maleine, as an
opera libretto. Now, in 1893, his attendance at the first Parisian
production of the same author’s Pelléas et Mélisande – whose printed
text he had already possessed for some months – was to inspire
new musico-dramatic ideas that would prove pivotal for his own
career and for the history of modern opera. Strangely, Debussy
made no mention of this experience when writing to Chausson of
his entrapment in ‘banal occupations’.7 But the closer contact with
Chausson was immediately to bring with it a musical discovery of
great significance for his consolidation of his operatic aesthetic.
In a letter of 24 May that anticipated Debussy’s pending visit
to Chausson’s country estate at Luzancy, Chausson noted that
‘the new Mussorgsky works will probably be here.’8 There has
been some debate about the history of Debussy’s encounters with
Mussorgsky’s music (for one thing, he later insisted to the critic
Pierre Lalo that this name had never been invoked during his
youthful travels in Russia).9 But it is clear that a significant new
phase in his appreciation for a composer who was, over time,
to displace Wagner in his musical pantheon was reached during
lengthy evenings spent playing through Mussorgsky’s opera Boris
56
Ernest Chausson
and his wife Jeanne.
The well-off older
composer was an
important supporter
for a brief period in
the early 1890s.
Godunov during two short stays in the country with Chausson,
Bonheur and Chausson’s brother-in-law Henri Lerolle (another
important supporter) in the early summer of 1893.
Soon after his return from this ‘suburban adventure’ Debussy
and Gaby moved to a new apartment at 10 rue Gustave-Doré, in
the north-west corner of Paris, where they would remain throughout the remaining years of their liaison. A fortnight later he learned
that his attempt, through Henri de Régnier, to secure Maeterlinck’s
permission for an opera on Pelléas et Mélisande had been successful.
After playing through the incomplete Rodrigue one last time for
Dukas, who appreciated the dramatic breadth of some scenes but
found the libretto vapid, he finally put Mendès aside in favour of
Maeterlinck.10 Chausson, caught in endless toils on his own opera
Le Roi Arthus, could only respond with envy at the early progress
reports: ‘One scene of Pelléas completed! And the fourth Prose
57
Debussy at the piano during an 1893 summer visit to the Chausson estate at
Luzancy. One crucial discovery was Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.
lyrique! How quickly you are proceeding!’11 But Debussy was soon
confessing that his struggles to shake off the Wagnerian yoke were
not yet over. ‘The ghost of old Klingsor alias R. Wagner appeared
in one bar’, he wrote in early October, ‘and I had to tear it all up
and begin again, in search of a delicate chemistry of more personal
phrases. Forcing myself to become just as much Pelléas et Mélisande, I have been searching for music behind all the veils it
gathers around itself, even for its most ardent devotees.’12
58
Musical Societies, Esoteric and Otherwise
The recurrence, here, of the image previously invoked to
Poniatowski – ‘Music! It is a dream from which one draws back
the veils!’ – underlines the recalcitrance with which Debussy clung
to idealistic visions even in the most precarious circumstances. At
times, his idealism shaded into elitist disdain. Reporting on some
of de Régnier’s musings about the way certain French words had
become tarnished through over-use, for example, Debussy suggested
to Chausson that a similar case could be made for certain ‘banalized’
musical harmonies. In this light, he insisted:
Truly music should have been a hermetic science, guarded by
texts requiring such long and difficult interpretation that it
would surely have discouraged the mob of people that treat it
with the same thoughtlessness they use when reaching for a
pocket handkerchief! . . . Instead of searching to open up Art
to the public, I propose the foundation of a ‘Society of Musical
Esotericism’.13
While it may be possible to discern some characteristic irony
here, it is harder to salvage the distasteful overtones that emerge
later when, calling for a ‘school of Neomusicians’ devoted to the
integrity of ‘the admirable symbols of music’, Debussy blames the
degradation of taste he saw all around on ‘the motto inscribed on
all our monuments: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – wonderful words,
fit for cab drivers at best!’14
It would be simplistic to read such rhetoric as a clue to strong
anti-Republican beliefs. A growing cultural nationalism aside,
Debussy’s political inclinations never received coherent formulation. His vision of a ‘Society for Musical Esotericism’ is better read
as a telling emanation from a pivotal moment in the evolution of
European art music, during which the tradition of broadly accessible
59
expression that had culminated in the intoxications of late-nineteenth-century wagnérisme was giving way to a newly problematic
relationship between avant-garde composers and the concert-going
public. Chausson, who was quick to dismiss Debussy’s self-doubts
with an assertion that ‘your music is of an essentially modern,
and refined, sensibility’, may be credited for sensing some of the
refinement with which Debussy would capture, in the series of
major works that first took shape around 1893, an exemplary
modern tension between esoteric and popular musical ideals.15
Even as Debussy’s correspondence with Chausson entered its
most involved phase, he began a second friendship that was to
prove just as significant during the evolution of these works. Pierre
Louÿs, a somewhat younger writer, had also been an habitué of the
Bailly bookstore and Mallarmé’s Tuesday evening soirées (the socalled mardis). In late 1893 his friendship with Debussy also took
on new warmth, and progressed rapidly to the tutoiement never
shared with Chausson. In early November, Debussy and Louÿs
travelled together to Brussels to visit the esteemed violinist Eugène
Ysaÿe, who was soon to premiere Debussy’s string quartet; then
to Ghent, for a meeting with Maeterlinck. Louÿs gave conflicting
reports of the latter ‘marvellous’ encounter, claiming at one point
that the timidity of composer and playwright alike had effectively
made him the spokesman for both.16 But while Debussy also noted
Maeterlinck’s skittishness in his account to Chausson, he went on
praise his surprisingly helpful suggestions about possible cuts to
the play.17
Back in Paris, work proceeded both on the new opera and the
string quartet, for which Debussy had recently secured a publishing
contract. He played and sang the first completed scenes of Pelléas
et Mélisande for Lerolle and Bonheur, but not for Dukas, whose
exacting opinion he wished to save for a more advanced stage.
After much strenuous revision, the string quartet was premiered
by the Ysaÿe quartet at the Société nationale on 29 December 1893,
60
alongside works by Franck and d’Indy. In the critical response,
guarded appreciation mixed with bafflement at Debussy’s ‘ingenuity’, ‘subtlety’ and ‘delicacy of thought’.18 In other words, this
exuberantly inventive and colourful work was initially received as
an embodiment of the esotericism Debussy had hailed in his letter
to Chausson. Chausson himself, who was to have been the dedicatee,
seems from Debussy’s pained response to have shared that reaction.
Dedicating the work instead to the Ysaÿe quartet, Debussy promised
to write him a ‘nobler’ replacement.19 But he would not return to
significant chamber music composition for over two decades.
In the ensuing months Debussy circulated through musical
milieux that differed, to varying degrees, from his ideal ‘Society for
Musical Esotericism’. The aesthetic profile of the factional Société
nationale, first of all, is best described as somewhat contradictory.
Chausson admitted to Debussy that his own compositional shortcomings could be blamed in part on ‘the aesthetic of the Société’,
whose concerts ‘resemble, at times, a sort of doctoral examination’
– but affirmed nonetheless that it was, all the same, ‘the place in
Paris where one hears the best modern music’.20 Debussy, while
developing his ambivalent relationship to the Société, confronted
a different flavour of exclusivity at the ‘Wagnerian séances’ hosted by Chausson’s mother-in-law Mme Escudier in her elegant
apartment near the Parc Monceau, where he played several music
dramas at the piano, and at the fashionable soirées of various society
hostesses, where he presented his own music.
In spite of his previous high society experience with Mme von
Meck, it was with a mixture of bemusement and disgust that
Debussy now wrote to Chausson:
I hardly recognize myself! I am now to be seen in the salons,
making appropriate smiles, or imagine, I am directing choruses
at the house of the countess Zamoiska! (yes sir!) . . . there is also
Mme de St. Marceaux who has decided that I am a talent of the
61
first order! It is all to die laughing! But truly one would have to
be terribly weak of soul to allow oneself to become stuck in this
kind of glue!21
Still, while he would never become a true salon habitué like Marcel
Proust or Gabriel Fauré it is clear that Debussy’s soul was not quite
strong enough to resist the pressures such exalted company exerted
towards the appearance, at least, of moral respectability. On 17
February 1894, he accompanied a singer who had also worked
with Chausson, Thérèse Roger, in the premiere of two of his Proses
lyriques. Barely a week later, in letters written in haste to Lerolle
and to the Société composer Pierre de Bréville as Debussy prepared
to depart for a second trip to Brussels, he blithely announced his
engagement to Thérèse.22
Clearly, this impetuous decision can be attributed to Debussy’s
wish to attain, at a step, a degree of bourgeois respectability. The
wide astonishment it elicited would not be faced until after this
second Belgian sojourn. This time, Debussy travelled to Brussels
to participate in the first full-length concert devoted to his music.
On one of four programmes presented under the auspices of the
Salon de la Libre Esthétique (Salon of the Free Aesthetic), the latest
instantiation of an annual art exhibition organized by the impresario Octave Maus, Ysaÿe led a performance of the string quartet
and conducted an ensemble of musicians from the Brussels Conservatoire in La Damoiselle élue. Thérèse Roger, summoned in haste
when the contracted soprano fell ill, sang in the cantata and again
joined Debussy in two of the Proses lyriques.
The other three concerts, which presented works by Chausson,
Franck and d’Indy alongside works by Beethoven and Schubert,
can be seen as a particularly blatant illustration of the claim by the
modern French school to be the heirs of the ‘Great Tradition’ of
Viennese classicism.23 Such a context vividly frames the ironic tones
with which Debussy, through his quartet’s sophisticated dialogues
62
with traditional models, had engaged with the same heritage.
In his case, the refractory take on the past in the sole work he
dignified with an opus number, ‘opus 10’, was further compounded
by its subtle negotiation, through an intricate post-Beethovenian
harmonic ‘argument’, with the syntactical implications of
wagnérisme.24
In retrospect, it is possible to see amidst the myriad artistic
tendencies on display at the same salon – from Impressionism
and Pre-Raphaelism through all the various flavours of postImpressionism – at least a few whose negotiations amidst the
vestiges of tradition and the new promises of modernist system
suggestively parallel the central concerns of Debussy’s quartet.
One critic, the wagnériste Maurice Kufférath, who heard the work
as a kind of musical ‘pointillism’ akin to certain ‘neo-Japoniste’
painters of Montmartre, fortuitously stumbled on the ‘systematic’
elements and exotic influences that can, with careful consideration,
best indicate the most fruitful of such parallels, and thus further
qualify lazy generalizations about Debussy’s Impressionism.25
At the same time, it is worth noting the emphasis in the salon’s
lectures and exhibits alike on an erosion of the boundary between
‘art’ and ‘craft’ – in other words, on a more inclusive vision of
modern aesthetics than the ‘esotericist’ ideals Debussy had been
propounding to Chausson.26
However professionally significant and aesthetically suggestive
the Brussels ‘Debussy festival’ may have been, it was overshadowed
on his return to Paris by the aftershocks of his announced engagement. A first letter to Chausson, hailing the ‘path full of light’ that
promised to lead him out of ‘shady places’, affirmed a determination
to ‘carry a completely new soul into a new life’ and ended (after a
request for money) with gratitude for the charming things Mme
Chausson had written to Thérèse.27 But such sentiments proved
short-lived. Within days, Chausson was asking Debussy to explain
certain inconvenient facts (he was still living with Gaby) as well as
63
mysterious revelations about moral depravities in his past. His
explanations were received as lies; the engagement was broken
off; the friendship between the two composers came to an end.
The Wagnerian evenings chez Mme Escudier having also been
cut short, it was left to Louÿs to mollify the equally scandalized
Mme de Sainte-Marceaux. Urbanely arguing that ‘a young man
cannot just dismiss, like a chamber-maid, a mistress who has lived
with him for two years’, he went on to insist that ‘as for the noises
that have been reported about his previous life, I stand guarantor
that those are monstrous calumnies’.28 It seems from his letters to
others that Louÿs was not quite as convinced about Debussy’s
blamelessness as he claimed. But whatever truth there may have
been behind the calumnies, neither he nor Lerolle was ready, like
Chausson, to end their relations with Debussy. Indeed, from this
point the friendship with Louÿs entered its most intimate phase.
A Mallarméan Musical Allegory
It is, in truth, profoundly ironic that Louÿs presumed to stand
as moral guarantor for anyone. A few months later he would be
sending Debussy the first reports of the exotic adventures that
would render him, over the next few years, a typical ‘sex tourist’.
Inspired by his friend and fellow-writer André Gide, the first such
adventure deflected him from a third Bayreuth pilgrimage to the
famed oasis town of Biskra in Algeria. In late July he crowed to
Debussy of his dalliance there with ‘a young person of sixteen years
who has the most depraved morals and a name like a little bird:
Meryem bent-Ali’.29 By the next year he was taking perverse pleasure
in reporting the young age of various sexual companions in Spain.
Eventually, announcing a return to Paris from Algeria with a more
mature ‘colonial product’, Zohra ben-Brahim, in tow as a mistress,
he celebrated this latest liaison in terms that recall the fetishization
64
The writer Pierre Louÿs in Constantinople, during one of the sybaritic tours that
nourished his literary exoticism.
of exotic flesh in countless contemporary paintings: ‘how pretty it
is, on white sheets, the body of a woman in chocolate’.30
According to another young writer friend, the dramatist René
Peter, Debussy disdained Louÿs’s sexual experimentation as ‘useless monkey-business’.31 At any rate, he was content to ‘work like
a tram-horse’ throughout the summer of 1894 ‘in the sole company
of Pelléas and Mélisande’.32 Soon, finding that these two characters
were ‘refusing to descend from their tapestry’, he expanded his
labours to other projects. In one of these he proposed to Ysaÿe
‘three Nocturnes for principal violin and orchestra’ which would,
by deploying the orchestra in separate groups, present ‘a study in
the diverse arrangements that can be given through a single colour,
as for example in painting, a study in Gray’.33 This inchoate vision
later gave rise to a tenacious association between Debussy’s Trois
Nocturnes and the painted ‘Nocturnes’ of James MacNeill Whistler
65
(which bear such subtitles as ‘Symphony in Blue and Gold’),
in spite of the fact that this work would evolve radically over
the five years it took to complete. (Years later Debussy pointedly
scorned the journalistic conceit that labelled him ‘the Whistler
of music’.34) More tangible progress can be deduced from the
publication contract Debussy signed in October for the Prélude
à l’après-midi d’un faune. The significance of this contract was to
extend beyond its immediate recompense of 200 francs, for the
publisher, Georges Hartmann, was subsequently to sustain
Debussy with a regular stipend while honouring many urgent
Debussy relaxing in Pierre Louÿs’s apartment with Zohra bent-Brahim, the writer’s
Algerian mistress.
66
requests for extra money – and tolerating endless delays in the
provision of promised scores.
On 22 December 1894 the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune finally
received its premiere at the Société nationale. The Swiss conductor
Gustave Doret, who later recalled the rare sensation behind his back
of an audience ‘completely subjugated’, rewarded the enthusiastic
final applause with an immediate repetition.35 By Doret’s account,
the orchestral musicians had been equally captivated all through
the meticulous rehearsals in Debussy’s presence. Critical response,
on the other hand, was less generous. For one surprising example,
Charles Darcours – who had previously hailed the composer’s
literary sensibility in La Damoiselle élue – now recoiled, as if facing
one stage of refinement too far. ‘Such pieces are amusing to write,’
he sniffed, ‘but not at all to listen to.’36
Perhaps his annoyance can be explained by reference to the
greater difficulty of the text that had inspired this new work. No
doubt the problem was compounded by the fact that Debussy’s
reading of Mallarmé (unlike all his previous text-settings) unfolded
in wordless orchestral sound. And over time, his evasiveness in
response to the obvious question about his prelude’s relationship
to the poem L’après-midi d’un faune ended up enshrining a received
wisdom even more deleterious to the understanding of his skills as
a reader than the association of the Nocturnes with Whistler. The
principal point of reference would be the flippant reply he gave to
a query from the prominent critic Henri Gauthier-Villars:
The prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune ! . . . Is it perhaps that
which remains of the dream at the tip of the faun’s flute? More
precisely, it is the general impression of the Poem, because in
trying to follow it more closely, the music would run out of
breath like a dray horse competing for the grand Prix with
a thoroughbred.37
67
Although he proceeded to scatter a few gnomic hints about closer
affinities, the offhand comment about a ‘general impression’ has had
more lasting impact. Indeed a consensus eventually emerged that
the change of title from ‘prelude, interludes and final paraphrase’
to ‘prelude’ signalled an abandonment of direct paraphrase in favour
of a vague, prefatory gloss on the poem’s overall mood or tone.
The immediate responses of Debussy’s confidants support a
different conclusion. Louÿs wrote in enthusiastic haste after the
premiere: ‘Your prelude is admirable. I wanted to tell you immediately on return. It was not possible to make a more delicious
paraphrase of the verses both of us so loved.’38 Mallarmé, having
been invited by Debussy to hear ‘the arabesques a possibly culpable pride has allowed me to believe were dictated by the Flute of
your Faun’, deemed the musical ‘illustration’ of his Eclogue ‘a
marvel! . . . which presents no dissonance with my text, if it is not
in going further, truly, into nostalgia and light, with finesse, with
malaise, with richness!’39 Debussy echoed Mallarmé’s description
of the work as an ‘illustration’ when he congratulated another
critic for being ‘one of the very few to “understand” my modest
attempt to illustrate this poem with concordant arabesques’.40
There are various reasons why it nonetheless became common
to downplay the degree to which the Prélude might be said to paraphrase or illustrate Mallarmé’s verses. For one thing, the contorted
syntax that has rendered Mallarmé’s oeuvre iconic of Symbolist
mystery has also given rise to a presumption that it would be
naive to try to unearth any clear thematic armature as the basis
for musical paraphrase. On the other hand, while the Prélude has
long held similarly iconic status – eminent post-war composer Pierre
Boulez famously asserted that ‘modern music awakens in the afternoon of a faun’ – most analyses have exemplified a professional bias
towards abstract, formalist explication, within which any reference
to a lustful faun pursuing nymphs amidst lush pastoral settings can
only seem an embarrassing irrelevance.41
68
For a finer appreciation of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as
a musical reading, it helps to consider this reminiscence from his
friend René Peter:
In poetry, one never saw [Debussy] lapsing into mechanical
citations, and undoubtedly he was prevented from doing so by
the care he took, above all, to penetrate the general rhythm of
a work and the idea that dominated it. From this sprang his
devotion to Mallarmé, whose so-called obscurities appeared
luminous to him because they superimposed themselves in
combination over his own thought. He clearly never perceived
in L’après-midi d’un faune, for example, each verse in separation
like one of the branches that makes up a tree: he saw the entire
forest with its millions of twigs, its glimpses of sunshine and its
entwinings of gold and blue.42
In other words, the much-noted fact that Debussy responded to
a poem of 110 lines with a piece exactly 110 bars long should not
be read as the mark of a line-by-line ‘paraphrase’, but rather of a
more embracing overview of the poem in its structured totality.
This synthetic overview, in turn, became the basis of an elastic
translation of the poem’s ‘general rhythm’ into a musical form
that rephrases in its own terms the ‘idea’ Mallarmé pursued
through the words of his mythical protagonist, the faun.
The most important of the many ideas enfolded in the text is
symbolized by the faun himself, a quasi-dramatic character whose
divided body, half man and half goat, distils the duality between
sensuous and intellectual experience.43 This duality, projected
through a web of cognates – mind and body; distanced vision and
intimate touch; the palpable pleasures of speech and the austere
symbols of writing – informs the text on multiple levels. It is given
clearest definition within the ‘general rhythm’ as a contrast between
two nymphs: one chaste and virginal; the other more sensuous and
69
carnal. As Mallarmé’s rhyming couplets gather expressive force
along with the faun’s pursuit of this paired object of desire, the
notional separation gradually collapses, to set up a crux in which
the duality between sense and sensation is enacted as an irresolvable conflict native to passionate lyrical utterance:
Je t’adore, courroux des vierges, ô délice
Farouche du sacré fardeau nu, qui se glisse
Pour fuir ma lèvre en feu buvant, comme un éclair
Tressaille! la frayeur secrète de la chair:
Des pieds de l’inhumaine au coeur de la timide
Que délaisse à la fois une innocence humide
De larmes folles ou de moins tristes vapeurs.
[I adore you, wrath of virgins, oh fierce / Delight of the sacred
naked burden, which slides / To flee my lip drinking fire, like a
lightning-bolt / Thrills! the secret terror of the flesh: / From the
foot of the inhuman one to the heart of the shy, / Let all at once
relinquish an innocence, humid / With mad tears or with less
mournful vapours.]
This passage, whose palpable turn at ‘Tressaille!’ (thrills!) from
a hissing chain of sibilants to a more measured, liquid murmur
exemplifies Mallarmé’s most compelling verbal music, also carries
darker undercurrents – ‘wrath’; ‘burden’; ‘terror’ – that trouble
even the most energetic attempts to speak the role of the faun.
When reading back to understand these darker hints, readerperformers will find themselves experiencing the same division,
between eyes and mouth, mind and body . . .
In short, Mallarmé had crafted L’après-midi d’un faune (over years
of revision) into an invitation to enact an agonistic confrontation
with the lost ideals of vocal expression that preoccupied him all his
life, even as he evolved into a pivotal figure for modern theories of
70
Stéphane Mallarmé at his writing desk in 1898, the year of his death.
‘pure’ or ‘impersonal’ poetry. Debussy’s paraphrase, in turn, can
be recognized from Peter’s embracing perspective as an equivalent
confrontation with fading expressive ideals.44 At the simplest level
of the musical illustration, for each of the contrasts between chaste
and carnal nymphs Debussy wrote a contrast between solo wind
instruments and the whole violin section. Simple as it may seem,
this translation of Mallarmé’s central idea actually offers a knowing
reading of Romantic orchestral tradition. The most influential of all
orchestration treatises – written by Hector Berlioz in the early 1840s
– discusses all wind sounds in literary, culturally mediated tones,
while singling out the violins as the most sensuous and ‘penetrating’
voice of the orchestra, ‘at once passionate and chaste’.45
If this congruence with Mallarmé’s formal rhythm can be made
audible to any listener, full appreciation of the musical paraphrase
also demands consideration of a second level of response. Debussy
secreted within each of his main sonorous contrasts a sly reference
to the recurring musical motives of Wagner’s music dramas (the
71
so-called ‘leitmotifs’), keyed to Mallarmé’s poem through the verbal
labels that had become a central tool of Wagnerian exegesis (e.g.,
the ‘Desire’ and ‘Solitude’ leitmotifs in Tristan und Isolde).46 This
esoteric undercurrent persists even through the lyrical effusion –
reminiscent of Tchaikovksy or Balakirev – sung by all strings
together at the piece’s heart. The result, as has been suggested
about a similar procedure in Pelléas et Mélisande, is ‘a sort of game’
that is ‘meant to be discovered’.47 In other words, in the contrast
between the audible pleasures of his orchestration and the harmonic
references accessible only to those ‘in the know’, Debussy found a
sophisticated way to paraphrase Mallarmé’s enactment of a division
(speech and writing) within the reader’s experience of his poem.
The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune stands as the culmination
of Debussy’s early development as a musical reader. His ability to
‘make an abstraction of the text’ had become refined enough to
facilitate, with Mallarmé’s assistance, an allegorical reflection
through musical form on the problematic relationship between
listening and ‘understanding’ (to adopt his own scare quotes).
At the same time, the pressing need in Symbolist circles to renew
One of Édouard Manet’s illustrations for the first, 1876 edition of Mallarmé’s
L’après-midi d’un faune. The faun’s features recall those of the poet himself.
72
over-used materials – recall de Régnier on ‘tarnished’ words – found
programmatic realization through this studied treatment of the
sound of sensuously singing violins, previously the default sound
of Romantic orchestral lyricism. This seductive archetype of lyrical
expression, now framed nostalgically within a soundscape dominated by pastoral winds, found fleeting new freshness even as it
took its place alongside Mallarmé’s lyric address (‘Je t’adore’) as
an artifice on the verge of fading away in favour of cooler, more
impersonal artistic ideals.
The Bilitis Triptych: Sensuality as Allegory
Even in paraphrasing complex poetry with enough sophistication
to satisfy the technocratic Boulez, Debussy maintained a sonorous
surface beautiful enough to secure the Prélude pride of place, decades
later, on cds marketed (for example) as ‘Debussy for Daydreaming’.48
This basic contradiction marks his success at holding in solution –
or in pastoral ‘suspension’ – the central dilemmas of his period
at the threshold of modern music.49 But the fact that the work’s
multi-levelled sophistication largely went unrecognized confirms
the degree to which its Mallarméan refinement was already at
odds with most of his audience. Indeed, whatever its mythic status
in music history, the premiere of the Prélude in late 1894 – which
received minimal notice in the press – hardly marked a breakthrough in Debussy’s career.
Although he announced the completion, ‘as of August 17, 1895’,
of the opera that would eventually occasion such a breakthrough,
he still had years to wait for the epochal 1902 staging of Pelléas
et Mélisande.50 These intervening years, thinner in significant
accomplishment than those just before, were partly consumed by
abortive collaborations with Louÿs. An exchange about an opera
on Cinderella (Cendrelune) persisted into 1898, even though Louÿs
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became so exasperated at one point that he told Debussy to write
the libretto himself. A proposal for a ballet on Longus’s early Greek
romance Daphnis and Chloe foundered more quickly. A passing
suggestion for another based on Louÿs’s own novel Aphrodite –
serially published in late 1895 to great acclaim – also led nowhere.
Of all such proposals, Debussy took most enthusiastically to La
Saulaie, a cantata on Louÿs’s translation of another poem by
Rossetti (Willow Wood), drafting several pages before abandoning
it in 1900.51
There is wide agreement that the failure of all these collaborations betrays an essential difference of aesthetics. As his friend
André Gide once put it, it is a mistake to associate Louÿs with the
‘modern school’, because he was actually ‘as little modern as possible
(I exaggerate a little), not Symbolist at all, but still of the preceding
school of the Parnassians, of Gautier, Banville, Hugo, Hérédia’.52
Furthermore, while Debussy was able to praise Louÿs’s writing –
at times with reservations, as Louÿs noted: ‘I will always love your
music more than you love my literature’ – disagreement occasionally
arose over musical issues.53 Most notably, the letters of mid-1896
bear traces of a heated dispute about Louÿs’s unqualified adulation
for Wagner as ‘the greatest man that has ever existed’.54
The possibility that Louÿs, belated Parnassian and unreconstructed wagnériste, ultimately remained ‘out of step’ with Debussy’s
evolving modernist sensibility should be borne in mind when considering the one significant work that did emerge from a confluence
of their two arts. In late 1894 Louÿs published a book inspired by
his experiences with Meryem bent-Ali: the Songs of Bilitis, translated
from the Greek for the first time by P.L. A preface identified these
hundred-odd prose poems as the recently discovered work of an
unknown poetess from the sixth century bce. In truth, they were
by Louÿs himself. Given the book’s faux-antiquarian concoction
of erotic-exotic clichés – eager pubescent virgins; stolen embraces
under Mediterranean skies; long-ago lesbian love affairs – it is easy
74
enough to understand its immediate, continent-wide success.55 And
it is just as easy to interpret Debussy’s setting of three of its poems
between 1896 and 1898, in an interrelated triptych of Chansons de
Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis), as his own small contribution to the eroticexotic fascination Louÿs shared with countless contemporary artists.
Again, however, in the face of all interpretations of this triptych
as an expression of the ‘deep-seated sensualism . . . which stamped
Debussy as a hedonist and sybarite’ it is important to keep in mind
the refined nature of his readerly talents.56 Indeed, the allegorical
accomplishment of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune offers a useful point of reference in the attempt to understand this strangely
diffident remark to Louÿs:
Can you tell me what my three little ‘musics’ would add to a
pure and simple hearing of your text? Nothing at all, my friend,
I would even say that they would clumsily disperse the emotion
of the hearers. What point is there, really, in fitting the voice of
Bilitis here into major, there into minor, when she already has
the most persuasive voice in the world? –You will say, ‘Why
have you made the music?’ That, old chum, is another question
. . . It is for other settings.57
This gnomic hint at a difference between songs written for direct
emotional expression and those for ‘other settings’ offers an invitation to read through the ‘pure and simple’ prose of the Chansons
to see if the ‘most persuasive voice’ of Bilitis, like that of Mallarmé’s
faun, bears subtler implications beneath its sensuous surface.
Having selected, to begin his triptych, two adjacent poems (nos.
30 and 31) from the first section of Louÿs’s book, Debussy jumped,
for his ending, to the last poem of the same section. The three
chosen texts present a clear narrative progression. In the first, ‘La
flûte de Pan’ (Pan’s flute), a childlike Bilitis tells of her lessons in
playing the pan pipes while seated on the lap of an unnamed male –
75
an activity whose sexual subtext is clear from her closing admission:
‘My mother will never believe that I have stayed so long searching
for my lost belt.’ The second, ‘La Chevelure’ (The Hair), expresses
a darker, more mature phase of sexual intimacy in a more roundabout fashion: Bilitis reports a dream ‘he’ told her, of becoming
so entwined in her hair as they embraced that it seemed to be his;
he became her; and she entered into him like his own dream. Her
response to this ‘tender’ report – she lowers her eyes ‘with a shudder’
– is exquisitely ambiguous. ‘Le tombeau des naïades’ (The tomb
of the naïads), finally, answers steamy oneiric passion with wintry
scenes of loss and disillusionment. Bilitis, tracking satyrs through
snowy forests, is told by an unnamed ‘him’ that the satyrs and
nymphs have all perished from an extremely cold winter. In a final
gesture, he breaks the ice of a spring ‘where naïads used to laugh’,
and gazes through a shard at the pale sky.
Though deserving of Gide’s ‘Parnassian’ epithet both for its
antique imagery and its deceptively clear language, this prose poetry
is not without its points of suggestive mystery. But while Debussy’s
settings abound in inspired responses to such details, the broader
significance of the Chansons only emerges by considering the triptych
as a continuous form – like the ‘entire forest’ of the faun poem – whose
implicit narrative and diurnal progression (from evening to night
to the ‘day after’) goes hand in hand with a deployment of musical
materials just as studied as that in the Prélude. The kinship between
the song triptych and the tone poem, with its famous opening flute
solo, is signalled from the start: the first song begins with a sweeping,
improvisatory arabesque, like a sweep of pan pipes across the lips,
on one of the scales known as ‘modes’ Debussy and many contemporaries imported into modern music from more ancient practice.
Then, as the voice flexibly declaims the first simple phrases, the
piano accompaniment settles into euphonious oscillations between
pure major triads (the fundamental building blocks of traditional
harmony). When Bilitis’s later reference to frogs singing at dusk
76
receives a blatantly literal musical representation, we can recognize
one more aspect of the song’s deliberately ‘naïve’ musical stance
(in the sense of Schiller’s famous essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental
Poetry’), which matches Bilitis’s innocence with a prelapsarian
euphony and representational simplicity.58
A delicately dissonant, sinuously coiling piano introduction
darkens the tone for the second song. As ‘she’ reports ‘his’ dream
over obsessively rocking accompaniments, Debussy’s harmony
relinquishes naïve triads and becomes clotted with dissonance.
Leaving prelapsarian modes behind as well, voice and piano now
interweave during the rise to passionate climax on one of Debussy’s
signature ‘modern’ scales.59 A second, near-hysterical surge delivers
at its peak one of those esoteric references to Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde, before a final fade brings the piece to a close on a halting,
dazed recollection of the opening. Finally, in the last song Debussy
ratchets up the harmonic intensity one more step. Saturating his
numbly plodding accompaniment with an even harsher dissonance
he stretches yet further beyond ‘La Chevelure’ into the ‘most
advanced musical chemistry’ (to borrow his own words on La
Saulaie).60 This third song ends on a dissonance whose resolution
would be the home key of the first song – thus supporting the hint,
within the triptych’s linear narrative, of an eternally recurring
diurnal ‘cycle’.
Such an overview risks leaving the impression that Debussy
merely made the most obvious choices: innocence received a naïve
setting; dark passion a steamier one; wintry disillusionment the
harshest of all. But we must not forget that he carved this little cycle
out of Louÿs’s disparate Chansons, thus raising into relief a triptych
of texts that facilitated a three-stage musing, from the perspective of
the ‘sentimental’ modern composer (to borrow again from Schiller),
on ideals of musical expression. ‘La flûte de Pan’ embodies the
antique-exotic ideal Debussy endorsed, at one point, when he
claimed in the words of ‘Monsieur Croche’ to love ‘those few notes
77
from the flute of an Egyptian shepherd, [who] interacts with the
landscape and hears harmonies unknown to our treatises’.61 The
text of ‘La Chevelure,’ by contrast, offered a compelling forum to
activate those seductive powers he had celebrated in Wagner’s
Tristan: the music that ‘embraces you like a caress’ and makes you
‘feel the same emotions as Tristan’.62 (This association is sealed by
the wrenchingly powerful nod to Tristan at the climactic words ‘you
entered into me like my dream’.) The more rebarbative setting of
the third text – with its final image of a futile search, in frozen
traces, for lost mythic ideals – can thus be taken as a markedly
pessimistic answer to the central question for all ambitious avantgarde composers of Debussy’s generation: What now, after the loss,
alike, of antique-exotic idylls and Wagnerian dreams?
Debussy was to frame this question most succinctly a few
years later when, in a note written for the Opéra-Comique entitled
‘Why I wrote Pelléas’, he suggested that Wagner ‘had placed the
full stop to the music of his times much in the way that Victor
Hugo embraced all previous poetry. It was thus necessary to figure
out how to be after Wagner [après Wagner] and not after the manner
of Wagner [d’après Wagner].’63 The Chansons de Bilitis triptych, far
more than a straightforward translation of the exotic wet dreams
of Debussy’s friend Louÿs, stands alongside the Mallarmé Prélude
as one of his most sophisticated enactments, through musical
reading, of the question later encapsulated in that distinction
between ‘après’ and ‘d’après’ Wagner. His distillation from the
faun poem of a ‘general rhythm’ susceptible to projection through
orchestral sound found its match, in this triptych, in his selection
from Louÿs’s book of three texts that could best allow him to
rephrase that question through the ‘persuasive voice’ of Bilitis.
78
Signs of an Era’s End
Debussy was to return twice more to that same voice: first, to write
flute and harp accompaniments for a dramatic recitation of twelve
more Bilitis poems in 1901; much later, to adapt some of those
accompaniments in the 1914 set of Six épigraphes antiques for two
pianos. Even though the 1898 triptych remains one of his greatest
contributions to the song genre, this still seems a paltry handful of
works to result from the countless exchanges with his friend about
collaborative projects. But as one projected production of Pelléas
after another foundered during these years, Louÿs was not the only
aspiring collaborator to experience such frustration. The incidental
music one of the original singers of La Damoiselle élue requested
from Debussy in May 1896 to accompany a restaging of a play by
Verlaine, for example, was not completed in time; nor was that
sought by the caricaturist Jean-Louis Forain for a pantomime written
by his wife. Meanwhile, numerous discussions with René Peter and
Régine Dansaert for theatrical collaborations with Debussy also led
nowhere.64
Such potential collaborators would likely have found little consolation in the fact that Debussy was making just as little headway
with his independent projects. Having performed in the piano
quartet by the recently deceased young Belgian composer Guillaume
Lekeu at the Société nationale in January 1897, he vaguely proposed
to the committee to write a new quartet and an oboe quintet.65 No
trace remains of either. More significant progress was made on the
Nuits Blanches, a successor set to the Proses lyriques of songs on his
own texts. But the fact that he made no effort to publicize either
the five new poems or the two completed songs (unearthed in 1991)
might suggest a recognition that the moment for such Symbolist
posturing was passing.66 Perhaps for a similar reason, Debussy
abandoned an attempt to orchestrate the Proses lyriques, writing in
March 1898 to Pierre de Bréville that ‘I have changed my mind, and
79
it now seems to me utterly useless to augment [these songs] with
such an orchestral fracas.’67
The one work that Debussy did manage to complete for the
Société during these years was just such an orchestral ‘augmentation’, of someone else’s music. In February 1897, Gustave Doret
conducted a programme that included two of Erik Satie’s solo piano
Gymnopédies in an orchestral arrangement by Debussy. Clearly
undertaken primarily to publicize the music of his eccentric friend,
this slight entry in Debussy’s orchestral catalogue represented
another foray into faux-antiquarian evocation. The hypnotic
melodic and harmonic simplicity of Satie’s bafflingly effective little
pieces, which take their title from the ritual games of ancient Greek
athletes, secured them a lasting place in the repertoire. In the long
view, they anticipate the ‘blank’, timeless and objective vision of
Classical antiquity that would, in such later works as the 1917
cantata Socrate, eventually win Satie belated pre-eminence as the
figurehead for a post-Debussyan musical modernism. But while
Debussy’s orchestration might be said to infuse this marmoreal
antiquarian vision with a more soft-edged ‘naïveté’ (as in ‘La flûte
de Pan’), we have no way of knowing how Satie evaluated the
transformation, for we only retain letters between these two
composers starting from much later, in 1903.68
If the span between the orchestration of the Gymnopédies and
these letters testifies to the continuity from one century to the next
of this one ill-documented friendship, the last years of the fin de
siècle were also marked by the deaths of several key figures in
Debussy’s early development. His reaction to Verlaine’s death in
January 1896 went unrecorded, although it has been suggested
that he joined the various Symbolist writers who gathered at
the Batignolles cemetery in January 1897 for a mass in the poet’s
honour.69 We know that he was present at another, strangely
sepulchral Symbolist celebration the following month. After
attending the banquet held for Mallarmé on the publication of
80
his collected critical writings, Debussy commented witheringly
to Louÿs about the ‘rivalries, jealousies and petty exclusions’ he
encountered there, and confessed that ‘I was prodigiously bored.
M. seemed to share my opinion, and delivered, in a melancholy
voice like Punchinello, a coldly constricted little speech.’70 The
sense of a literary era approaching its end was to be cruelly intensified a year and half later when Debussy learned of Mallarmé’s
sudden death. Writing to the poet’s widow in September 1898, he
expressed his ‘real and intense sorrow’ about ‘the loss that Art in
all its manifestations has just suffered’.71
Public marks of epochal change and rare compositional accomplishments aside, the growing list of abandoned or postponed
projects delivered Debussy, by early 1898, to a nadir in his private
hopes. Having expressed frustration in a letter to Hartmann of
31 December 1897 about ‘a year in which I accomplished almost
nothing that I wished’, he then sank, by March, into an even more
‘passionate’ sadness that left him weeping (he confessed to Louÿs)
as if ‘this simple act, shared by all humanity, is the sole thing that
remains to me within such anguish’. A month later, reaching the
lowest point, he admitted: ‘I hardly know where I am going, if it
is not toward suicide, stupid ending for something that possibly
merited better.’72 Louÿs, who acknowledged once holding similar
ideas himself, nonetheless responded with salutary bluntness:
You, my friend, you do not have the shadow of an excuse for
having such nightmares; because you are a great man – do you
know what that means? . . . Whatever troubles you are facing,
this thought must dominate. You must continue your work and
make it known, two things from which you have excused yourself and which should be everything for you. It is not by giving
music lessons that you will secure your living, it is by doing
everything possible to make sure Pelléas is performed.73
81
It is unclear how Debussy received this imperious grant of the same
greatness Louÿs had previously assigned to Wagner. But soon enough
he was to make crucial progress towards the performance of Pelléas
that would prove a turning point in his career.
In late May 1898, Hartmann brought the new director of the
Opéra-comique, Albert Carré, to Debussy’s apartment to hear him
play through Pelléas et Mélisande. The agreement then secured was
the first concrete step towards the production of the opera under
Carré’s direction in 1902. But before the final practicalities could
fall into place and the last revisions begin, Debussy had one more
major composition – the most hard-won product of this crucial
decade – to complete.
A More Grandiose Orchestral Allegory
Because of the long delay between the first ‘completion’ of Pelléas
in 1895 and its 1902 premiere a historical account of Debussy’s
music through these years becomes somewhat tangled. If the
Chansons de Bilitis effectively stand, compositionally speaking,
one further step ‘after Wagner’ than the opera itself, yet another
was taken in a much more grandiose project whose protracted
creation, from 1897 through 1899, caused Debussy, he complained
to Hartmann, ‘more difficulty than the five acts of Pelléas’.74 This
project, which had its roots in the ‘Nocturnes for principal violin
and orchestra’ proposed in 1894 to Ysaÿe (and abandoned due to
his lukewarm response) eventually found public performance, in
part in December 1900 and as a whole in November 1901, as the
Trois Nocturnes for orchestra.
The three Nocturnes, which project the orchestral imagination
of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune through the triptych form
of the Chansons de Bilitis, pose a greater interpretive challenge than
either of these immediate precursors. Only one of the three – the
82
last, Sirènes (Sirens), based on an episode in The Odyssey – can be
securely tied to a poetic inspiration. The other two, Nuages (Clouds)
and Fêtes (Festivals), bear titles vague enough to support the shallow
imagistic associations that have largely forestalled consideration of
the poetic implications of the whole. Indeed the learned critic Jean
Marnold, who largely devoted his review of the 1901 premiere to
tracing cyclic thematic cross-currents, launched a lasting tradition
of formalist accounts when he dismissed as irrelevant to the work’s
permanent ‘essence’ both any hint of an extra-musical programme
and whatever ‘troubling emotion’ it might seem to express.75
A first step towards a rehearing of this triptych in light of
Debussy’s allegorical and affective acuity would be to recognize
the portentous weight of its one explicitly literary gesture. Given
the cyclic unity Marnold outlined, the decision to close by evoking
the famous ‘sirens’ episode in Homer’s archetypical poem of
wandering exile invites a search for related poetic resonances in
the two previous nocturnes. In the case of Nuages, Debussy’s first
American biographer Oscar Thompson offered a suggestive hint
when noting the importance of cloud imagery in the allegorical
vocabulary of Baudelaire.76 For example, in the famous first poem
of the Petits Poèmes en Prose, ‘L’Étranger’, the eponymous stranger
is asked what he loves: family; friends; homeland; gold. His negative
responses inspire a final query:
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds . . . the clouds that pass . . . up there . . .
up there . . . the wonderful clouds!
With this image in mind, we might well rehear the repeated cor
anglais arabesque that drifts against dusky chord clouds in the first
section of Nuages – a melancholy relative of the flute arabesque
that marked the faun’s ambivalence in his pastoral world – as a
perfect melodic cipher of Baudelairean anomie.
83
At the heart of Nuages, the clouds part to reveal a contrasting
musical vision featuring a stately melody for flute and harp using
what was then called ‘the Chinese scale’. Here again, it is easy to
think of poetic precedents in the fine-brushed exotic idylls Baudelaire
and Mallarmé often posed against the disillusionments of modern
urban experience.77 In this light, when the initial arabesque returns
like the interruption of a dream before the piece’s final ‘grey agony’
(to borrow from the original programme note), it is possible to
glimpse poetic affinities between the questions raised by the first
nocturne – a poignant musing on the promises of exotic fantasy,
say – and the more explicit invocation of mythic exile in the third.78
Such a sense of unifying subtexts is strengthened by the more
blatant musical symbolism of Fêtes. An initial rambunctious chain
of ‘tarantella’ and ‘saltarello’ episodes vividly recalls the ‘Italian
carnival’ trope previously featured in Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’
Symphony and Berlioz’s ‘Roman Carnival’ overture. The whirling
dances abruptly halt for a contrasting section whose play with perspective renders it one of Debussy’s most blatantly programmatic
episodes. A hushed march rhythm in strings and harp prepares the
entry of the distant, muted trumpets of a military fanfare. Repeated
louder and louder with larger and larger forces, the fanfare rises to
overwhelming proximity just as the main tarantella theme returns
– as if the military band has passed right through the festive dancing.
At this pivotal crux of the triptych, the listener is thrust into the
midst of a violent confrontation between militaristic fervour and
carnivalesque frenzy. After a last blare of brass the whole fracas is
cut short, leaving the fleet-footed dance rhythms to return – now
pervasively tainted by echoes of trumpets and drums, all fading
away into quizzical memories.
Sirènes, returning to the harmonic realm of Nuages, rounds off
the triptych and offers a fraught summation. At the heart of the
piece, after a long, becalmed passage of exquisitely delicate orchestration accompanying the wordless female choir that stands in for
84
the deadly sirens, the mythical voices suddenly give way to impassioned strings for the triptych’s only span of full-blooded Wagnerian
lyricism. No sooner does this new ‘voice’ reach its peak than it, too,
is cut off, leaving a plangent solo trumpet – a sound native to Fêtes
– to state an arc of melody reminiscent of the cor anglais arabesque
in Nuages. When the piece drifts to its close through a dim memory
of the central, ‘exotic’ theme of Nuages, we are left with the sense of
a subtly tangled concatenation of poetic and affective experiences.
To hear the final nocturne as a summation is not to say that it
offers any clear answer to the preceding evocations. But the trumpet
call seems an urgent invitation to reflect on the affective implications
of the whole. Note, for a start, that the climactic march this single
brass instrument summons in memory offers yet another ironic
redeployment of Tristan-esqe harmonies – indeed an even more
blatant and extensive reference to Wagner’s chords than the knowing winks in the Prélude or the convulsive climax of ‘La Chevelure’.
Recalling the use of the same harmony to set Louÿs’s words ‘you
entered into me like my own dream’, the whole triptych can be
said to pivot on a nod to Tristan whose scoring brings to mind
Baudelaire’s famous image of ‘military bands pouring heroism
into the hearts of the citizens’.79 Indeed a few months after the
1901 premiere of the Nocturnes Debussy would invoke a similar
image in his essay ‘Music in the Open Air’ when asking why ‘military
music’ has gained a monopoly over ‘squares and promenades’, and
suggesting in answer that such music totalizes a ‘love of homeland
[la patrie]’ for everyone from a pastry chef to an ‘old monsieur who
thinks constantly of Alsace-Lorraine but never speaks of it’.80
While Debussy never explicitly identified a play with musical
evocations of la patrie as a subtextual thread through the Nocturnes,
this sense of a unifying undercurrent gives new resonance to the
explicit clues he did offer, in a 1900 letter to Dukas, about one
source of inspiration:
85
I’ll have you believe that the music of Fêtes was, as always,
adapted from impressions already quite distant of a festival in
the Bois de Boulogne; the ‘chimerical procession’ was, that day,
made up of cuirassiers [horsemen in breastplate]!81
Apparently, Debussy also told his lawyer friend Albert Poujaud
that Fêtes was inspired by ‘one of the first national festivals [fêtes
nationales] given in Paris after the 70s’.82 In Republican France,
fête nationale means, precisely, the quatorze juillet (fourteenth of
July) commemorations of the fall of the Bastille, first established
in 1880 with a grand military assembly in the Bois de Boulogne.83
Historians have noted an irresolvable tension in the attempts by
early Republican leaders to impose such official ‘national festivals’
on a populace whose spontaneous ‘popular’ festivities were threateningly redolent of the revolutionary energies that had unseated
various royal precursors.84 A suggestive parallel emerges between, on
the one hand, those press portrayals of fin-de-siècle quatorze juillets
that juxtapose images of serried ranks in uniform with costumed
dancers parodying authority, and on the other, the collision, in
Fêtes, between an officious march music and a rambunctious offshoot of nineteenth-century ‘carnivalesque’ style.85
In short, it may be easy to decide with Marnold that the lasting
value of the Nocturnes can be described in purely musical terms.
But any attempt to understand the work as the product of the
same sensibility behind the post-Wagnerian games in the Prélude
and the Chansons de Bilitis brings to mind a swirl of hints to
rehear it as an intricate chain of affective questions centring on the
fantasies, aspirations and instabilities of early Republican nationhood. As a final twist, however, any rehearing of this work in these
terms should also acknowledge that it was composed through the
most intense years of the Dreyfus Affair – a national crisis that
brought the Republican investment in l’armée as embodiment of la
nation under severe strain. Precisely in the months that Debussy’s
86
torturous revisions were leading him to moan to Hartmann that
‘the three Nocturnes are deeply affected by my life, and have been
full of hope, then, full of despair and then full of emptiness!’ the
grossest poles of the Affair were being promulgated in pamphlets
with such titles as ‘La Nation et L’armée’ and ‘L’Armée Contre la
Nation’.86
To see some significance in this coincidence of dates is not to
identify the Nocturnes as a direct response to the Dreyfus trials.
But a broader view might recognize how efficiently this work
stands alongside the Affair in marking a pivotal point in the ideological evolution of a generation. For a writer like Debussy’s exact
contemporary Maurice Barrès, the fading embers of fin-de-siècle
exoticism and wagnérisme would burn away in the furnace of
Dreyfus-era debates, leaving behind a newly militant, proto-fascist
version of nationalism. And while Debussy had been able in 1897
to sniff scornfully at the ‘deplorable use of patriotism’ in certain
writings of Émile Zola and the composer Alfred Bruneau, the early
years of the new century would see him tending more and more to
A poster commemorating the 1882 fête nationale, showing a typical quatorze juillet
juxtaposition of military processions and carnivalesque entertainments.
87
a nationalist rhetoric that was ultimately to become just as chauvinistic as that of Barrès, if on a narrower musical terrain.87
Personal Changes
On a more mundane level, the same years saw equally convulsive
developments in Debussy’s domestic life. Some time in 1898 he had
met an attractive young model, Lilly Texier, who initially sparked
minimal interest. Subsequent meetings led rapidly to a new passion
destined to displace Gaby Dupont from his life. A letter to Hartmann
of January 1899 announcing Debussy’s recent move to 58 rue Cardinet
also reported that ‘Mademoiselle Dupont, my secretary, has resigned
her engagement.’88 The reasons behind this dry conclusion of a
seven-year relationship became clear a few months later in a sudden
rush of letters to Lilly that could not contrast more starkly in tone.
‘Claude is not yet cured of the bites from your dear little mouth!’
exclaimed one of the first, in late April, before ending: ‘impatient
for your mouth, for your body, and for your love’.
When reading the correspondence of the next few months, it is
startling to find just how far this reader of Baudelairean ironies and
Mallarméan ideals could tumble into Romantic cliché:
I cherish you right down to the habits that least please you
about yourself: the One that one loves but once in life, the One
who abolishes all the Past, the one who contains the desire to
live within all that is most absolute, that is to say, the Happiness
that is in the Beauty and the charm within everyday things.89
There may be some cause even at first reading to wonder just how
long Debussy would remain satisfied with ‘the charm within everyday things’. A more general question emerges about the near
absence from these letters of any expression of shared aesthetic
88
concern. A faint suspicion about Debussy’s true compatibility with
this latest paramour deepens in the face of one flippant note to
Godet which both celebrates Lilly’s ‘fairy-tale prettiness’ and notes
her lack of interest in up-to-date musical developments.90
Such suspicion obviously derives from retrospective knowledge.
At the time, Debussy was convinced enough to ask Lilly to marry
him. Satie and Louÿs – who had recently married himself – were
among the few witnesses present on 19 October 1899 at the civil
ceremony, which was followed by a meal at the Taverne Pousset
paid for in part by a piano lesson Debussy gave the same morning.91
Here, finally, was the respectability he had once rashly sought with
Thérèse Roger. Sadly, it came too late to mitigate his estrangement
from Chausson, who had died in a bicycle accident only a few
months before. But the liaison with Gaby ended civilly enough,
for in the month of his marriage to Lilly Debussy gave her a copy
of the manuscript of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, signed
with the dedication ‘To my dear and good little Gaby, the sure
affection of her devoted Debussy’. Within months she too had
moved on, ultimately to wed a wealthy South American banker.
A 1902 photograph of Debussy and his first wife Rosalie Texier, known as Lilly,
whom he married in 1899.
89
A few months into married life, as the revisions to the Nocturnes
and Pelléas continued, Debussy suffered the annoyance of another
great success, with the opera Louise, by his bête noire Gustave
Charpentier. Given its genre this popular triumph of a composer
whose music he despised must have rankled even more than
before. Interrupting his work, Debussy sent Hartmann another
blast of invective about all ‘realistic’ (and ‘nationalistic’) posturing:
He takes the ‘Cries of Paris’ which are rhythmically delicious and
like a dirty Prix de Rome, he turns them into cantilenas at the
moon and drags them into textbook harmonies! . . . Everything
that is false and declamatory in the Aesthetic of ‘beautiful roles’
is contained in this work. Monsieur Mendès rediscovers Wagner
in it, and Monsieur Bruneau discerns Zola. In sum: a truly
French work. There has to be some mistake in the addition.92
In an almost identical missive to Louÿs Debussy further suggested
that disillusionment with Parisian audiences was leading him to
‘prefer it if Pelléas were played in Japan’.93 But in truth, these same
audiences were beginning, in these months, to grant Debussy a
little more of the recognition he desired.
For one thing, the premiere of the Chansons de Bilitis, given in
May 1900 by Debussy and Blanche Marot, received a laudatory
review by one Gustave Bret, whose ears were fine enough to note
that Debussy ‘always leaves something implied, or half-expressed’.94
Such refinement of response may still have been rare, but Debussy’s
place in Parisian musical life was nonetheless now prominent
enough for his string quartet, La Damoiselle élue, and the Chansons
de Bilitis to feature on the vast concert series of ‘music from all over,
of every kind’ that rendered Paris a ‘perpetual symphony’ (as Dukas
put it) during the International Exhibition of 1900.95 All the same,
he could only respond with bemusement at the cause of further
delay in the public unveiling of his Nocturnes. Writing to Hartmann
90
about the conductor’s repeated decision to programme, instead,
excerpts from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (‘Twilight of the Gods’)
he quipped:
As I see that Chevillard stubbornly persists in ‘en-twilight-ing’ his
public, my poor Nocturnes are naturally left beneath the rubble,
and I must remain broken-hearted, because I was much anticipating the joy that they would have given you. Oh well, everyone
will have his turn . . . luck is essentially a portable thing.96
In one respect, this stoicism was to prove ill-founded. In a crueller
irony than any temporary displacement of Debussy’s latest music
‘après Wagner’ by that of Wagner himself, his supporter Hartmann
fell suddenly ill and was dead by the middle of May. If it is hard not
to sense some selfishness in Debussy’s response – ‘I find the only
editor capable of adapting himself to my delicious little soul’, he
wrote to Louÿs, ‘and he has to go and die on me!!’ – it is easy to
sympathize with such a reaction to what must have seemed just
one more of an endless stream of setbacks.97
In the end, while Hartmann was never to hear the Nocturnes
the premieres of the first two in December 1900 and of the whole
triptych about a year later garnered enough substantive critical
recognition to stand as another pair of significant milestones in
Debussy’s career. In early 1901, furthermore, he gained a new
public forum for the polemical battles he had previously fought
only in private correspondence when he became music critic for
La Revue blanche, a journal edited by the redoubtable art critic Félix
Fénéon. All the while, Debussy’s opera was inching its way towards
the production that would secure him a measure of the fame that
he would, in a last twist of irony, occasionally greet with just as
much exasperation as the obscurity it was to replace.
91
3
The Art of a Curious Savage
Predictably enough, in the brief preamble that launched his first,
short-lived stint as a music critic on 1 April 1901 Debussy disavowed
any aspirations to conventional criticism. Claiming to offer only
‘sincere impressions, honestly expressed’, he dryly dismissed all
highly technical appraisals:
I will try to see, through musical works, the multiple movements
that gave birth to them and all that they contain of the inner
life; is that not more interesting than the game that consists of
taking them apart like curious watches?1
Given his long-held distaste for textbooks and methods, such antianalytical posturing is hardly surprising. But it also reflects a moment
in which all musical study, particularly the technical aspect later
institutionalized as ‘Music Theory’, was undergoing rapid professionalization. And when Debussy went on to disclaim any wish to
comment on ‘consecrated works’ – which did not prevent him from
writing about one of the most revered works of all, Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony – it can be taken as a telling response to the consolidation,
all around him, of the classical canon that was to become so central
to twentieth-century musical culture.
Such broad cultural-historical hints aside, the pursuit of music’s
‘inner life’ Debussy proceeded to offer both in his own voice and that
of his alter ego ‘Monsieur Croche’ (a near-plagiaristic adaptation of
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Paul Valéry’s fin-de-siècle critical mouthpiece ‘Monsieur Teste’)
arguably deserves the epithet ‘Impressionistic’ rather more than
his compositions. Few opinions remain consistent from one acerbic offering to the next. Beyond vague proposals for a ‘music of
the open air’ and a growing inclination to cultural nationalism –
notably in polemical defences of the ‘French’ elegance of JeanPhillippe Rameau – no systematic aesthetic emerges. Still, some
entertainment value remains in the facility with anthropomorphic
metaphor Debussy demonstrated, for example, when suggesting
that in Massenet ‘the harmonies resemble arms, the melodies
necks; one leans over the brows of women in order to know, at
all costs, what happens behind them’; or, elsewhere, that:
The undeniable beauty of Liszt’s oeuvre springs, I think, from the
fact that he loved music to the exclusion of all other feeling. If, on
occasion, he went so far as to address it familiarly and to place it
squarely on his knees, that is no worse than the stuck-up manner
of those who have the air of being presented to it for the first time.2
The cumulative effect of such imagery is a vivid, public version of
the sardonic perspective on contemporary musical culture Debussy
had long been expressing privately in his letters.
Occasionally he turned on more familiar bugbears. A celebration
of Franck as one ‘who serves music almost without demanding any
glory’, for example, provided a foil for one of many snarls at Wagner:
‘when he borrows from life, he dominates it, puts his foot on top
of it and forces it to cry the name of Wagner more loudly than the
trumpets of fame.’3 The persistence of such jabs demonstrates the
degree to which Debussy’s relations with this particular precursor
remained unresolved even after the production of Pelléas et Mélisande
had secured him significant fame on Wagner’s own ground. But
while the agonistic layers of post-wagnériste response seem an
unavoidable subtext to all discussions of Pelléas, it could be that
93
the opera is best approached, in the first place, through the prism
of Debussy’s words on one of the few composers who appears in
letters and criticism alike in a uniformly positive light.
On 15 April 1901 Debussy gave the readers of La Revue Blanche his
warmest praise of a favourite Russian alternative to faded wagnériste
passions. In an effusive review he celebrated Mussorgsky’s little
cycle of songs on poems from a child’s perspective, The Nursery,
in terms that could not be more illuminating of his own ideals as
he nursed his opera towards completion:
Never has a more refined sensibility been translated by such
simple means; it resembles the art of a curious savage who
would reveal the music within each step traced by his emotion;
nor is it ever a question of some form or other, or at least this
form is so multifarious that it is impossible to relate it to established – we might say administrative – forms; it is composed by
small successive touches, connected by a mysterious thread and
by a gift of luminous clairvoyance.4
Here, in short, is a paean to the simplicity Debussy would repeatedly affirm as his artistic ideal in the face of disgruntlement about
his Byzantine intricacies. Here too is a perfect image for his vision
of a dramatic music that, rather than indulging in tired conventions
of expansive lyricism – in which the gap between dramatic and
musical emotions, he suggested, makes characters ‘sit on a note
to allow the music to catch up’ – instead tracks the fluctuations of
‘inner life’ step by step like a ‘curious savage’. And here, finally, is
the perfect description of the operatic style that emerged from his
rejection not only of conventional forms, but also traditional
phrasing: a music of ‘small, successive touches, connected by a
mysterious thread’.
As it turned out not everyone who first experienced Pelléas
some months later readily granted Debussy the same ‘luminous
94
clairvoyance’ he attributed to Mussorgsky. But before tracing the
last steps to the opera’s 1902 production and sampling the critical
reaction it is worth pausing to take particular note that this
extravagant praise greeted a collection of songs that gives voice
to the perspective of a child. Over the ensuing decade the theme
of childhood, in implicit or explicit tension with elusive ideals of
maturity, would rise to new prominence alongside Debussy’s other
preoccupations. Indeed, in considering the degree to which Pelléas
not only fulfils his early ambitions to ‘clothe the poetry, in order
to convey the sense of something truly lived’ but also approaches
the more sophisticated literary responses of the Prélude and the
Louÿs songs, attention to this particular theme can aid an attempt
to thread the maze of Maeterlinck’s symbolism and evaluate
Debussy’s grandest single act of compositional reading.
Last Steps to the Stage
Throughout the year 1901, as Debussy saw his first articles into print and,
later, absorbed reactions to the first complete performance of all three
Nocturnes (received as a triumph by Dukas, the triptych occasioned
one of many cautions against seductive Debussyan ‘sorcery’ from the
influential critic Paul Lalo), his compositional activity remained relatively sparse. One minor work, the musical accompaniment for flutes,
harps and celesta he wrote for a recitation with danced tableaux vivants
of twelve more poems from the book of Chansons de Bilitis, offered a
far less refractory engagement with the antique exoticism of Louÿs’s
poetry than the earlier song triptych. A couple of months later,
Debussy made sure Louÿs was one of the first to receive the latest
news from the director of the Opéra-Comique: ‘Because you are, in
spite of everything . . . my old friend Pierre! I do not want you to learn
from someone else that: I have the written promise from M. Alfred Carré
that he will stage Pelléas et Mélisande next season.’5
95
Whatever it may have owed to their latest Bilitis collaboration,
this warm reaffirmation of friendship probably also reflects some
sense of Louÿs’s proprietary interest in the opera given his key
role as mediator with Maeterlinck almost ten years before. On
that terrain, however, one last setback was still to unfold. During
the few months that remained before the premiere the playwright,
once graciously accommodating to Debussy’s plans, turned violently
against the opera.
The main point of contention concerned Maeterlinck’s presumption that the role of Mélisande should be created by his mistress
Georgette Leblanc. As evidenced by the legal documents drafted
at the hearing that adjudicated Maeterlinck’s attempt to reclaim his
play, Debussy did not reject this idea outright but ceded the final
decision to Carré. The director later recalled that he had been in no
doubt of Leblanc’s talents – indeed he would cast her in Dukas’s 1907
Maeterlinck opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue – but felt he had previously
erred in giving her the lead in Bizet’s Carmen and wished to avoid a
similar mistake with Pélléas. Beautiful as Leblanc may have been, he
elaborated diplomatically, she ‘did not possess the physical qualities
of the woman-child character that was Mélisande’. These, as it happened, were qualities he had already found miraculously conjoined
in the Scottish soprano Mary Garden, just then enjoying considerable
success in Charpentier’s Louise.6
Carré’s reference to Mélisande’s ‘woman-child character’ opens
a window on this opera’s lasting challenges to singers and critics
alike. By contrast, the terms with which Maeterlinck excoriated the
work once his claim had been dismissed and rehearsals proceeded
seem bizarrely out of line with later assessments. Soon after attending
an open rehearsal on 19 March 1902 he sent a scathing open letter
to the weekly journal Le Figaro:
They succeeded in excluding me from my own work, and since
then it has been treated as a conquered territory. They have
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undertaken arbitrary and absurd cuts which render it incomprehensible; they have retained all that I intended to suppress
or improve . . . In a word, the Pelléas in question has become
a piece that is strange to me, almost an enemy; and stripped
of all control over my work, I am reduced to wishing that it
suffers prompt and resounding failure.7
Whether or not we accept the explanation Maeterlinck’s friend
Octave Mirbeau offered Carré – the playwright, he suggested, was
suffering a madness inspired by ‘the evil genius of a woman’ – it
remains striking just how radically this complaint departs from the
general view of Pelléas as an opera exceptionally (even excessively)
faithful to the original play.8 Long before any critical tradition developed, the composer Richard Strauss put this point most archly when
he grumbled on hearing the opera for the first time in 1907: ‘there is
not enough music for me, here. These are very fine harmonies, very
good orchestral effects; but this is nothing, nothing at all. I find that
it is nothing more than Maeterlinck’s play, all alone, without music.’9
The gulf between the two responses reflects fundamentally
different priorities. Woman-crazed or not, Maeterlinck reacted
with an author’s understandable preciosity when discovering that
one of his works had been subject to extensive cuts. On the other
hand Strauss, Wagner’s leading heir on the grounds of lushly
orchestrated, mythopoetically grandiose opera, could hardly have
found much to admire in this work’s determined avoidance of all
he thought essential to ‘musical phrases’ and ‘development’.10
Somewhere between the two responses can be found a judicious
appraisal of the opera: a product both of a literary sensibility that,
while scrupulously faithful to Maeterlinck’s prose rhythms, saw
the need for numerous surgical excisions to tighten his dramatic
form; and a musical aesthetic that, in service of a stringent ideal of
‘natural’ declamation, brought to the stage the new understanding
of the musical phrase Debussy had long been honing in his songs.
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A Play and an Opera
In the same little book in which he recorded those 1889 conversations with Guiraud, Debussy’s erstwhile Conservatoire colleague
Maurice Emmanuel briefly summarized Pelléas et Mélisande:
An old king, Arkël, in a legendary time and country; his son,
ill, hidden in some corner of the palace; his two grandsons,
Golaud, the elder, and Pelléas; their mother, Genevieve; an
unknown woman, who will marry Golaud and love Pelléas . . .
The plot is one of the simplest of all: an old husband, ‘because
it is the custom’ kills the lover of his young wife. She also dies,
and forgives him. But . . . ‘what is there to forgive?’ The murderer
will never really know whether or not his vengeance was justly
taken.11
This sketchy précis efficiently captures a central duality of the work.
In outline, this ‘simplest plot’ – a love triangle – may indeed seem
(as musicologist Joseph Kerman later noted) ‘oddly conventional’.12
But rather less so is the bafflement that accumulates through the
elliptical exchanges between characters. Ultimately, in spite of the
‘old husband’ Golaud’s desperate search for truth both he and the
audience are left in doubt about the most basic question of all,
concerning the precise kind of love his wife Mélisande and his
young brother Pelléas actually shared.
Of the many excisions that brought the play even closer to
Debussy’s ideal libretto, several reinforced the theme of a vain
search for truth. By removing the first scene of servants washing
the castle steps, for example, he effectively plunged his audience
directly from the antique-flavoured orchestral prelude into the
murky forest of Allemonde with Golaud. The opera’s first utterance
– having lost his way while hunting, Golaud sighs ‘I will never be
able to get out of this forest’ – thus gains relief as a motto for the
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whole experience about to unfold. At the same time, the excision of
this and three other full scenes recast Maeterlinck’s overall dramatic
shape into new formal symmetries – for example, between the threescene Acts i and ii.
This broadest reshaping may seem enough cause for the playwright’s fury. But Debussy also pruned just about every scene he
retained. While dispensing with excessive exposition and repetition, his scalpel may also have been guided by a reaction against
what one critic had termed a ‘pointless abundance of symbols, at
times too simplistic, and at times too blatant’.13 Countless references
to light and dark and blind or unreliable eyes recur in blatant association with the theme of truth-seeking. Almost as pervasive is the
water imagery: the first meeting of Pelléas and Mélisande occurs
overlooking the sea; later they meet twice at a well, once leading
to the loss of her wedding ring, the other culminating in their one
brief love scene. Such instances might seem all too easy to read
from a post-Freudian perspective. But at times, the symbolic crosscurrents combine with more multivalent richness – as when two
central scenes juxtapose the ‘water of death’ in the castle vaults
against the life-giving water Pelléas sees on emerging into breezy
brilliance, sprinkling over gardens to the sound of ‘children running
down to the beach to bathe’.
Even after Debussy’s surgery such symbolic interplay renders
any pursuit of interpretive solidity like an attempt ‘to carry water
in a muslin bag’ (to borrow an image from the opera). Still, some
consensus has emerged that the opera’s central ‘lesson’ can be
taken to be, in the words of one early critic, that ‘fate governs the
world, that events drive us forward and that all resistance is vain,
on our part, against the secret laws of destiny’.14 When distilled
down to such flaccid generality it is easy to understand why some
have complained of dramatic weakness. But while the emphasis
on fate may be easy to justify with reference to the gloomy pronouncements of the old king Arkël, as a general proposition it
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Scottish soprano
Mary Garden photographed in the
role of Mélisande,
c. 1902, showing a
hint of the ‘womanchild character’
noted by director
Albert Carré.
tends to foreclose inquiry into the ways the play might enfold more
precise significance.
It helps to recall the seemingly trivial fact that Emmanuel’s summary begins by demarcating chain of generations: ‘an old king . . .
his son . . . his grandsons . . . their mother’. As stated, the chain is
incomplete, for Golaud already has a son, Yniold, by a previous
marriage; his new wife will bear a daughter before her death.
Maeterlinck does not demarcate every link in the chain clearly.15
But he continually positions his characters against an ever-present
lattice of stages of the life cycle. Fatefully ineluctable as the progression through this cycle may seem, it is the dramas of identity posed
at its discrete stages that provide a humane core of empathy to
which Debussy’s music proved a particularly telling supplement.
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The extremes are most clearly defined. Arkël attributes his
fatalistic wisdom to his proximity to death; Debussy wrote of his
struggle to infuse one scene with ‘the compassion of a child to
whom a sheep gives at first the idea of a toy that he cannot touch,
and also a pity that people concerned with their comfort no longer
possess’.16 In between these poles lies the shifting terrain occupied
by ‘people concerned with their comfort’ – that is, the realm of
maturity so precariously upheld by Golaud. And the catalyst that
pushes precariousness over the edge of tragic failure is the ‘unknown
woman’, Mélisande, who will not sit still on the ladder of maturity.
The phenomenon recalls a comment in Maeterlinck’s mystical
essay ‘On Women’:
[Women] are truly the veiled sisters of all the great things we
cannot see. They are truly the close relatives of the infinite that
surrounds us and they, alone, know how to smile at it with the
familiar grace of the child who does not fear its father.17
The image of ‘the child who does not fear its father’ is literally
relevant to one scene in which Golaud uses Yniold as an informant
about the relationship between Pelléas and Mélisande. But it also
captures Golaud’s inability, in spite of ongoing attempts – ‘you
are no longer a child’; ‘you are no longer at the age to cry over
such things’ – to claim Mélisande for his ‘mature’ stage of the life
cycle. At the same time, his contradictory tendency to dismiss her
dalliances with Pelléas as ‘childish games’ seems particularly obtuse
when, for example, he finds her leaning from a window with Pelléas
ecstatically tangled in her hair. The same incomprehension recurs
in the final scene: having slain Pelléas, Golaud blames himself at
Mélisande’s deathbed for ‘killing without reason’ since ‘they had
embraced like little children . . . they were brother and sister’.
Debussy’s setting of all these scenes deepens the sense of an
unbridgeable gulf between ‘mature’ and ‘child-like’ perspectives.
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At the beginning of Act iii scene iv, Golaud, placing Yniold on his
knees, interrogates him about his time in the company of his new
‘mummy’ and uncle Pelléas. His fury at the child’s blandly literal
replies drives him to a violent gesture. When he attempts to assuage
the boy’s hurt with a bribe the music, which has been closely tracking the darkly perverse undertones, pinpoints the gulf between
father and child: a tiny window of naïve, light-fingered simplicity
marks the degree to which Yniold, captivated by the promised bow
and arrow, remains impervious to his father’s obsession. This is but
a foretaste of the much lengthier musical deflection when Golaud
forces the interrogation to its climax: ‘Do they sometimes kiss?’ ‘No’
answers the boy – but then corrects himself: ‘yes, once, when it was
raining.’ Sensing truth at his fingertips, Golaud asks how they kiss,
only to receive a playful kiss himself – ‘Like this, daddy, like this’ –
and a blithe bit of chatter, over whimsically cheerful music, about
his prickly beard and grey hair. Although Golaud will try again to
pin down the truth, the stark juxtaposition of musical worlds marks
his search as futile even before a last crescendo of aggression brings
the scene to its close.
Trivial as it might seem, Yniold’s reference to Golaud’s hair and
beard echoes Mélisande’s equally naïve reaction to Golaud’s age
during the very first dialogue of the opera. The most telling outgrowth of this parallel in childish perspectives occurs in the final
scene. Golaud, left alone with his dying wife, makes one last reach
for the truth. When the initial, affirmative answer to his plea for
forgiveness disconcertingly becomes a question set to angelically
sweet accompaniment – ‘what is there to forgive?’ – it is clear that
their interaction is to unfold between incommensurate worlds of
understanding. As in the scene between father and child, where
the verb embrasser (to kiss) could mean either romantic or familial
embrace, the dialogue comes to pivot on the ambiguity of a single
word, aimer, to love. When Golaud finally blurts the question ‘Did
you love Pelléas?’ she blithely answers ‘yes’ over a moment’s silence
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in the orchestra – only for a coolly ethereal harp and horn to usher
in the gentle flute tones that colour her next words: ‘I loved him.
Where is he?’
Realizing that she has not grasped his meaning, Golaud again
lurches onto crudely literal terrain: ‘I am asking you whether you
loved with a forbidden love. Were you guilty? Tell me, tell me,
yes, yes.’ Accompanied by a delicate flute halo and a heavenly
high violin, her response – ‘no, we were not guilty, why do you
ask that?’ – exposes yet another maddening misunderstanding.
For Golaud, guilt is a state of being that results logically from
‘forbidden’ acts; for Mélisande, it is an emotion one may or may
not have felt.
Some have heard such responses as the manipulative deceptions
of a mature ‘woman character’. But in view of Mélisande’s resistance
to clear definition it is better to let this culminating ambiguity
about love inform retrospective reflection about the ‘love scene’
that precipitated Golaud’s fatal intervention. In the last scene of
Act iv, as Pelléas and Mélisande meet at the well on the night before
his departure from Allemonde, he finally blurts his confession: ‘I
love you.’ The extreme restraint of her muted reply – ‘I love you too’,
whispered on a single note over a breathless orchestral hush – has
often been celebrated as the opera’s most iconically anti-lyrical
moment. But her faint declaration does, in fact, trigger an extravagantly lyrical outburst from Pelléas – the closest thing to a Massenet
aria in the opera.
Perhaps this is the point at which Debussy’s strictures about
musical and dramatic emotion fell away in favour of a full, hearton-sleeve concession to traditional melodic expectations. But the
disappointment some have felt about the love scene is understandable in view of this naïve reaction to Mélisande’s faint echo of a
word (aimer) whose instability she is soon to expose. Recalling
Debussy’s self-conscious treatment of Romantic lyricism in his
contemporaneous works, we might well ask whether there is
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Frontispiece of Maeterlinck’s libretto for Pelléas et Mélisande, showing the moment
of amorous abandon by the fountain and the spying Golaud.
something ironic, ‘in quotes’ – like the Bellini-esque bel canto
at the heart of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – about the
Romantic outpouring he gives to Pelléas at this most intimate
moment of his opera.
Still, it would not do to resolve Mélisande’s identity too clearly
in the childish direction either. She finds her own version of
Romantic passion when, in response to Pelléas’s recognition that
they have been locked out of the castle, she leaps into his arms
with a cry: ‘All the better!’ It is crucial, in short, to recall that even
with the meticulous rhythms and expressive inflections Debussy
gave to Maeterlinck’s ‘woman-child character’, there remains a
great deal about her he could never pin down in a musical score.
Perhaps he offered a sly clue to the challenge for all aspiring
Mélisandes when in 1903, exceptionally for this phase of his career,
he set a single poem, ‘The Garden’, by a minor poet, Paul Gravollet.
It is hard to see what attracted him to this precious little text if it
was not some hint of recognition in its description of ‘a grown
girl and yet childlike / Cunning only by instinct’. And if this song,
with its references to hair and ‘eyes shaded by long lashes’ and
‘frail and charming body’, might be taken as a wry after-image
of the ‘woman-child character’ in his opera, perhaps one clue to
resolving the challenge Mélisande perpetually poses in her poise
between naiveté and sexual allure is to be found in Gravollet’s
succinct formulation: ‘voice of April, but gestures of May’.
A Production and its Aftermath
In terms of scale and public impact, Pelléas et Mélisande remains
Debussy’s single most significant act of compositional reading.
But in any judicious view, Strauss’s crotchety overstatement about
‘Maeterlinck’s play . . . without music’ bears a hint of valid insight.
Even with due regard for his editorial interventions, Debussy’s
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broadly respectful treatment of the play renders Pelléas a more
straightforward reading than the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,
whose orchestral translation of Mallarmé required several inspired
imaginative leaps, or the Chansons de Bilitis, whose allegorical
progression was a product of the composer’s shaping intelligence.
Maeterlinck’s play, set in ‘Allemonde’ (a German-French hybrid
implying ‘all-the-world’), came with portentous allegorical ambitions in plain view. If Debussy’s ‘successive touches’ of orchestral
colour and delicate melodic ‘cantilena’ (as Emmanuel called it)
amounted to a strikingly unfamiliar style of opera, he nonetheless
did little to transform the play’s ‘lessons’ – whether these hinge on
a general idea of fate or on threatened ideals of maturity and truth
in a time of social upheaval.18
It could even be argued that Pelléas does not present his most
distinctive negotiation with ‘music after Wagner’. To be sure, as
Carolyn Abbate demonstrated long ago, while he took pains to
erase some blatant echoes of Tristan und Isolde in the love scene he
left the opera strewn with those more esoteric Wagnerian references familiar from his contemporary works.19 But when suffused
through Maeterlinck’s symbolic web across over two hours of finely
shaded orchestral tapestry, such harmonic winks seem less freighted
than they do in the more formally compact Mallarmé Prélude and
Louÿs songs – let alone the blazingly powerful march in Fêtes. Indeed,
for Debussy’s later partisan Boulez no less than his grouchy contemporary Strauss, any esoteric dialogue with Tristan proved less
significant than the opera’s audible debts to Parsifal – the Wagnerian
music drama that remained a touchstone for Debussy’s orchestral
thinking to the end of his life.
Needless to say, the public that first heard the work in April
and May 1902 were not concerned with such fine distinctions.
The final steps to the stage had been far from smooth. Although the
conductor André Messager quickly won over the cast, the problems
encountered during the many orchestral rehearsals were so daunting
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that Debussy, as late as March 1902, announced to René Peter
that he would withdraw the work.20 The limited scenic resources
of the Opéra-Comique, which made the numerous set changes impracticable, required a late, hasty expansion of several orchestral
interludes. Even as he undertook these last revisions Debussy
became embroiled in negotiations with the set painters that seemed
like a battle towards imperfect understanding. Once all these
dimensions had finally been shepherded to the open rehearsal
on 28 April, he found that some ill-wisher had manoeuvred for
Maeterlinck’s desired failure by distributing a derisory pamphlet.
Thus primed, many in the audience found ready excuse for
mockery in Mélisande’s pathetically prosaic complaint – ‘I am
not happy here’ – at the end of Act ii, and in Yniold’s grating
repetitions of ‘Daddy’ in the spying scene (which had exasperated
Debussy himself ).
As Messager recalled, the power of the fourth and fifth acts
won over enough supporters to balance the protesters by the final
curtain.21 But the division of opinion carried over into the critical
reception. On one hand, enough commentators echoed a complaint
about ‘lack of melody’ that Debussy saw fit to insist in a tetchy
‘response to the critics’ that ‘melody, if I may say so, is almost
anti-lyrical. It is powerless to translate the mobility of souls and
of life.’22 On the other hand, Maeterlinck’s pique could hardly
have been assuaged by Dukas’s ringing praise for:
A music so naturally incorporated into the action, so naturally
arising from the situation, from the decor and the language, a
music so closely reunited with the music included in the words
that, within the total impression produced by the sonorous
transfusion, it becomes impossible to dissociate it from the text
that it penetrates; to the extent that in the final analysis it might
appear just as much the unconscious work of the poet as the
poem is that of the musician.23
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While it may have been easy to dismiss Dukas as a committed
partisan, it would have been harder to undermine the praise of
Pierre Lalo, a more ambivalent critic, who nonetheless took Pelléas
as the decisive illustration of the degree to which ‘all is poetry, just
as all is music, in [Debussy’s] oeuvre; and all his music is poetry’.24
Still, in spite of the enthusiasm of such influential commentators, any decisive evaluation of the opera’s success can only be a
historical simplification. The fact that Boulez could write in 1969
of the work’s ‘failure with audiences’ reflects its entanglement
in the questions about esotericism Debussy had been courting
since the early 1890s – as Emmanuel noted when paraphrasing the
question of another critic: ‘Is this not a language a bit too distant
and aristocratic, which risks remaining incomprehensible to the
non-initiated?’25 For aficionados of the ‘beautiful singing’ of operatic divas the answer can only be ‘yes’. But for those composers
(from Dukas to Bartók and Berg and beyond) who sought ways
to sustain this pre-eminent genre of the nineteenth century into
the twentieth, Pelléas et Mélisande was to prove an inexhaustible
source of inspiration.
For Debussy the production proved both personally and professionally pivotal. Soon after accompanying Messager in London
in July 1902, Debussy wrote to him affirming their new, profound
friendship in terms that touch both the theme of childhood and
the crucial ambiguity in the opera’s final act:
There are things about which I have never spoken except with
you, which makes me find your friendship precious to such a
point that I do not know how to say enough about it . . . Do not
find this too childish a story because the sentiment about which
I am speaking is perhaps more elevated than Love.26
The new friendship with Mary Garden, though less intense, was to
leave an invaluable trace in the recordings of songs and excerpts
108
A suburban
gathering around
the time of the
premiere of Pelléas
et Mélisande in
1902. From left
to right: the lawyer
Paul Poujaud,
Debussy, the critic
Pierre Lalo (seated),
Lilly Debussy and
the composer
Paul Dukas.
from Pelléas she made with Debussy in 1904 for the French record
company Le Gramophone. But of all the new connections stimulated
by the opera the most significant was to spring from a positive
review published in La Revue musicale in November 1902. When
he gratefully invited the review’s author for a personal meeting
Debussy inaugurated one of the most important relationships of
his later years. Indeed, the friendship with the young musicologist
Louis Laloy – which bore immediate fruit in the honour of ‘Chevalier
de la Légion d’Honneur’ granted to him by the state in January
1903, in part due to Laloy’s machinations – was to be one of the
few, new or old, to survive the turbulence that soon engulfed his
personal life.
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Professionally speaking, in spite of Debussy’s cynicism about
the tendency to measure artistic success in box-office terms – ‘to
have made Pelléas is of mere anecdotal significance, but to make
good receipts, that’s the main thing!’ – he seems to have seen his
opera as the long-sought key to material prosperity, for he initially
retained the publication rights himself.27 Even as he plunged into
laborious preparation of the proofs the eagerness with which he
turned to fresh projects can be taken as evidence of a kind of
creative release. The first substantial glimpse of a new literary
preoccupation appeared in August 1902 in a letter to Messager
announcing intensive work on Edgar Allan Poe’s tale ‘The Devil in
the Belfry’. But while Debussy confessed apprehension about public
reactions to this abandonment of ‘the shadows of Mélisande for the
ironic pirouette of the Devil’, such fears were to prove ill-founded
for the simple reason that neither this work nor the later project
on Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, which were to occupy him
sporadically for the rest of his life, ever reached completion.
Ill-starred readings of Poe aside, the years 1903–4 were creatively
significant both for the works Debussy saw into print and the much
more extensive list of projects he contracted for future publication.
Not all were entirely the products of his own personal inclinations.
A letter to his wife of 31 May 1903 contains a first reference to the
‘woman with the saxophone’, Elisa Hall (president of the Orchestral
Club of Boston), who was seeking new works for the instrument
she had taken up at the age of forty-seven.28 Although Debussy
was to work on his saxophone Rhapsody off and on for several years,
his failure to finish the orchestral version – ultimately completed
posthumously by a colleague – undoubtedly had something to
do with his unfamiliarity with the ‘habits’ of this particular ‘reed
animal’.29 But this project also clearly paled in interest beside the
more personal vision for a series of works under the collective title
Images. Although some vagueness remained about musical forces
(the pieces were to be for solo piano and ‘two pianos or orchestra’),
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the fact that the poetic titles specified for nine out of twelve works
in the initial contract of 8 July 1903 survived almost unchanged
into the two sets of Images for piano (1905–8) and the Images for
orchestra (1905–12) testifies to the clarity of Debussy’s original
vision. Just as clear in outline if not in detail, finally, was another
vision for a grand orchestral triptych based on his ‘countless
memories’ of the sea, first announced to Messager in September.30
When completed in 1905, La Mer was to prove his grandest
masterpiece after Pelléas.
By the end of 1903, in short, most of the works that would preoccupy Debussy over the next several years were either under way
or clearly in view. The one significant new composition to appear
in print, furthermore, can be seen as a crucial breakthrough in a
musical medium so far oddly marginal to his compositional explorations. Back in 1901, the publication of the triptych Pour le piano
had marked the appearance of the first of Debussy’s works for his
own instrument that retains a secure place in the virtuoso repertoire.
But as his younger contemporary Maurice Ravel later respectfully
observed, this showy, prosaically titled set offers little evidence of
a distinctive Debussyan pianistic voice.31 It was only after Ravel’s
Jeux d’eau appeared in 1902 that Debussy completed a triptych for
solo piano, under the collective title Estampes (‘prints’), whose progression through three evocative panels – Pagodes, La Soirée dans
Grenade, Jardins sous la pluie – belatedly matched the sonorous
poetry long apparent in his songs and orchestral works.
A ‘Bad Outcome’?
While Debussy was destined to complete most of the projects
envisioned in the years immediately after Pelléas, it would be misleading to see his aesthetic evolution through this time as simple
or straightforward. As the musicologist Guido Gatti noted in 1920,
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‘the personality of Debussy is one of those which unfolded in concentric circles’.32 A clear exemplification of this non-linear evolution
can be seen in the two song triptychs he completed in 1904.
First of all, in the second of two song cycles on poems from
Verlaine’s collection Fêtes galantes, Debussy offered his last readings
of a key early literary inspiration. This second, 1904 Fêtes galantes
triptych ends by pointedly recalling a birdlike arabesque for piano
that had long ago, in Debussy’s 1891 triptych of the same name,
been associated with the archetypical Romantic image of the
nightingale. The valedictory weight of the recollection in ‘Colloque
Sentimentale’ is clear from Verlaine’s words about two aged
‘spectres’ who walk together in a frozen landscape evoking a
shared Romantic past. The emotional gulf between the one who
wishes to remember and the one who does not is captured in
starkly contrasting language:
- Do you remember our former ecstasy?
- Why do you want me to remember it?
- Does your heart still beat merely at my name?
Do you still see my soul in your dreams? - No.
- Ah! Those beautiful days of inexpressible happiness
When we joined our lips together! - It is possible.
- How blue was the sky, and how great our hope!
- Hope has fled, vanquished, into the black sky.
Pacing the melodic declamation of this dialogue just as finely
as he had the exchanges in Maeterlinck’s play and colouring the
exquisitely spare accompaniment with fleeting surges of radiant,
post-Wagnerian harmony, Debussy’s setting of this ‘sentimental
colloquy’ bids a poignant farewell to Romantic lyricism.
Years later, he was to echo the same Romantic cliché when suggesting that ‘it is not necessary to hear the song of the nightingale,
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that of the locomotive responds better to modern artistic preoccupations’.33 But in truth, his negotiations with and against the
Romantic heritage would never lead to significant flirtation with
‘machine aesthetics’. In fact, during the first decade it is possible
to discern a growing alienation from the radical experiments of
the next generation. A visit to the 1908 Salon d’Automne – a forum
for the most advanced painting – was to leave him complaining
that ‘these people, who I would like to believe lack spitefulness,
are strenuously trying to disgust everyone including themselves
(one must hope) with painting’.34 Around the same time, a letter
to the writer Georges Jean-Aubry provided an occasion to gripe
about ‘contemporary poets’ who extract ‘fraught lyricism from
direly mediocre subject matter’.35
This sense of a gradual falling out of step with radical developments provides perspective on the fact that Debussy (unlike Ravel,
for example, in the 1905 Histoires naturelles on texts by Jules Renard)
did not turn to a contemporary poet to refresh his post-Romantic
song-writing. Instead, he turned to a more distant past. The triptych
Trois Chansons de France, also published in 1904, features settings
of two rondels by the fifteenth-century nobleman Charles d’Orléans
alongside a single setting of the seventeenth-century poet Tristan
l’Hermite.36 This reach back into the depths of French literary
tradition can be seen as further symptom of the nationalism
Debussy was exemplifying most clearly, in these years, in his
critical polemics on behalf of Rameau.
The adoption of an ‘antique’ style of poetry affected the musical
style of the songs. The deft treatments of the highly repetitive refrain
structures of the d’Orléans rondels may distantly recall the similar
imaginative play with musical recall in his much earlier settings of
Baudelaire. But now, the games with textual and musical recall are
projected through a studied pose of melodic and accompanimental
simplicity. The only point at which some of the old, blood-rich
Baudelairean languor re-emerges (for l’Hermite’s poem about ‘a dark
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grotto / where . . . The tide struggles against the pebbles, / And
light against shadow’) remains a paler, more stately version of the
post-Wagnerian grandeur now lost to the past.
This ‘archaeological’ turn from the faded legacy of Symbolism
to the depths of French literary history was to prove more than a
momentary indulgence, for Debussy would choose similarly antiquated texts for most of his later songs. But if it is thus clear that
the farewell to Romantic lyricism in Fêtes galantes ii must be
understood, aesthetically speaking, as a backward-looking turn,
at the same time this triptych, when published, bore explicit hints
of new developments in Debussy’s personal life. On sending the
proofs for the songs to the editor Durand in July 1904 he specified
that the dedication was to read: ‘In gratitude for the month of June
1904’, followed by the letters ‘A. l. p. M.’ Admitting that this might
seem ‘a little mysterious,’ he suggested that ‘it is necessary to make
some contribution to legend’.37
The ‘legend’ in question was to arise around one of the most convulsive dramas of Debussy’s personal life. ‘A. l. p. M.’ stands for ‘à la
petite mienne’, meaning ‘to my dear little one’. This was Debussy’s
affectionate nickname for Emma Bardac, the married mother of
one of his students, with whom he had recently embarked on a
passionate affair. Indeed, he sent the Fêtes galantes proofs from the
Grand Hotel in Jersey, where he was secretly staying with Emma.38
Their late-summer tryst in Jersey and Dieppe was the culmination
of a connection that had been growing since, upon first meeting
her in June 1903, he had dedicated a copy of the recently revised
Ariettes oubliées to her with the words ‘to Madame S. Bardac whose
musical sympathy is precious to me – infinitely’. Clearly, in Emma
– an accomplished singer for whom Gabriel Fauré had composed
his song cycle La Bonne Chanson, and who had been performing
Debussy’s songs since the late 1890s – he had found a partner whose
fine attunement to his own métier promised much broader sympathy than the physical passions that had once drawn him to Lilly.
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Debussy at
Pourville on the
Normandy seaside
in 1904, during the
trip with Emma
Bardac that
preceded his
divorce from Lilly.
A clear indication of this new level of connection can be seen in
a postcard Debussy sent to Emma in June 1904 bearing no message
beyond a hand-written citation of ‘Le faune’, the first song in the
second series of Fêtes galantes.39 It may be testimony to the security
of their relationship that he could thus invoke a song which depicts
a sculpture – a terracotta faun – laughing on the lawn as if ‘predicting a bad outcome to these serene moments’. In this case, the
‘bad outcome’ that soon befell Debussy’s marriage to Lilly was
ultimately (after Emma’s divorce, in turn, from Sigismond Bardac)
to prepare the way to a second, more compatible union. But this
happier outcome would not be won without significant personal
and financial cost.
Throughout the summer of 1904, the letters Debussy wrote to
Lilly at her parents’ home in Yonne mixed feeble attempts to prepare the ground (‘try above all not to become bored with waiting
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for me, you must try and be happy there, your proud and independent character will help you I hope’) and insincere affirmations
of continuing affection (‘stop accusing me of indifference, it is too
unjust!’). But when his explicit request for a separation finally came
in mid-August Lilly’s response proved the opposite of rational and
discreet.40 A quick return to Paris to meet her did little to calm
the waters; on 13 October 1904 she attempted suicide by shooting
herself in the stomach.
Although surgical intervention saved Lilly’s life, the noisy
condemnation that now engulfed Debussy must have seemed like
a cruel negation of the acclaim he had enjoyed after the Pelléas
premiere. Even before the suicide attempt, he wrote to Durand of
his terror of returning to the gossip of Paris, ‘city of light, perhaps?
but city of bores too, let us admit!’ By the end of October, before
leaving Dieppe for further travels with Emma, he admitted being
‘furiously tormented by the press campaign Madame Debussy has
deliberately summoned against me’, and complained that ‘it seems
I cannot get divorced like everyone else’.41
Debussy and his second wife Emma outside their home in the Avenue du Bois de
Boulogne, 1908.
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Bad publicity aside, the aftermath of the affair was to be a wave
of ‘desertions’, as he put it, by those he considered his closest
friends. Longstanding companions René Peter, Pierre Louÿs and
Raymond Bonheur all broke ties in sympathy with Lilly; Messager
and Garden followed suit; even the friendships with Dukas and
Godet chilled (although with these two the breach was temporary).
Of Debussy’s intimate circle, only Satie and Laloy remained firm
in their affections. On receiving a first letter from the latter some
months later he responded with touching warmth: ‘Dear friend, be
sure of my joy at finding you again; I will also attempt to find again
the Claude Debussy you once knew.’42
The pervasive disapproval seems to have arisen in part from
the misapprehension that Debussy’s interest in Emma was basely
financial. (For Louÿs, distaste for the liaison with ‘a forty-somethingyear-old Jewess’ was compounded by anti-Semitism.43) But Emma
came away from her divorce with little of her husband’s money.
And the only way Debussy was able to meet the costs of the divorce
was to sell the rights to Pelléas. Immediately on signing the contract
with the editors and receiving his part of the fee he sent Emma a
ring with a letter affirming that ‘for me life did not begin until the
day I met you’. Less than two months after his divorce on 5 July
1905, he had gained enough detachment from his earlier life to
comment sardonically to Laloy: ‘you have probably read in the
papers that Madame Debussy has become Mademoiselle Lilly
Texier again. That is a state she should never have left. Be in no
doubt that by regaining it, she will find profit and success.’44
A Mature Masterpiece
Torturous as the ‘press campaign’ about his marital problems had
been, the tumult of scandal was not the only determinant of
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Debussy’s public profile through these months. Indeed, the same
period, after the first restaging of Pelléas had begun in October 1903,
saw the first growth of a partisan adulation for his music that would
lead one critic to coin the derisive label ‘Pelléastres’ for the acolytes
of what was starting to seem like ‘a new religion’.45 Meanwhile, the
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was performed again both in Paris
and Amsterdam; a concert in early 1904 at the salon of the Princesse
de Cystria (whose Heures de musique were dedicated to ‘the most
refined, the most pure and the most delicate’ music) featured several
piano works, songs and the string quartet. About year later, the
Salle Aeolian presented a concert featuring Debussy’s string
quartet together with Ravel’s; recent piano music by both composers was performed by their mutual collaborator, the Catalan
pianist Ricardo Viñes.
Revivals and restagings aside, it is striking just how much new
work Debussy managed to produce even as he negotiated this great
change in his life. Two of the piano pieces Viñes played in February
1905, Masques and L’Isle joyeuse, were newly completed; a third, D’un
cahier d’esquisses, was finished and published with a dedication to
Emma’s son Raoul Bardac. The same year also saw the completion
of the Danse sacrée et Danse profane for harp and orchestra, which
(along with the incidental music for the Chansons de Bilitis) represent an extreme in the oeuvre of hieratic ‘classical’ innocence. But
by far the most significant accomplishment of this period was
Debussy’s most grandiose triptych so far, La Mer – the work based
on ‘memories of the sea’ first announced to Messager back in 1903
– whose orchestration preoccupied him all through the last months
of his first marriage before it was finally finished in March 1905.
Critics inclined to hear music as composer’s autobiography
have been unable to resist linking some of these works directly to
Debussy’s personal life. Given both its title and its radiant virtuosity,
for example, the piano piece L’Isle joyeuse (‘Joyous Isle’) has been
readily deemed a quasi-programmatic emanation from the romantic
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flight with Emma to the island of Jersey.46 A trace of that romantic
seaside sojourn has even been sensed in the new, sweepingly affirmative orchestral tones of La Mer. No doubt such conceits now seem
irredeemably crude. But there may be some value in considering
this work as a crucial marker in Debussy’s compositional life, at
least – even as a grand affirmation in aesthetic terms of the maturity
that had proved so elusive to Golaud. Whether or not it is coincidental that this affirmation emerged just as Debussy was turning
from the ‘woman-child character’ he had first married to a more
mature companion, the crucial point concerns the extraordinarily
deft synthesis of contrasting elements he accomplished in La Mer.
The work’s ‘cyclic’ unity, for one thing, is projected much more
blatantly than in the skein of subtle thematic interconnections that
link the Trois Nocturnes. This is not the only way in which La Mer
seems to glance back to the Franckian models of Debussy’s string
quartet – indeed one fulsomely Romantic theme can be heard as a
distinctly reminiscent of Franck’s piano quintet, which Debussy
had once admired.47 As if to reflect the Teutonic undercurrents of
the subtitle ‘Three Symphonic Sketches’, furthermore, the overall
trajectory comes across as markedly more traditional than the
previous orchestral triptych – especially in the rhetorical shapes
of the first and third movements, whose powerfully affirmative
perorations contrast starkly with the ‘fades to silence’ that end
all three Nocturnes.
At the same time, La Mer marks a significant step forward in
Debussy’s orchestral thinking. From the start, the new prominence
of the bass instruments creates a weightier, more sinewy context
for the characteristic (but newly prolific) flickers of wind arabesques.
Overall, the instrumentation offers countless instances of the
gap between Debussy’s critical posturing and his compositional
imagination. In his first fictive ‘interview with Monsieur Croche’
(published July 1901) he had described Wagner’s orchestration as
‘a kind of multicoloured putty, spread almost uniformly, within
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which it is no longer possible to distinguish the sound of a violin
from that of a trombone’.48 Unfair as this description may be, it can
serve to highlight the degree to which the Prélude, the Nocturnes
and Pelléas had trafficked in the pure tones of single instruments.
Now, in La Mer, the same clear hues are joined by a rich new range
of orchestral ‘doublings’ and aqueous layering effects, through
which, for example, one early theme in four horns sounds three
times as if suspended in the middle depths before it fades from
the scene.
Traditional resonances and orchestral detail aside, finally, it is
its unfettered, improvisatory formal unfolding that was to render
La Mer iconic for later modernists. In a book written for Debussy’s
1962 centenary, for example, the composer Jean Barraqué suggested
that the work seems to ‘propel itself in a sense all on its own, without
the aid of any pre-established model’, and that ‘music here becomes
a mysterious and secret world that invents itself from within and
destroys itself in turn’.49 This description seems particularly apt to
the second movement, ‘Games of the Waves’, in which the orchestra
sounds at times like a loose corporation of diverse entities, free to
play at their own whim, occasionally whirled together – as if by a
larger, tidal force – into unitary swells. But while Barraqué may be
right to celebrate the degree to which this formal unfolding seems
to match the quicksilver ‘linkages and superpositions’ of thought
itself, he underplays the degree to which the same movement’s
‘games’ remain shot through with anthropomorphic and cultural
echoes – for example in the mocking laughter scattered throughout,
or the infectious waltz rhythm that drives the whole, expansive
melodic excursion at the close. Here, as in the work’s grand brass
chorales, Debussy’s ‘pictorial’ effects are projected through musical
tropes with strong historical pedigree.
On the whole, the critical responses to the premiere at the
Concerts Lamoureux in October 1905 tended, like Barraqué, to
emphasize the radical aspects of La Mer over its myriad partly
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dissolved traces of tradition. The critic for Gil blas, for which
Debussy himself had written articles in the first six months of 1903,
was able to note ‘some concession to symphonic development’ and
a few conventional phrases ‘lost in the orchestral foam’. But he was
more taken with the impression that ‘[Debussy] doesn’t actually
write. He is Aeolus, who breathes across an immense harp that is
the orchestra.’ 50 Laloy was even more extravagant, praising La Mer
in his recently launched journal Le Mercure musical as ‘amongst the
most beautiful, the most harmonious, the most enchanting, and at
the same time the broadest and most powerful [works] not only
of music, but of all art, and I would almost say of nature’.51 Laloy’s
fellow-editor Jean Marnold, once so dismissive of programmatic
response to the Nocturnes, now indulged in anthropomorphisms
even more extravagant than the composer’s own:
The [sea] from which the poet took inspiration this time awakens
in the splendour of a sunlit dawn, beneath the plaintive caress
of the wind that rocked its sleep, that watches over it, that coddles
it with an egotistical and jealous love. It stretches lazily, then
capriciously, and soon infuriated by the obstinate pursuit, resists,
froths and bleats within the embrace, only to surrender finally,
panting, in the golden brazier of noon, even as its conqueror
loses strength and a chorale, surging forth from the limpid
depths, celebrates their eternal marriage.
Taking issue with those who had criticized Debussy for lack of force,
Marnold praised the mixture of the ‘grandiose’ and the ‘exquisite’
in La Mer, a music ‘in which one would believe oneself to be skirting
vast abysses and staring into the depths of space’.52
Not everyone was so convinced. The composer Alfred Bruneau,
for whom La Mer lacked some of the ‘irresistible seduction’ of the
Nocturnes, was not the only one to note a change of tone, characterized by Gaston Carraud as something ‘more precise, less enveloped’
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than in Debussy’s earlier works.53 But it was Pierre Lalo’s criticism
in Le Temps that most annoyed the composer:
For the first time, while listening to a picturesque work by
Debussy, I have the impression of being not really in front of
nature, but in front of a reproduction of nature; a reproduction
that is marvellously refined, ingenious, and industrious (perhaps
too much so); but a reproduction nonetheless . . . I do not hear,
I do not see, I do not feel the sea.54
Debussy’s reply took particular issue with Lalo’s casual invocation
of ‘picturesque’ motivations. Suggesting that this was a term
generally used with little precise meaning, he defended the radical
nature of his work:
You love and defend traditions that no longer exist for me,
or at least, they only exist as representatives of an epoch in
which they were not always either as beautiful or as valuable
as one might wish to maintain, and the dust of the Past is not
always respectable.55
In this way Debussy, too, significantly exaggerated the degree to
which he had shaken off the ‘dust of the Past’. A full appreciation
of the ‘Symphonic Sketches’ requires a more judicious appreciation
of those aspects of its tone and language that are ‘less new’, as
Carraud aptly put it – which is to say, its synthesis of all the most
influential traditions behind Debussy’s orchestral imagination.
Fatherhood, Further Projects and a Debut
The public unveiling of La Mer aside, the month of October 1905
also proved pivotal for more personal reasons. Only days before
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Debussy and his daughter Claude-Emma, known as ‘Chouchou’, in 1907, Avenue du
Bois de Boulogne.
the premiere Debussy moved with Emma into a hôtel particulier
on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne in the fashionable sixteenth
arrondissement, where they would remain, beset by financial
worries, until his death. On 30 October Emma bore them a daughter,
Claude-Emma, known as Chouchou. Writing to Laloy in early
November, Debussy both thanked him for his review of La Mer
and gave him the news: ‘I have been, for a few days, the father of
a little girl – the joy of which has somewhat knocked me over and
leaves me a bit fearful.’56
A day after Chouchou’s birth, the first fruits of Debussy’s 1903
vision for a series of works for piano and ‘two pianos or orchestra’
appeared with the publication of the first three Images for solo
piano. It is clear from a letter to his editor that this set represented
a looser kind of triptych than the Chansons de Bilitis or La Mer. But
it is also clear that Debussy recognized its significance as a further
step beyond the Estampes in his writing for piano. ‘Have you played
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the Images?’, he asked Durand. ‘Without false vanity I believe that
these three pieces will hold up well and that they will take their
place in the literature for piano . . . (as Chevillard might say) to
the left of Schumann or to the right of Chopin . . . as you like it.’57
Whatever he meant by this gnomic turn of phrase, the Images can
be said to raise the aesthetic stakes in turning from the postcardlike exoticism of the Estampes (about which he once quipped ‘when
one cannot afford to pay for travels, it is necessary to supplement
with the imagination’) to deeper subtexts more akin to the exploration of traditions in La Mer.58 The first of the three, Reflets dans
l’eau, though superficially an exercise in fluid pictorialism, carries
palpably Romantic echoes in its climactic irruption that suggest
more than one meaning of ‘reflection’ is in play. Historical retrospection is more blatantly at issue in the second, Hommage à
Rameau, a grandly expressive pianistic equivalent to Debussy’s
critical polemics in honour of a great French precursor.
In the second instalment of this large project – a second set
of three solo piano Images, completed a couple of years later –
Debussy was to deepen and refract this pianistic engagement
with time, tradition and pictorial evocation. But in the interim,
he entered a relatively fallow period similar to that experienced
ten years before. Throughout 1906–7, the slow gestation of several
existing projects was accompanied by lengthy fruitless exchanges
about new plans with potential collaborators.
The most important new interlocutor (measured by time spent
if not by results) was the young writer and doctor Victor Segalen,
whose published articles on contemporary aesthetics were known
to Debussy, and who presented himself in April 1906 in hopes of
securing his collaboration on a musical drama on the life of Buddha.
Although Debussy felt some affinity for this earnest scholar of
foreign cultures, claiming that Segalen’s 1907 article ‘Dead voices,
Maori musics’ interested him more than any other of its kind, he
was soon retreating from the Siddhartha libretto with the excuse
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that ‘in its existing form, I know no music capable of penetrating
this abyss!’59 Proposing instead a work based on the myth of
Orpheus, he took the chance to criticize the eighteenth-century
German composer Gluck, whose damnable displacement of
Rameau in French musical affections was a recurring theme in
his criticism. Gluck’s opera Orphée, he suggested, ‘had only represented the anecdotal and sentimental side of [the myth], completely
neglecting everything that made Orpheus the first and most sublime
of the misunderstood’.60 But in spite of this hint at the allegorical
investments behind Debussy’s dramatic affinities – similarly, in
explanation for his attraction to Poe’s tale of the Devil he once
suggested that this character ‘breathes through those who do not
think in the same way as everyone else’ – the Orpheus project was
to remain incomplete by the time Segalen’s departure for China
in 1909 ended their collaboration.61
According to Laloy, whose important early biography of Debussy
was to appear in 1909, he had embarked on these labours in full
expectation that they would never bear fruit. But Segalen, like Louÿs
in the mid-1890s, was not the only one to find that collaboration
with the composer promised more than it delivered. Exactly at
the time Debussy was envisioning ways to correct Gluck’s Orpheus
he imagined outdoing a more recent German musical invader on
the more invested terrain of the Tristan story, whose ‘legendary
character’, he claimed, had been deformed by Wagner’s ‘questionable metaphysics’.62 But while his collaboration on The Story of
Tristan with a renewed acquaintance, Gabriel Mourey, briefly
seemed promising enough to receive an anticipatory announcement in the press, a combination of practical problems and aesthetic
hesitations left this project in an even less advanced state than
Siddhartha or Orphée-Roi.
Clearly, the compositional impasses during these years cannot
wholly be explained with reference to the vagaries of collaboration.
A second Poe opera, The House of Usher, on which Debussy worked
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independently from mid-1908 through the remaining decade of his
life, would also remain unfinished. All such abortive ventures aside,
the paucity of new publications in these years can be put down in
part to the steady progress he was making on his capacious Images
project, whose orchestral component was ultimately to include no
less than five substantial pieces. Although the sheer size of the whole
collection would ultimately delay its first performance until 1913,
Debussy was able to announce the completion of one orchestral
Image (Rondes de Printemps) around the same time as he sent his
editor the second of three sets for piano in late 1907; he claimed
to Emma that a second (Ibéria – itself a triptych) was complete by
Christmas 1908. Meanwhile, the same year saw the revision and
orchestration, by Debussy alone and with younger collaborators
Henri Busser and André Caplet, of several earlier works, including
L’Enfant prodigue, Printemps, the two-piano Petite suite (of 1889),
and Le Jet d’eau from the Baudelaire songs.
While some critics received this mining of the back catalogue
– and indeed this farming out of creative labour by a renowned
orchestrator – as evidence of fading revolutionary cachet, such
a revival of youthful accomplishments clearly reflects Debussy’s
prominence and marketability after Pelléas and La Mer.63 Indeed,
relatively thin in publications though they may have been, these
years saw considerable growth in his international stature, as
evidenced by the productions of his opera in major European cities
and beyond. Shortly after Pelléas received its fiftieth performance
at the Opéra Comique in Paris on 23 December 1906, Debussy
travelled to Brussels to observe (in exasperation) the rehearsals
for the first Belgian production in January 1907. A German version
was first produced in Frankfurt in April 1907 and then Munich in
October 1908. In the interim, productions were mounted further
afield: in New York in February 1908; in Milan in April under
Toscanini (who sent a congratulatory telegram); then finally in
Prague in September.
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Back in Paris, the plans to present La Mer on the city’s other significant symphony series, the Concerts Colonne, initially foundered
in ‘lamentable rehearsals’ (as Debussy put it), which led the conductor, Édouard Colonne, to pass the baton to the composer himself.
‘It is not without a strongly beating heart that I climbed the podium
for the first rehearsal’, he confessed to Segalen, candidly admitting
his inexperience at this most public and demanding musical role.
But he was also quick to celebrate a new wealth of sensations. As
a conductor, he enthused, ‘you truly feel at the heart of your own
music . . . when it “sounds” very well, it seems as if you have become,
yourself, an instrument possessing a total range of sonorities,
unleashed solely at the whim of the gestures of a little stick’.64
By all accounts, his début with the ‘little stick’ was a roaring
success. Noting with amusement the public’s keen desire (after
Pelléas) to glimpse the head of the ‘monsieur who wrote that’, the
critic ‘L’Ouvreuse’ vividly described the tumult that greeted the
performance of the new work in the revealed presence of this
‘slightly chubby paleness, ink black hair, and bulging forehead
filled with ninth chords’:
The last note of La Mer unleashed one of those ovations that –
aside from anything else – victoriously prove the solidity of a
theatre and the genius of its architect . . . It lasted a duration
improbable to specify, it featured cries of savage joy, clatterings
of obsessed palms, demented shouts and calls. Debussy passed
ten times through the forest of music stands to take the
prompter’s box as witness to his touched gratitude; from time
to time a violent and energetic whistle, like a train conductor’s
signal for departure, restarted the triumphal convoy . . .
recharging the zeal of tired biceps and smarting hands.65
While he undoubtedly savoured this triumph, Debussy’s own
reflections were drier in tone. Noting to Dukas how curious it was
127
Caricature of
Debussy as a
conductor, by
R. Claude Bils,
c. 1909.
that ‘the feat of assembling sounds in the most harmonious possible
way gives as an echo the cries of animals and the vociferations of
aliens’, he compared this first experience of conducting to that
of ‘an acrobat who has just succeeded with a difficult jump’.66
‘To Translate a Refined Sensibility by Simple Means’
The success of this début cannot be taken as evidence of Debussy’s
natural gifts with the ‘little stick’. Testimony to the contrary was to
emerge a little over a year later when, at the invitation of the impresario Sir Edgar Speyer, Debussy crossed the Channel to conduct his
music in London. As Sir Henry J. Wood, artistic director of the
Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts, reported in his autobiography:
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The rehearsal went off smoothly enough but at the concert
there was a peculiar accident. In the second of the Nocturnes
(a movement called Fêtes), the time changes a good deal. To
the surprise of all of us, Debussy (who, quite candidly, was not
a good conductor, even of his own works) suddenly lost his
head, and his beat! Realizing what he had done, he evidently
felt the best thing was to stop and begin the movement over
again. He tapped the desk, and tapped again. But then something extraordinary happened. The orchestra refused to stop.67
As it turned out, the determination of the ensemble to ignore their
unreliable leader resulted in a performance successful enough to
be enthusiastically encored. As Wood dryly recalled, ‘Debussy was
non-plussed and certainly did not understand the English mind.’
An even more damning assessment of Debussy’s conducting abilities was soon to emerge closer to home following the 9 April 1909
concert at the Concerts Colonne on which he presented both his
early cantata La Damoiselle élue and a new work of 1908, the Trois
Chansons de Charles d’Orléans for four-voice choir. This time,
‘L’Ouvreuse’ was distinctly ungenerous:
It would not be a bad thing if he learned to conduct properly,
because Friday, he led his four-part songs and his Damoiselle élue
depressingly badly. Alas! yes, mesdames, with a feeble and timid
arm, the young master shredded the gracious score that had once
scandalized the Institute, and made of it a grey, somnolent,
interminable affair.
While the critic was willing to blame the loss of revolutionary
freshness in the cantata on Debussy’s amateurish directing, he
registered a more fundamental disappointment with the choral
songs: ‘After such a long silence, we had the right to hope for
more significant discoveries from such a musician.’68
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This response is easy to understand in view of the humble charms
of the Trois Chansons – a strikingly unprepossessing musical reading
to emerge late in the same decade that had seen the premières of
Pelléas and La Mer. As in the Trois Chansons de France for voice a
nd piano of 1904, the light tone of the selected Renaissance poems
again inspired a marked simplicity of musical utterance – indeed
the most traditional musical medium (satb choir) drew from
Debussy something close to the ‘gracious’ intertwining lyricism
he had long celebrated in the music of Palestrina and Bach. The
second, most recently composed song, ‘Quand j’ai ouy le tabourin’,
is the most inventive of the three: this cosily amusing text about
the poet’s wish to remain warm in bed while others enjoy May
time celebrations is given to a contralto solo accompanied by a
tambourine-like vocal ‘jangle’ for all other altos, tenors and basses.
It may be, as ‘L’Ouvreuse’ noted, that such ‘precious effects’
would have been well within reach of many a more mediocre
composer. But rather than any reflexive critique about a failure
of imaginative scope on the part of this notorious ‘Impressionist’
(the label was now well established), a more generous response
might take the Trois Chansons as evidence of a different kind of
aesthetic broadening on Debussy’s part, to include alongside the
range of traditions absorbed and transformed in La Mer such
humbler, ‘occasional’ exercises of musical craft as could be accessible
to most community and church choirs. Here again, Palestrina
and Bach are relevant points of reference – but in a historical
sense that precedes their anachronistic canonization as exemplary
pre-Romantic geniuses. A similar broadening in the direction of
humility and simplicity, in fact, can be seen in the contrast between
two other significant compositions Debussy managed to see into
print in 1908.
The second set of piano Images, published in January, includes
some of the most sonorously and psychologically suggestive of
Debussy’s creations for the instrument. Although he never suggested
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a specific inspiration for the first, Les cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells
through the leaves), it is tempting to sense in the title and the deft,
translucent layerings of rhythmic figures an oblique reminiscence
of an idyllic report sent to Louÿs back in 1901 from a sojourn in the
countryside around Lilly’s parental home in Yonne. ‘At that moment,
the Angelus, with the voice of a little faithful – even stupid – bell
was commanding the fields to sleep,’ Debussy wrote, ‘I found it
the occasion of rhythmic combinations of which the details would
make a tambourine tremble.’69 If this piece might thus be heard to
embody a kind of idealized nostalgia for rural simplicity, the second,
Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fût (And the moon descends over
the temple that was), clearly enacts, through flexible rhythmic
fluctuations, a melancholy reflection on the fading promise of
various ‘exotic’ instrumental and vocal invocations. Poissons d’or
(‘Goldfish’), finally, brings the set to a close with an acrobatic
summa of Debussyan virtuosity, inspired by a Japanese lacquer
nd dedicated to his favoured interpreter Viñes.
In marked contrast to the scope and difficulty of these Images,
the other work Debussy completed for the piano in 1908, the six
pieces of Children’s Corner dedicated ‘To my dear little Chouchou
with the tender excuses of her father for that which follows’,
might be seen as a belated response to the ‘childhood’ songs of
Musorgsky, The Nursery, he had so praised in 1901. The suggestion
is more contentious than it might seem. A little while earlier, Laloy’s
ringing praise for Ravel’s Histoires naturelles as a song set that both
captured and transcended the ‘spirit of The Nursery’ had drawn
heated objections from Debussy, who complained of Ravel’s
‘artificial’ qualities as a ‘conjuror’ or ‘Fakir’ whose tricks could
never surprise more than once.70 (The cordial relations between
the two composers largely ceased around this time, in part due
to what Laloy termed ‘absurd questions of priority’.71) While it is
impossible to argue decisively for the greater ‘sincerity’ of Debussy’s
own venture into music of childhood, these little pieces remain
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striking for the elegance and efficiency with which they manage
to ‘translate a refined sensibility by simple means’ (to recall his
Mussorgsky review).
The ‘simplicity’ is far from infantile in a technical sense. The
occasionally fleet finger work and pervasive subtle shadings place
this music beyond the reach even of many children older than
Chouchou (who turned three in 1908). Still, the way the opening
piece, ‘Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum’, captures the learning
pianist’s wayward drift from earnest finger exercises into playful
improvisation bespeaks a fine imaginative sympathy between
mature and childish perspectives.72 Each of the ensuing pieces
demonstrates another facet of ‘refinement in simplicity’ – for
example, in the delicate, hovering dynamism of ‘The Snow is
Dancing’ or the miniature echo of the idyllic pastoral of ‘La flûte
de Pan’ in ‘The Little Shepherd’. But it is the last work of the set that
most tellingly hints at a larger import behind the childlike pose.
In ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ a boisterous evocation of newly fashionable American dance rhythms frames a central section featuring
a tongue-in-cheek quotation of the opening of Tristan und Isolde,
marked ‘with a grand emotion’ and answered by a coy pianistic
wink. Here, the Wagnerian ‘trumpets of fame’ finally seem cut down
to size – reduced to an in-joke in a music-hall parody composed for
a child. But it would be misleading to take this easy wit as evidence
of a final resolution in this compositional relationship. Although
less than a decade now remained to him, there were still further
twists to come in Debussy’s negotiations with all the compositional
influences he had confronted to such varied ends in the years after the
production of Pelléas. If these last years were to provide relatively
few new developments on the terrain of musical reading, they were
to prove rich both in the further expansion of ongoing aesthetic
pursuits, and in the exploration of new compositional realms.
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4
Something New, Which Surprises
Even Ourselves
Not long before Debussy’s death, Robert Godet – the Swiss linguist
who had received, over the years, more dedicated copies of his scores
than anyone else – was inspired to take a new voyage through the
‘magical archipelago’ of the composer’s oeuvre. On disembarking
from his journey of rediscovery, Godet sent his friend a letter that
distils into a single colloquial phrase some of the navigational
difficulties posed by the last intricate channels of this musical
archipelago. ‘The continuity of your effort’, Godet suggested, ‘is
paradoxically captured in the fact that you have never drawn double
profit from the same bag of grain.’1
As a reaction to the whole oeuvre, this observation succinctly
captures the degree to which Debussy realized his own demand
for all artists to ‘distance themselves as much as possible from the
place and subject of their success’ – as he put it to a Hungarian
journalist in December 1910.2 But Godet’s sense of paradoxical
continuity-within-variety takes on greater weight in the face of the
extreme heterogeneity of the works Debussy composed in the last
eight or nine years of his life. If 1910 saw, in the first book of piano
Préludes, a significant expansion in his facility with evocative ‘masks’,
the next year was to find his only, disconcertingly overblown (and
ostensibly sincere) work of religious music in Le Martyre de SaintSébastien. Soon after, an extreme of esotericism (Trois Poèmes de
Stéphane Mallarmé) would share the work-table with an even sparer
and simpler essay in childlike play than Children’s Corner (the ballet
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La Boîte à Joujoux). And only a year or so later, a cringingly blatant
piece of wartime propaganda (‘Noël pour les enfants qui n’ont pas
de maison’) would emerge even as Debussy was describing his last
three chamber sonatas as a retreat to the haven of ‘pure music’.
It would not do to over-exaggerate this last disjunction, for
however remote from worldly cares the sonatas may seem the
signature on their title page – ‘Claude Debussy, Musicien Français’
– attaches them to the nationalism that stands behind this whole
varied output as a consistent prise de position in these years. But
Debussy’s nationalistic posturing, repeated ad nauseam in letters
and criticism alike, also has its ambiguities. It is unclear, for
a start, just how much his list of ‘French’ attributes – ‘clarity’,
‘elegance’, ‘charm’ – really tells us about the complex formal and
expressive imagination at work in many mature compositions.
Furthermore, while the war years would stimulate more than one
outburst of xenophobia amidst the railings against French music’s
enthralment to foreign influences, Debussy’s writings on Wagner
(to mention one contested name) actually remained more nuanced
than many others. The specific problem of Teutonic influence
aside, there may even be grounds – in his repeated praise for a
Hungarian cafe violinist; his judicious evaluations of modern
Spanish adoptions of folk music; and his exhortation to Igor
Stravinsky to be ‘above all, a Russian artist’ – to attribute to him
a more pluralistic, Herderian nationalism than is implied by those
wartime pronouncements alone.3
On the whole, both the variegated profile of the late oeuvre and
the instability of its informing ideology might seem easy to explain
in light of external events – amongst which the cataclysm of the
First World War was of course pre-eminent. As Debussy put it to
his close friend André Caplet in 1914: ‘with or without patriotism,
war is an accumulation of disorder. I have a horror of disorder; thus,
I do not like war.’4 But whatever relationship might be adduced
between Europe’s collapse into violent chaos and the startling
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shifts in Debussy’s later oeuvre there were other causes in place,
closer to home, long before 1914. After his divorce from Lilly
Debussy never gained secure financial footing. Even when supplemented by Emma’s alimony from Sigismond Bardac, his earnings
never came close to supporting their house in the Avenue du Bois
de Boulogne along with sundry other expenses. Without the many
loans – or ‘advances’ for work never completed – from the publisher
Jacques Durand it is hard to see how the family would have survived.
Given that some later projects were primarily taken up for financial
reasons, it is hardly surprising that a whiff of dutiful blandness
occasionally emerges.
But such instances are remarkably rare in view of the straitened
circumstances of the life, which ultimately extended to an excruciating terminal illness. It would thus be misleading to overemphasize
Godet’s sense of paradox at the expense of an appreciation for the
wealth of disparate accomplishment that emerged from several
short spans of intense productivity before Debussy succumbed
to cancer in early 1918. A chronological ‘voyage’ through the late
works perhaps exaggerates discontinuities better appreciated, from
a bird’s eye view, as evidence of new deftness in pivoting – like one
of the ‘notorious dancers’ who came to play a key role in Debussy’s
creative life – from one avenue of exploration onto another. If any
one of these paths seems a new and regrettable departure, others
can be seen as richly unpredictable extensions of long-developing
interests. On completing his latest steps along these established
lines of inquiry it is not hard to imagine Debussy sensing again the
thrill he celebrated to that Hungarian journalist in 1910: ‘what joy
in finding within us something new, which surprises even ourselves,
and fills us with calm satisfaction.’5
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A Year of Abundance
Debussy had good cause for satisfaction by the end of a year which
had proven, in spite of considerable distraction, one of his most
productive. In the early months of 1910 he completed several
instrumental works: the Première Rapsodie for clarinet; the first
book of piano Préludes; two orchestral Images. A few months later,
he turned again to literary-musical reading. He brought two further
settings of Tristan L’Hermite’s seventeenth-century verse together
with ‘La Grotte’ from the 1904 Trois Chansons de France to form a
new, unified triptych, Le promenoir des deux amants. Then he reached
further back, to the Renaissance poet François Villon, for a triptych
whose value in his own estimation can be deduced from the fact that
these were the only songs, aside from a single Baudelaire setting
(‘Le Jet d’eau’), for which he completed an orchestral version.
The instrumental works completed between January and
April already present a varied spectrum of accomplishment. The
Première Rapsodie, written as a test piece for the clarinet competition at the Paris Conservatoire, is generally catalogued with
Debussy’s small corpus of chamber music. But it is clear from the
contract that an orchestral conception was in view from the start.
From a hearing of the orchestrated version (completed late 1911)
it is striking how blithely the rhapsody traffics in specific echoes
of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – a work of similar scale
whose ‘rhapsodic’ form had been led by a different solo wind
instrument. Such echoes only highlight the aesthetic distance
between the two works. Not only is the relationship between
solo ‘figure’ and orchestral ‘ground’ now more stable, but the
rhapsody’s flexible chain of improvisatory episodes actually
delivers the strongest reminiscence of the Prélude’s agonistic
lyrical effusions late in the form, as a fully satisfying moment
of expressive release.
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The last page of ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (1909), showing one of the parenthetical
‘after-titles’ Debussy used for all of his piano preludes.
Such slackening of allegorical investment can readily be put down
to the official occasion of this ‘most amiable’ work (as Debussy once
called it).6 But it may also have something to do with the absence of
any invested ‘reading’ behind the Rapsodie. The point might seem
clearer once we note that Debussy was, at the same time, further
developing the relationship between reading and composing in
the first book of twelve preludes for piano. Although only a few can
be tied to specific literary sources – including Shakespeare’s As You
Like It (the eleventh prelude, La Danse de Puck) and Baudelaire’s
‘Harmonie du Soir’ (the fourth, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans
l’air du soir) – Debussy structured the manuscript to encourage a new,
quizzical perspective on the relationship between notated sounds and
their evocative implications. Previously, he had given each Estampe
and Image a conventional title atop the first page. But he now identified each prelude with a numeral, and only provided an informing
poetic conceit as an elliptical afterthought below the last page.
Many of these appended hints to the performer imply modes
of physical activity: dancing; turning; guitar strumming; plodding
(the sixth prelude, Des pas sur la neige); drumming (the twelfth,
Minstrels). The elliptical ‘after-titles’ thus can be read as invitations
137
to reflect about the choreographic – tactile and gestural – experiences
summoned when Debussy’s modern scalar languages are deployed
with evocative intent across the familiar field of the piano keyboard. The challenge, in other words, is to consider consciously
the most esoteric aspects of musical experience Debussy had
adumbrated, back in 1901, in his review of Dukas’s piano sonata
for La Revue blanche:
True music lovers rarely go to fairground booths; they have
their simple piano and passionately play certain pages again
and again; this is just as certain a method of intoxication as the
‘true, powerful and subtle opium’ and a much less debilitating
way of evoking happy moments.7
To approach some of the preludes with attunement to the combined
tactile, gestural, sonorous and imaginative components of such
private ‘intoxication’ is potentially to sense – say, within the second
prelude, Voiles, which fleetingly releases one of Debussy’s most
radiant visions of ‘exotic’ pleasures – a further extension of the
agonistic concern with expressive means and ends he had first
refined years before in consultation with Mallarmé.8
Of course Debussy exaggerated in his description of ‘true music
lovers’: he was to perform several of his piano preludes in public and
would be closely attentive to the interpretations of others. If the first
book of preludes might thus be best understood as an exploration
of the boundaries between private and public musical experience
rather than an endorsement of either side, Debussy was also, in
early 1910, adding the finishing touches to works whose medium
destined them more decisively for the ‘fairground’ of the public
concert. The second of the three orchestral Images, Ibéria, was conducted by Gabriel Pierné at the concerts Colonne in late February
1910. A week later, Debussy directed the third Image, Rondes de
Printemps, at a new concert series founded by the publisher Durand.
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Although both Laloy and Ravel greeted the Images as further
attainments of a consummate orchestral imagination, this triptych
(the first piece, Gigues, was completed in 1913) was destined, as
Boulez noted years later, to remain an ‘underestimated’ contribution
to Debussy’s orchestral oeuvre. In his attempt at a defence, Boulez
tried to downplay the unifying conceit by which the triptych presents
the musical ‘colours’ of three different countries: Scotland, Spain
and France.9 But while the elastic treatment of timbral resources
partly justifies Boulez’s focus on ‘purely musical’ aspects, Debussy
gave startlingly literal emphasis after one rehearsal to precise representational qualities: ‘a water-melon seller, and whistling urchins
. . . I see it all quite clearly.’10 This absurdly specific claim implicitly
raises a question about whether the Images carry any deeper, subtextual implications along the lines of those discernible in other
orchestral works. Recalling Debussy’s flippant remark about the
similarly folkloric Estampes – ‘when one cannot afford to pay for
travels . . . ’ – the relative neglect of the Images within Debussyan
historiography might be partly attributed to their simpler, ‘postcard’ level of musical evocation by comparison with the Prélude,
the Nocturnes or La Mer.
In the two song triptychs written later the same year, on the other
hand, some sort of narrative or dramatic orientation becomes explicit. First, when Debussy returned to Tristan l’Hermite to complete
a triptych, Le promenoir des deux amants, which included one song
(‘La Grotte’) previously presented in the Trois Chansons de France,
he belatedly brought this poet under the unified conception of the
‘song cycle’ previously exemplified in triptychs on Verlaine and
Louÿs. To be precise, in this case he restored the unitary conception
of the source. Like Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel l’Hermite’s Le promenoir
des deux amants is in fact a single long poem, in 28 stanzas, from
which Debussy extracted three little poems for his triptych.
Although the triptych presents the nine stanzas of the three new
‘poems’ in l’Hermite’s original order, Debussy’s selection transforms
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the overall effect. In the original, some lengthy conventional pastoral
scene-setting precedes the invitation from one lover to another to
sit by a fountain; more florid verbal business then sets up their first
physical intimacy – he drinks from her hands – before the poem ends
with passionate embraces: ‘this kiss intoxicates me, / This other one
completely paralyzes me.’ In Debussy’s setting, the dripping languor
of the first song (‘La Grotte’) briefly sets the scene before the second
jumps ahead to the moment by the fountain (‘Crois mon conseil,
chère Climène’). The blithely innocent invitation that opens this
central song leads, over rippling pianistic evocations of the ‘sighing
Zephyr’, to a powerful surge of suppressed passion at the invocation
of a ‘rosy complexion’ before it ends on a sensuous murmur. In
the ‘dreamily slow’ third song, finally, a suave dance-like rhythm
seems at first an equivalent of the speaker’s vision of his lover’s face
‘floating within my desires’ but later serves more subtly to intensify
(like the rocking accompaniment to a lullaby) the childlike intimacy
of Debussy’s new ending, at the initial moment of intimate contact:
‘Let me drink in the hollow of your hands / If the water does not
melt their snow.’
While he retained l’Hermite’s incremental intensification in
intimacy, Debussy’s excision of the consummating kisses rendered
Le promenoir des deux amants another inconclusive cyclic musing
on the elusive stages of intimate relationship. If we recall that his
songs had long stood in some oblique relationship to his emotional
life it may be tempting to seek similar subtextual resonances behind
this decision to suspend the lovers’ intimacies on an interrogative
note. Indeed this triptych, like the Trois Chansons de France and the
Fêtes galantes ii, is dedicated to Emma, Debussy’s ‘dear little one’. But
if the same dedication in 1904 had affirmed their first, passionate
liaison, by 1910 the marriage was encountering severe instability.
All through the year, Debussy’s letters hinted at some sort of
personal crisis. Although he never spelled out the cause, it seems
clear (for example from a confession to feeling at once ‘the need to
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flee, no matter where, and the fear of leaving’) that it had much to
do with the strains of ‘family life’ (as Lesure put it).11 The clearest
proof of marital strain is a letter Emma wrote to her lawyer, which
agonizes over the pain it would cause her to ‘separate from the one
who makes me suffer so inexpressibly’.12
If it is thus tempting to read the dedication of Le promenoir as the
mark of a freighted, penitent offering, the difficulty in affirming such
personal subtexts becomes clear from a reminiscence of Debussy’s
publisher. On first hearing a private performance of the new triptych
Durand expressed surprise that such ‘delicious’ music could be
written at such a troubled time. Debussy replied: ‘in times of drama,
I feel at ease for composing.’13 During his last years he often expressed bemusement at the light-spirited music he could create
even in dire anguish.
Such a suggestion of compartmentalized life and art need not
decisively undermine any hint of autobiographical resonances in Le
promenoir. But taken together with the contrast between this triptych
and the other one composed in the same year, it somewhat undercuts
such lines of critique. In the Trois Ballades de François Villon, Debussy
selected three of the sixteen or so ballads scattered through the multifarious Testament the Renaissance poet had penned in prison at the
age of thirty. It may be tempting to read his first chosen text, ‘Ballad
of Villon to his Lover’, as representative of a radically different
response to marital difficulties. But it is hard to imagine him crudely
associating himself with the ‘poor man’ who speaks this poem,
whose ‘disgrace’ and ‘misery’ and desperate calls for help spring from
the ‘false beauty’, ‘treacherous charm’ and ‘concealed pride’ belatedly
recognized in his partner. In a wider view, it seems better to recognize
this whole triptych as a further imaginative exercise in the adoption
of masks – like the Spanish guitarist, Shakespearean fairy and nightclub entertainer in the first book of piano preludes.
The implication is not that the characterizations lack force, but
that it is impossible to trace any coherent autobiographical thread
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through the triptych. The second song sets a ballad written from
the perspective of a pious woman praying to the Virgin Mary; the
third is a twist of comic banter praising the world-leading ‘gift of
the gab’ of Parisian women. Along with the vivid, madrigalesque
intensities of the first song, the deftness with which Debussy deepens the hints of prurient fascination in Villon’s ostensibly pious
prayer and the skill of his comic timing in the witty third song
(for example with the vaudevillian aside – ‘have I named enough
countries?’) can be taken to link this triptych with Debussy the
aspiring dramatist who had once envisioned a music adequate
to convey ‘all the distinct sensations of a character’. That such a
simpler, more naïvely powerful demonstration of musical ‘crossdressing’ could emerge simultaneously with the more intimate
delicacies of Le promenoir des deux amants is further testimony
to his late widening of aesthetic range.
Two Dancers, and a ‘Mystery’
The end of 1910 brought yet more emotional turbulence. On
28 October Debussy’s father, Manuel, died after a long illness.
‘Although we had almost nothing in common,’ he confessed to
Caplet, ‘it is a loss that strikes me more deeply each day.’14 Painful
as it was, the bereavement proved the occasion for renewed contacts
with several friends estranged by his divorce from Lilly, notably
including Godet, Dukas and Messager – for whom the operettaloving Manuel, Debussy affirmed, had held an admiration close
to religion.
A different, seemingly more mundane kind of disruption was to
follow a month later, when Debussy left for an eighteen-day concert
tour of Vienna and Budapest. Given the prior hints of estrangement
from Emma, it is surprising just how longingly his written reports
to her express the pain of separation:
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Of course you well know the ennui of being separated from
one’s ‘other half ’, to be thinking of them to the point of
anguish, only to end up holding nothingness in one’s arms;
but you are living amidst familiar things; your bed is full of
the past; while I am living in a random, anonymous room, –
whose past I had better not try and envision!15
Although the trip was, on the whole, a ringing success in professional terms – and was to leave Debussy with a cherished memory
of the ‘gypsy violinist’ Radics, heard in a Budapest café – he was
destined to express similar extravagant pain on all the trips he took
away from Emma in his later years.
Back in Paris, as he completed the ample harvest of 1910 Debussy
was also still hard at work on his Poe opera. But he was soon to
be deflected, as he put it in early 1911, from ‘the capricious throats
of singers’ to ‘the spiralling legs of notorious dancers’.16 One such
dancer, the Canadian Maud Allan, then enjoying considerable
renown for her scantily clad appearances in The Vision of Salome,
signed a contract with him in late 1910 for a ballet on a similarly
sensuous Egyptian theme, eventually titled Khamma. The considerable fee was undoubtedly the main reason Debussy accepted
this project on a plot that ‘could be held in the hand of a child’.17
After endless wrangles with Allan over everything from length
to performing rights, he only extricated himself from the project
some years later after passing off the orchestration to a younger
contemporary. Although some later critics were to argue for the
subtle musical qualities of Khamma, its subsequent neglect by
conductors and critics alike can be taken to reflect an unmistakable sense of creative disengagement.
Contact with a second dancer, Ida Rubinstein, was to result in
an even more controversial work Debussy initially described as
‘much more sumptuous than the poor little Anglo-Egyptian ballet’.18
This collaboration actually came to him directly from the original
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instigator of the work, the infamous Italian writer Gabriele
d’Annunzio – ‘adventurer, patriot, poet and hedonist extraordinaire’ – who had fled his home in Tuscany for Paris to escape his
creditors.19 D’Annunzio had been struck by Rubinstein’s androgynous beauty on seeing her dance in Schéhérazade during the first,
1909–10 Paris season of Diaghilev’s renowned Ballets russes. He
invited her to dance the lead in – and fund, from her considerable
family wealth – an elaborately staged ‘mystery’ he was concocting,
in blatant emulation of Wagner’s Parsifal, from an overwrought
mixture of Christian and pagan symbols.
Having gathered a pre-eminent painter (Léon Bakst), choreographer (Michel Fokine) and set designer (Armand Bour) to collaborate
on Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, d’Annunzio and Rubinstein had
been less successful in securing a composer. There was thus a hint
of obsequious dissimulation in the letter Debussy received from
d’Annunzio while still in Vienna:
This summer, while I was at work on a ‘mystery’ I had long
been pondering, a friend would often sing to me the most
beautiful of your songs, with the inward voice you require.
My growing work trembled, at times, with the same voice.
But I did not dare to hope for you. Do you like my poetry?
. . . I ask if you would wish to see me, and hear me speak of
this work, and this dream.20
Debussy responded with great enthusiasm: ‘How would it be
possible for me not to like your poetry . . . The thought of working
with you gives me, in advance, a kind of fever.’21 Shortly after his
return to Paris, he signed a contract with Gabriel Astruc, impresario
of the ‘Saison Lyrique’ at the Théâtre du Châtelet, to provide an
extensive list of incidental music, including orchestral preludes,
dances and several vocal and choral pieces, for a production of Le
Martyre in May and June of the following year.
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The incidental music Debussy wrote for Le Martyre de SaintSébastien, his lengthiest single work after Pelléas, remains the most
problematic stumbling-block for any attempt to follow the twisting
paths through the later oeuvre. The work’s plot, concocted as much
from d’Annunzio’s lurid imagination as from his research into
medieval mystery plays, follows Sebastian, commander of the
archers of Emesa, over five Acts or ‘Mansions’ as he first (‘The
Court of the Lilies’) dances on burning coals to rescue Christian
twins from martyrdom; then (‘The Magic Chamber’) conquers
pagan sorceresses and encounters a wounded Virgin bearing the
shroud of Christ. In the third Mansion, ‘The Council of the False
Gods’, he mutely enacts the Passion before the Emperor Augustus
Caesar using a broken-stringed lyre as a prop. Crucified on the
same lyre for rejecting Caesar’s offer of pagan godhood, he urges
his own archers to fulfil his destiny by shooting him. A funeral
procession at the end of the Fourth Mansion leads without break
to the Fifth, where the gates of paradise open to receive his soul
as a martyr and saint (‘The Wounded Laurel’ and ‘Paradise’).
In the face of such outré subject-matter, it is easy to see why
some commentators have leant heavily on Debussy’s few complaints
– which largely concern the absurdly short time he had to compose
– as support for dismissing most of the music for Le Martyre as hackwork. But the strange truth is that the majority of his statements
about the project were extremely positive. In a pair of interviews
in early 1911 he affirmed his interest in the libretto’s ‘mixture of
intense life and Christian faith’ and his admiration for the ‘treasures
of lyrical imagination’ that made d’Annunzio so precious a collaborator.22 Such public statements may be tinged with what we
now call ‘spin’. But it is harder to discredit the firsthand reports
of Debussy weeping during rehearsals – or indeed the reverential
tones in which he remembered those early moments of revelation
when receiving the proofs a few months later. ‘I am reminded of
those precious instants of the first rehearsals – back in the time
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when we were still the masters’, he wrote in August to Caplet,
who had helped him with the orchestration. ‘I think I can say
those were my best and strongest memories.’23
Clearly, what followed had left more ambivalent traces. As
rehearsals progressed, difficulties arose concerning everything
from the dramatic weakness of the final scenes to the problems of
ensemble singing in the cluttered sets. In the face of Bakst’s pallid
vision of paradise, Debussy once again found himself arguing with
a set painter. To cap it all, six days before the performance the archbishop of Paris intervened in the press to remind all Catholics to
avoid theatrical productions that might cause offence to conscience
– amongst which he included this ‘disfiguring’ of a glorious martyr.24
In an open letter, Debussy and d’Annunzio earnestly reaffirmed the
‘profoundly religious’ quality of their work.25 Elsewhere, Debussy
insisted that he had composed his music ‘as if it were commissioned
for a church’.26
From the perspective of the impresario d’Astruc such a contretemps likely came as useful publicity: by some reports, Catholics
eagerly swarmed to the first performances. And in spite of all the
difficulties, the press premiere of Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien on
21 May 1911 was far from a critical disaster. To be sure, many balked
at d’Annunzio’s ‘interminable’ anti-dramatic monologues (as
Laloy put it), whose sheer tedium over more than five hours made
Debussy’s 55 minutes of music seem relatively inconsequential.27
Still, it is surprising just how warmly some critics did respond. For
Gaston Carraud, the music demonstrated ‘new firmness of sonority
and accent’.28 For Alfred Bruneau it even represented an important
breakthrough: ‘until now, Debussy’s art has been instrumental
above all. Here, it is principally choral and attains an entirely
new force.’29 It is strange that Bruneau could give such one-sided
emphasis to the instrumental productions of a composer so long
engaged with vocal arts. But he prefigured the later consensus that
the greatest strengths of the music for Le Martyre emerge in certain
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Léon Bakst, line drawing of Ida
Rubinstein in the armour of Saint
Sébastien, 1911; a costume-design
for the 1911 theatre-piece.
choral episodes, where even one particularly harsh later critic finds
Debussy approaching his ‘Renaissance ideal’.30
However close Debussy may have come to the style of his beloved
Palestrina, it is still hard to accept even the best of the choruses in
Martyre as a full realization of the high ideals for incidental music
he expressed in one of those 1911 interviews. Reaching beyond the
most exacting of his youthful visions for a music that ‘clothes the
poetry’ he now claimed to be seeking a music ‘which must become
one body, intimately, with the text’.31 The phrase betrays a renewed
susceptibility to Wagnerian enthusiasms like those hyperbolically
expressed by d’Annunzio after a rehearsal of the last scene: ‘Like
Sebastian nailed to the Lyre, Music and Drama cry “We are One!”32
Ironically, it is precisely the question of its pervasive debts to
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Parsifal, along with the difficulty of framing any cogent response
to the whole ‘curious hybrid’ of recitation, dance and music, that
together have rendered Le Martyre the hardest of all Debussy’s
works to assimilate.33
More than any other work, the degree to which one is willing
to be ‘surprised’ by Debussy seems to determine how the music
for Le Martyre is received. Does it betray a loss of balance between
compositional inclinations and limitations, which leaves a ‘ramshackle’ assemblage of ‘imitation Wagner’ whose only value is
its expansion of Debussy’s emotional range to include Parsifal’s
darker realms of guilt and expiation?34 Or if its extreme eclecticism
is accepted as typical of incidental music, can the echoes of both
La Damoiselle élue and The Fall of the House of Usher in Le Martyre
be heard to render it ‘a central point of reference in Debussy’s
theatrical career’?35 At any rate, the initial ‘mystery’ was never
to be restaged after its first run of nine performances. Although
Debussy would continue planning revisions up to the end of
his life, Le Martyre is now known primarily through curtailed
concert adaptations prepared by the original chorus director
Émile d’Ingelbrecht in 1912 and by Caplet in 1914.
Nijinsky and Stravinsky
There was to be little chance for Debussy to resume work on his
Poe opera even once Le Martyre had been released into the world,
for within a few weeks he was away to Turin on another conducting
trip. Musically, this was to be one of his least satisfying journeys.
The musicians seeming both ill-prepared and indifferent to his
music, Debussy handed the rehearsals over to the young conductor
Vittorio Gui. At least the company of Emma and Chouchou, this
time, could have been expected to save Debussy from his customary
pain of separation. But Emma’s constant indisposition (along
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Debussy at
Houlgate on the
Normandy seaside,
1911.
with the noise of the trams) nonetheless left him complaining
that ‘a trip that could have been a pleasure has become an odious
nightmare!’36
The return to Paris, to confront belatedly the exhaustion he
had been feeling after Le Martyre, inspired visions of more relaxing
ventures. A nudge to Durand – ‘in looking for the most ingenious
combinations, I’m still missing three thousand francs, which, even
by selling my soul to the devil, I don’t know where to find!’ – was
enough to secure funds for a month’s family vacation at Houlgate
by the sea.37 Here again Debussy found himself at odds with the
joys of travel, writing wryly to Caplet about such rituals of hotel
life as the need to change clothes four times a day (photos on the
beach show him in his usual natty urban attire) and the ‘barbarous’
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impositions of ‘civilization’ on the seaside. Quoting Pelléas’s idyllic
vision of ‘children going down to the beach to bathe’ he added a
misanthropic postscript: ‘But my lord! How unsightly to contemplate are Messieurs their papas and Mesdames their mamas!’ His
attempts to finish scoring the clarinet rhapsody and the last of the
Images having been disrupted by the whole ‘caravansary’, he settled
for reading cheap novels instead.38
Given this curmudgeonly attitude to travel it is perhaps surprising that the return to Paris was to find Debussy contemplating
a much more extensive voyage, to present Pelléas et Mélisande in
Boston. His exchanges with Caplet about this new plan betray
further background tensions with Emma, who neither wished to
come along nor wanted to let him go alone. Reluctantly, Debussy
secured Caplet’s agreement to go in his stead, pleading ‘very serious familial reasons’ as his excuse to the impresario Henry Russell.
Denied this new involvement with his one complete opera, an
attempt to revive his labours on the two Poe libretti only led to
further frustrations.39 Finding that he could still see the ‘seams’
in what he had completed, he scrawled in exasperation a phrase
that testifies how resolutely he clung to stringent musico-dramatic
ideals even after recent disappointments: ‘How much it is necessary
to find, and then suppress, in order to arrive at the naked flesh of
emotion.’40
As it happened, attempts to excavate such naked emotion from
beneath the dead weight of operatic traditions were to be deflected
yet again by dance projects. Even as negotiations about Khamma
sporadically continued with Maud Allan, an exchange began with
the symbolist poet Charles Morice about Crimen Amoris, a ‘sung and
danced poem in the style of Verlaine’, and proceeded over the first
few months of 1912 to a signed publisher’s contract and discussions
about a production with Messager, who had been director of the
Opéra since 1908. But while Debussy expressed a vivid sense of
choreographic and colouristic detail in his early exchanges with
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Morice and would still be discussing the project under the new
title Fêtes galantes as late as 1914, he was never to complete any
music for this balletic ‘reading’ of a poet who had inspired so
many of his songs.
Meanwhile, another product of early literary encounters, the
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, was undergoing its own translation
to the ‘spiralling legs of notorious dancers’ without significant input
from Debussy himself. His familiarity with the dazzling productions
of Diaghilev’s Ballets russes extended back, before his involvement
with Ida Rubinstein, to the company’s first Parisian season in 1909–
10. (At that time he had even worked briefly on a ballet scenario,
Masques et Bergamasques, at Diaghilev’s invitation.) In June 1910,
having met Igor Stravinsky for the first time at the première of the
ballet The Firebird, he had praised the music of the brilliant young
Russian both for its unheard-of ‘rhythmic concordances’ and for
being much more than a ‘docile servant of dance’. His admiration
for and friendship with Stravinsky subsequently grew to the point
that he could send him, a year later, the highest imaginable praise
for the music of Petrouchka, Stravinsky’s second project with
Diaghilev, when claiming to hear in it ‘the kind of orchestral
certainties I have not encountered since Parsifal’.41
In retrospect, there is a faint irony in Debussy’s admiration for
the way Stravinsky’s Firebird music transcended simple servitude
to dance. For when his own faun Prélude was drawn into a Ballets
russes programme in early 1912, he was to react with horror at the
disjunction between music and choreography – the very quality
that earned the production epochal status in dance history. In
fact, the Prélude had been chosen by Diaghilev to accompany a
highly stylized choreographic vision his famously charismatic lead
dancer (and lover) Vaslav Nijinsky had been developing through
study of the postures on ancient Greek vases.42 Nijinsky had initially found Debussy’s music, though perfect in ‘sentiment’ and
‘atmosphere’, too ‘hazy’ and ‘soft’ for the new angular style of
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Debussy and Igor Stravinsky in 1910, around the time the Russian composer was
first gaining fame with his ballet scores l’Oiseau de feu and Pétrouchka.
movement he was exploring.43 But Diaghilev’s nose for publicity
won over, and after an inordinate number of rehearsals Nijinsky’s
choreography of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was staged
at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with sumptuous decor by Léon Bakst,
on 29 May 1912.
It may be easy, on first viewing one of the many reconstructions
of this ballet, to understand why Debussy recoiled in disgust at
the ‘dissonance’ between his supple music and Nijinsky’s ‘angular’
gestures.44 But closer consideration discovers a rich interaction
between the distinct layers of this ‘balletic reading of a musical
reading of a poem’. While some later reports would emphasize
Nijinsky’s indifference to the poem, both the overall scenario (a
faun wakes from slumber, sees several nymphs and pursues one,
then settles back to sleep after her escape) and certain visual details
(the pipe he plays at the start; the grapes he raises to the sky) draw
directly on Mallarmé’s imagery. As for the ‘dissonance’ with the
Prélude, the sensuously dappled faun and decorously draped
nymphs may indeed seem to shuttle against the sonorous backdrop like ‘figures of cardboard’, as Debussy complained, but the
dance nonetheless unfolds with some sensitivity to the music’s
formal outlines. Most notably the central, static but oddly intimate
pas de deux between the faun and a single nymph begins just as
Debussy starts his transition to the climactic lyricism; poignantly,
their most intimate gesture (they briefly hook elbows) occurs not
at the musical climax but after, once the string melody has faded
to a wispy memory for solo violin.
Such subtleties were largely lost to view within the tumultuous
reception of the first performance. A rousingly enthusiastic initial
response, which led Diaghilev to order an immediate encore, found
its opposite in the heated press censure that greeted Nijinsky’s final
action: lying astride a scarf dropped by his desired nymph, he had
given a tiny pelvic thrust. Predictably, prudish critical outrage at this
‘erotic bestiality’ only served to guarantee the work a succès de
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Vaslav Nijinsky as the faun, confronting a nymph in his 1912 ballet Prélude à
l’après-midi d’un faune. Debussy objected to the angular choreography.
scandale, although later audiences found their prurience disappointed by the suppression of the offending gesture.45 The planned
run of four performances was extended to eight, overshadowing
the two productions of Daphnis et Chloé choreographed by Michel
Fokine to the music of Ravel that closed the 1912 season.
It is unclear whether Debussy found any satisfaction in this
partial sacrifice of Ravel’s ballet to Nijinsky’s Prélude, for he made
surprisingly little reference to the whole affair in his letters. But
as it turned out, he was destined to suffer similar overshadowing
himself once he accepted a commission to write an original score
for a second Nijinsky dance. The scenario for Jeux (Games), as the
new ballet was called, offered more up-to-date imagery than the
faun’s stylized archaicism:
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In a park, at twilight, a tennis ball has gone astray; a young
man, then two young women eagerly look for it. The artificial
light of the tall electric lamps that cast a fantastic glow all
around them inspires them to childish games: they chase each
other, hide from each other, quarrel and sulk without reason;
the night is warm, the sky filled with glimmers, they embrace.
But the charm is broken by a tennis ball thrown by some
unknown malicious hand. Surprised and scared, the young
man and the young women disappear into the depths of the
nocturnal park.46
While it hardly seems more robust than the ‘Anglo-Egyptian’ plot
he had found so flimsy, Debussy later described this scenario as the
kind of ‘nothing at all’ that was perfectly appropriate for a ‘ballet
poem’. Indeed by characterizing it as ‘all that is necessary to give
birth to rhythm in a musical atmosphere’, he casually encapsulated
the two most distinctive qualities of the coruscatingly imaginative
score he wrote for Nijinsky’s Jeux, which was premièred almost
exactly a year after the Prélude.47
In terms of its sonorous ‘atmosphere’, for a start, to evoke what
he melodramatically described as the ‘horrors’ that take place amidst
the three characters Debussy makes far subtler use of the darker
expressive hues of Parsifal in Jeux than he had in Le Martyre.48
He explicitly acknowledged the model in this case when writing to
Caplet of his search for ‘that orchestral colour that seems as if lit
from behind, of which there are such marvellous examples in
Parsifal’.49 On the other hand, the reference in the same letter to
an ideal ‘orchestra without feet’, while suggestive of the work’s
‘aerian’ qualities (as one critic put it), is deceptive to the degree
that it deflects attention from his clever play with dance rhythms.
This aspect of Jeux had been emphasized by Diaghilev in his initial
remit: ‘Nijinsky says that he is envisioning above all some “dancing”.
– Scherzo – waltz – a great deal of work en pointe for all three.’50 If
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the impresario savoured the scandal value of a man in point shoes,
for Debussy the call to write music for ‘dancing’ inspired games with
conventional rhythms just as brilliantly ironic as his musings on traditional lyricism had been in the Prélude almost two decades before.
Here again, the point has been obscured by later appropriations
of Debussy’s Jeux as the precursor of mid-century modernist ideals.
But however readily it might be claimed as a model for ‘quasistatistical accumulation of sound’ or ‘methods of musical time . . .
engendered from within the work itself ’ (as one influential 1959
essay put it), this mercurial score is just as significant for its subtle
engagement with the musical past encapsulated in Diaghilev’s
reference to ‘dancing – scherzo – waltz’.51 While some trace of the
Prélude’s concern with lost lyricism remains in the vestigial wisps
of nostalgically sweet high violin sound that mark key moments
of intimacy, Jeux is constructed more intensively around a few
archetypical ‘waltz’ gestures that emerge from a kaleidoscopic
variety of more abstract rhythmic figures. Periodically surging
into prominence to support the various couplings and recouplings
of the scenario, these impassioned revenants of the most iconic
Romantic dance form receive their ultimate apotheosis in the
music for the last, threefold embrace that precedes the ballet’s
crepuscular close.
When he finally saw the choreography, Debussy was understandably disappointed to find that Nijinsky had actually conceived
no similar play on traditional ‘dancing’ but rather an aridly arithmetical concoction redolent of his studies with dance guru Émile
Jaques-Dalcroze – in Debussy’s opinion ‘one of the worst enemies
of music’. Complaining, after the premiere, about the dancer
‘watching the music go by with a disdainful eye’, he later defined his
distaste more explicitly when recalling how the ‘cruel and barbarous
choreography’ had ‘stamped on my poor rhythms as if on a noxious
weed’.52 No doubt this choreographic ‘abstraction’, which made
the flirtatious games seem to one critic ‘as if traced on a blueprint’,
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Nijinsky as a tennis player in the 1913 tennis-inspired ballet Jeux. Debussy was again
disappointed by the choreography, and the work was overshadowed by Stravinsky’s
Le Sacre du Printemps.
partly explains why Jeux met with little acclaim at its premiere
on 15 May 1913.53 But if the result was more a near-invisibility than
a failure – as Lesure put it, ‘no score went so unnoticed as Jeux’ –
a more important reason was the fact that the work had been prepared alongside a much more radical choreographic collaboration
between Nijinsky and Stravinsky.54 Beyond simply overshadowing
Jeux, the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps that followed
just two weeks later was to become one of the most mythologized
moments in the history of modern music and dance.
Debussy was well aware of the hair-raisingly powerful music
in preparation for this other ballet, for he had played a four-hand
piano version with Stravinsky at Laloy’s home in the summer of
1912. He later confessed to Stravinsky that the experience ‘haunts
me like a beautiful nightmare’, leaving him ‘waiting for the production like a greedy child who has been promised some sweets’.55
But the only firsthand record we have of his response to the ballet
is one comment to Caplet after the dress rehearsal: ‘Le Sacre du
Printemps is something extraordinarily wild . . . If you wish: it is
savage music with all of modern comforts!’56
While this may be a reasonable response to the Rite’s monumental
hybrid of ‘archaeological’ primitivism and modernist technique, from
some reports it is clear that Debussy felt some ambivalence about a
ballet whose rhythmic experiments may have seemed to trample
the ‘scherzos’ and ‘waltzes’ of Jeux even more cruelly than Nijinsky’s
Dalcrozian choreography. The writer Georges Jean-Aubry, for one,
recalled that Debussy, while admiring the work’s power, fell back
on his usual nationalism to sniff that ‘still, that’s not the way we
will make French music’.57 There is likely some truth, furthermore,
in Stravinsky’s self-serving recollection that Debussy found himself
unable to ‘digest’ the Rite as easily as many younger composers.58
Indeed, he himself offered oblique support to this view when, on
receiving a dedicated piano score of the Rite from Stravinsky some
months later, he wrote in reply: ‘for me who is descending the
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other side of the hill while still retaining an ardent passion for music,
there is particular satisfaction in declaring how much you have
pushed back the permissible boundaries of the empire of sounds.’59
Last Preludes, Last Ballet, Last Reading
It is clear from more than Jean-Aubry’s testimony alone that
Debussy was able to retain his lifelong intransigence even in full
awareness that he was ‘descending the other side of the hill’. In
late 1912, even as he penned one of his most forceful polemics
in favour of Rameau at Caplet’s behest, he also reluctantly launched
a last stint of professional criticism for the Revue de la S. I. M. with
a jeremiad urging for music’s release from ‘those who profit from
it while usurping the good name of artists’.60 We might wonder
how he could presume that all own labours ‘for hire’ transcended
such suspicion. But after a year or two devoted to works of an
extravagantly public nature, in mid-1913 he turned back to more
esoteric pursuits.
A second book of twelve Préludes, first of all, represents a further
stage in Debussy’s pianistic explorations of the relationship between
private ‘intoxication’ and evocative musical powers. In considering
the relationship between this volume (published April 1913) and
the previous one, it helps to recall Gatti’s sense of the ‘concentric
circles’ of Debussy’s development.61 For if it is possible to pair
many of the preludes in the second volume with those in the first
– the ‘ancient Egyptian’ evocation in Canope, for example, answers
the ‘Grecian’ accents of Danseuses de Delphes; the music-hall witticism of Général Lavine: Eccentric descends directly from Minstrels
– the overall progression is far from straightforward. Of the two
evocations of the Celtic North, for example, the second book’s
Bruyères (Heaths) seems even more idyllically naive than the first
book’s ever-popular La fille aux cheveux de lin (Girl with the Flaxen
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Hair). But of the two ‘Spanish’ pieces, while the first book’s La
Sérénade interrompue offered distinct pianistic pleasures in its
imitations of a strumming guitar, the more violent, gesturally
unfettered intensity of the second book’s La Puerto del Vino enacts
the more complex relationship between pianistic choreography
and abstract musical coherence.
Gatti felicitously framed the questions now coming into focus
in Debussy’s pianism when he admitted to some ambivalence about
what he felt as a displacement of conventional musical values by
purely ‘epidermic’ sensations.62 Indeed in certain preludes the
quasi-improvisational gestures seem to emerge directly from the
array of black and white keys on the piano, confronting the relationship between music’s evocative poetry and its conventional materials
in a way entirely in keeping with the legacy of Mallarméan
Symbolism.63 To sense such questions in Debussy’s piano music
is again to confront the larger tension between private, solipsistic
experience and public communication. There is perhaps no more
vivid illustration of the potential for this tension to become something approaching a contradiction than the two works for which
Debussy signed a single publishing contract in July 1913.
Each marks an end to one of Debussy’s paths of exploration. The
ballet La Boîte à joujoux (‘The Toybox’) was to be his last work for
the stage (Caplet finished the orchestration after his death). The
Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé was his last song triptych – indeed
the last of his significant musical readings. The scenario for La Boîte
à joujoux was adapted from an illustrated children’s story by André
Hellé about a love triangle between a doll, a cardboard soldier and
a clown. Absurd as it may seem to note that Debussy’s opera had
used a similar theme, he invoked Maeterlinck in support of the
idea that this little ballet might best be presented by the ‘mysterious
souls’ of dolls or marionettes.64 But at the same time, he found in
Hellé’s illustrations of the various scenes an ideal of simplicity
which he expressly wished to match in music.65 The several echoes
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of Children’s Corner are only the clearest sign of Debussy’s intention
for this music, like the earlier collection, to serve as a paternal
offering to Chouchou. The piano score Debussy published, though
full of deft thematic interrelationships and parodic winks at Gounod
and Mendelssohn, perfectly fulfils the goal he expressed to Durand:
‘I have tried to be clear, and even “amusing” without pretension,
and without useless acrobatics.’66
If La Boîte à joujoux thus brings Debussy’s balletic explorations
to a close on the tone of paternal warmth with which he always
referred to Chouchou, the close of his career as a reader of sophisticated literature is harder to link to his life. Breaking the precedent
of the Trois Chansons de France, the Fêtes galantes ii, and Le promenoir
des deux amants, the last triptych, Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,
is not dedicated to Emma but ‘to the memory of Stéphane Mallarmé
and in respectful homage to Mme. E. Bonniot (née G. Mallarmé)’.
Nearly thirty years after setting ‘Apparition’ Debussy thus rounded
off his literary-musical explorations with a personal homage to the
poet whose L’Après-midi d’un faune had inspired his most sophisticated musical response to poetic form. But it is hard to trace any
allegorical progression through the late Mallarmé triptych, in
which each chosen poem articulates a highly refractory first-person
declaration to a woman. In the absence of the quasi-narrative
continuity of Le promenoir des amants, the whole unfolds as a
loose collation of musings on the theme of intimate encounter.
After he had composed his Mallarmé songs and belatedly sought
permission from the poet’s executor, Debussy learned of an extraordinary coincidence. Not only had Ravel also been inspired by
the appearance of a new edition of Mallarmé to write a triptych of
songs, but he had even selected two of the same poems. Although the
Ravel triptych would not appear for another year, its juxtaposition
with Debussy’s last reading of Mallarmé seems in retrospect a milder
version of the overshadowing Jeux had suffered alongside The Rite
of Spring. The sense of disparity of accomplishment is perhaps most
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unavoidable in the settings of the poem both composers chose as
the first song in their triptychs.
The poem, ‘Soupir’ (Sigh), one of Mallarmé’s finest symmetrical
structures, both enacts and holds in suspended solution a rich
metaphorical equivalence between the striving of the speaker’s
soul towards the eye and brow of his ‘calm sister’ and a fountain
perpetually rising from a melancholy pool towards the azure
October sky:
Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme soeur,
Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,
Et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique
Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,
Fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur!
– Vers l’Azur attendri d’Octobre pâle et pur
Qui mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinie
Et laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agonie
Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
Se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.
[My soul towards your brow where dreams, o calm sister /
An autumn strewn with freckles / And towards the shifting
sky of your angelic eye / Climbs, as in a melancholy garden, /
Faithful, a white fountain sighs towards the azure! / Towards
the tender azure of a pale and pure October / Which mirrors
in the great basins its infinite languor / And lets, over the dead
water where the tawny agony / Of the leaves drifts in the wind
and ploughs a cold furrow, / Be drawn out from the yellow sun
a long ray.]
Debussy’s setting shows all of the lyrical flexibility and pianistic
imagination that he had developed over decades of song-writing.
But in a sense, Ravel trumps his reading from the start by setting
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the poem to an instrumental ensemble (flute and piccolo, clarinet
and bass clarinet, string quartet and piano) that responds with
great subtlety to the poem’s autumnal hues. One of the most
inspired conceptions of a pre-eminent instrumental colourist, the
song is also exceptional for the hypnotic power of its lyrical pacing.
Entering low, beneath a high radiant rustle of string sound, the
voice unfurls a continuous ‘sigh’ of melody that swoops gradually
upwards as the accompaniment accumulates depth and resonance,
to deliver an epiphanic arrival on ‘Fidèle’ (faithful) before settling
back for more darkly tinted later episodes.
Retrospective evaluations aside, in late 1913 Debussy was able
to view the coincidental choice of two poems with some humour,
describing it to Durand as ‘a phenomenon of auto-suggestion worthy
of a message to the Academy of Medicine!’67 Unlike Ravel, who
dipped into the most obscure corners of Mallarmé’s art to end his
triptych with the sonnet ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’, Debussy
opted for a more delicate piece of occasional verse as the text of
his last significant song.
‘Autre éventail’ (Other fan) is one of several poems Mallarmé
wrote on fans as gift offerings, in this case for his daughter
Geneviève. This precious little text, written as the fan’s supplication to the ‘dreamer’ who holds it in her hand, inspired one
of Debussy’s most whimsical settings. A scatter of exclamatory
fragments set to a spare flutter of piano figuration, it saves its
most sensuous hues for a final image – ‘The sceptre of rosy shores /
Stagnant beneath the golden evenings’ – that revisits the vespertinal
close of Mallarmé’s faun poem. A few faint traces of the 1894 Prélude
can be discerned in the closing passages, but the more tellingly valedictory detail is to be heard in the last vocal utterance. Relinquishing
his literary-musical explorations with a final taste of the characteristic ‘singing’ style long ago used for the first words of Mallarmé’s
‘Apparition’ – and later for Bilitis’s ‘Ma mère ne croira jamais’ and
Mélisande’s ‘Je t’aime aussi’ – Debussy narrows down the last
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melodic line to deliver the closing image, a ‘white, closed flight’
posed against ‘the fire of a bracelet’, on a single, chanting pitch.
More Travels and Frustrations
As Debussy worked on La Boîte à joujoux and the Mallarmé songs
through the later months of 1913, he also added to his list of incomplete projects by signing a contract for another ballet, on a Chinese
theme (Le Palais de Silence, later No-ja-li). In a solo flute piece written
for the play Psyche (later published as Syrinx) he finished the only
music to emerge from his various attempts at collaboration with
Gabriel Mourey. Although the year as a whole had proven relatively
productive, this was not enough to prevent him from again courting
near-suicidal anguish. Once more, the problems were primarily of
a material nature, compounded by the tensions these inevitably
created with Emma. In part to supplement scant resources, on 1
December Debussy embarked on his longest tour abroad. At
the invitation of the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky, he left
for Russia for two weeks to present his music in Moscow and
St Petersburg.
The telegrams sent to Emma en route testify pathetically to
the pain of separation: ‘All the poor love of Claude’; ‘Unhappy
Night. Unhappier sleeper’; ‘Do not forget your Claude’; ‘I am here,
Alas.’68 Once he had arrived and rehearsals were under way, he
felt it necessary to remind her that he was undertaking the trip ‘to
serve us’. His difficulty in convincing her of this point is illustrated
most clearly in a letter sent from Moscow about half way through
the trip:
You wrote ‘I do not know how to prevent myself from holding
some rancour about your music’ . . . Do you not see how there
might be something a little maddening in that? In truth,
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between you and music, if there is anyone who should be jealous,
it is surely music! And, if I continue to make it and love it, it is
surely because I owe to this very music you treat so badly the
fact that I have known you, loved you, and all the rest!69
As the trip continued to its second phase, not even the comforts
of the Grand Hôtel d’Europe in St Petersburg were enough to give
Debussy back his ‘beautiful sleeps of a spoiled child’. But while
insomniac yearning for Emma may have contributed to the air of
suffering one Russian composer later recalled, it did not prevent
him from conducting a memorable performance of La Mer.
Acknowledging the ‘strange charm’ in the inexpert conducting of
many composers, the same witness affirmed: ‘a touching beauty is
revealed through this combination of technical clumsiness and an
interpretation that is both personal and convincing to the highest
degree.’70 The musicians of Koussevitzky’s orchestra proved similarly forgiving of technical shortcomings when they signed a note
thanking Debussy for experiences that were to remain ‘like explosions of light that will forever brighten our musical career’.71
Back in Paris, in early February Debussy accompanied the violinist Arthur Hartmann in a concert of violin and piano arrangements
of his own songs and preludes, along with the violin sonata by
Edvard Grieg. While he clearly saw the arrangements as another
potential source of income it is harder to account for his interest in
the Grieg, whose music he had once cuttingly compared to a ‘pink
sweet covered in snow’.72 But this more recent encounter seems
to have inspired the more generous comparison of Grieg’s music,
in his last regular article for the Revue de la S. I. M., with the ‘icy
freshness’ of Norway’s lakes and the ‘urgent ardour’ of its short
springs. Amusingly, the same article criticizes a ‘symphonic illustration’ of a poem by the younger composer Gabriel Grovlez in terms
that could equally well have been directed at his own orchestral
illustration of Mallarmé many years before: ‘if poetry can change
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its setting at will, music can not be turned around quite so easily’;
‘the artifice of the explicative programme disappears . . . the mind
starts to create its own personal story.’73 While his sense of the
gulf between his own readerly gifts and those of Grovlez likely
masked this parallel from him, it nonetheless remains surprising,
given his experiences with Nijinsky, that he could propose a
‘scenic realization’ as a possible solution to the problems of such
an orchestral reading.
Before this article appeared on 1 March 1914, Debussy was away
on more travels: to Rome in late February; then to Amsterdam and
The Hague until early March. While sending the most hysterical
of all his plaints to Emma from Rome – ‘all night truly I had the
sincere impression that I was going to die’ – Debussy was able to
muse more philosophically to Durand about the possibility that
his distress had something to do with a sense of lost time since his
residency at the Villa Medici thirty years earlier.74 The orchestral
concert on 21 February, at any rate, was a great success. And while
Debussy bemoaned the ‘subtle cruelty’ of the brief stop in Paris
before he had to leave again, the concerts in the Netherlands were
similarly greeted by ‘tumultuous ovations’. On returning, he was
only to enjoy a scant few weeks characterized by a few scattered
exchanges about various productions and rather more about
financial difficulties before he was off again, to Brussels, where
he played several preludes and images and accompanied the
singer Ninon Villat-Pardo in Le promenoir des deux amants and
the Chansons de Bilitis.
A momentary lull in his wanderings saw Debussy, through the
late spring and summer of 1914, engaging with the latest offerings
of Parisian musical life. D’Annunzio accompanied him and Emma
to a performance of Verdi’s Otello featuring Nellie Melba in early
May; a few weeks later the couple joined society hostess Misia
Edwards in her box at the Opéra for the Ballets russes production
of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le coq d’or and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. Early
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June presented an intriguing juxtaposition when, on the expiration
of Bayreuth’s thirty-year exclusive contract, Parsifal received its first
Parisian staging only a day after the latest production of Pelléas et
Mélisande. Debussy left us no response to the Verdi, the Rimsky
or the Wagner, but proved as exacting as ever about his own opera.
In a detailed letter of critique he warned the conductor Franz
Ruhlmann, among other things, that ‘the first scene of the 4th
Act is taking on the pace of a gallop: one might say that Pelléas
and Mélisande are afraid of missing their train.’75 This was to be
the last Parisian production of Pelléas in his lifetime.
Although consultations continued with Hellé on La Boîte à
joujoux and with d’Annunzio on a film version of Le Martyre and
a new ‘Indian drama’, the only new composition in the first half
of 1914 was a suite for two pianos, Six Épigraphes Antiques, partly
adapted from the incidental music written years earlier for the
recitation of the Chansons de Bilitis.76 When writing to Godet of
his dissatisfaction with this paucity of accomplishment Debussy
again touched that extreme of fatalism that had regularly recurred
since the mid-1890s:
For four and a half months, I have been able to do exactly
nothing! Naturally, such things lead to miserable domestic
spats and to hours during which one can hardly perceive any
other way out except for suicide . . . Ah! the ‘magician’ who
you loved in me, where is he? This one is now no more than
a gloomy mountebank who will soon break his back in an
ultimate pirouette bereft of all beauty.77
But such dire personal predictions were to be overshadowed by
the unimaginably more serious crisis that soon befell all of Europe.
By the time Debussy returned in late July from one further trip to
perform with the tenor Enrico Caruso in London the assassination
in Sarajevo had precipitated the initial declarations of war. In
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early August, he admitted to Durand how useless it seemed to speak
further about his private concerns in view of the far grander problems
inevitably in store.
Debussy and the War
Debussy’s initial response to the war was a contradictory blend
of candour at his own lack of ‘military spirit’; worry about Emma’s
son and son-in-law (both of whom were in the army); and envy
of his friend Satie for participating with a socialist militia in the
defence of Paris.78 Within a couple of weeks a more distasteful note
typical of the mental reflexes so often triggered in wartime crept in.
Using a racist term of abuse – métèques – best translated as ‘dagoes’
or ‘wogs’, Debussy wrote approvingly to Durand about the government’s evacuation and internment of foreigners: ‘Since they cleansed
Paris of all of its métèques, whether by shooting them or by throwing
them out, it has immediately become a charming place. And truly
one only encounters no more than a minimum of ugly mugs!’79
The casual cruelty may be hard to swallow, but the underlying
racist susceptibility should hardly come as a surprise. Debussy was
just as ready as most of his generation to use a term like ‘negro’ in a
derogatory sense (for example when noting the simple-mindedness
of Maud Allan’s scenario for Khamma). Still, it is hard not to sense
a bizarre contradiction between what we might call the ‘multicultural’ musical spectrum – Far Eastern, Slavic, African-American
– he had long drawn on for inspiration, and this wartime question
to Durand: ‘did not our supposed [national] decay arise from that
wave of foreigners who flooded Paris with a whole variety of horrors,
finding the opportunity to accomplish them here more freely than
in their own country?’ In hindsight, perhaps ‘contradiction’ is too
mild a word for such a conflation of aesthetic and moral concerns,
given its kinship with the ideology that would, twenty-odd years
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later, seek the elimination not only of ‘decadent art’ but also ‘subhuman people’ through similar appeals to racial purity as in
Debussy’s next assertion: ‘the French soul will remain forever
clear and heroic.’80
Still, if the line linking Debussy’s wartime chauvinism to the
most vicious later forms of nationalist ideology seems less than
clear, that is because the primary target of his repugnance was not
any unfortunate ‘foreign worker’ but rather the esprit bochard (to
put it politely: ‘Germanic spirit’) that had, he thought, long been
overvalued in French musical culture.81 In other words, distasteful
as it may be to find him invoking a ‘vile seed’ lodged within the
French like ‘tainted blood’, for him such language denoted the same
Wagnerian bombast later appropriated to National Socialist myths
of Teutonic supremacy.82 Even on this point, Debussy never rose
to the extremes of those ideologues (including erstwhile wagnéristes
like Maurice Barrès) for whom any performance of Wagner during
the war amounted to treason.83 Even after the deaths of several
civilians from aerial bombardment had led him to flee Paris for
Angers with his family he was able to opine with equanimity:
As regards Wagner people are going to exaggerate! He retains
the glory of having gathered together into a single recipe several
centuries of music. That’s surely something – and only a German
was able to try it. Our mistake was to try for too long a time to
follow his lead.84
In mid-October Debussy could even suggest casually that Wagner
‘had enough genius that one might, little by little, forget his
weaknesses as a man’.85
The thorny relation between aesthetics and politics aside, a
stranger contradiction can be seen in the fact that Debussy, after
asserting in late 1914 that ‘never in any era have art and war been
able to live comfortably together’, was to enjoy, in late 1915, one
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last span of intense compositional creation.86 The year had begun
somewhat inauspiciously with the publication of the Berceuse
Héroïque, Debussy’s contribution to the collection of music and
literature assembled by the Daily Telegraph in sympathy for
Belgium’s occupation by Germany. He seems to have seen this
task as an unwelcome obligation. Echoing Baudelaire’s line about
‘military bands pouring heroism into the hearts of the citizens’,
he complained to Godet about the difficulty of using the Belgian
national anthem, which ‘pours no heroism into the hearts of those
who were not brought up with it’, and disparaged his Berceuse as
‘all that I was able to do’ in a state of physical weakness.87
Around the same time, he took editorial charge of a new complete edition of Chopin, one of several new publications of musical
classics Durand launched to replace German editions. From his
prefaces it is clear that Debussy found more than drudgery in
this new role – indeed, the satisfaction in engaging closely with
a compositional ‘fellow spirit’ emerges clearly from his description
of Chopin as ‘a delicious recounter of amorous or military legends,
which often escape towards that forest of As You Like It where the
fairies alone are mistresses of the imagination’.88 At one point
Dukas was led to wonder in a letter to a mutual friend whether
‘the work as an editor has impaired that beautiful musical intuition
that once guided him’.89 But Dukas knew that other concerns were
also contributing to Debussy’s loss of ‘assurance’ at this time. His
mother had long been seriously ill; on 23 March 1915 she died.
Amidst his many expressions of pain at this loss, one of the most
touching noted the impossibility of giving personal bereavement
its due amidst widespread distress. ‘The loss of my mother has
affected me more heavily than I can say,’ he confessed to Edgard
Varèse, ‘because I am well aware that in this moment there are
tears for everyone.’90
During the weeks after the funeral, Debussy accompanied the
eminent mezzo-soprano Claire Croiza in several of his songs at the
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first of many concerts for war charities with which he would be
involved over the next few years. In May, he turned his editorial
hand to the violin and harpsichord sonatas of Bach. But on the last
day of June he wrote asking Durand how urgently he required the
Bach edition, for he was sensing the germination of certain ideas
whose cultivation promised relief from the ‘long drought imposed
on my brain by the war’.91 Of the two works he mentioned, one,
the ballet Fêtes galantes, was already familiar and would never be
completed. The other was new. Eventually published as the triptych
En blanc et noir for two pianos, it was to be the only substantial
work in which Debussy took the risk, against his own strictures,
of confronting the topic of war directly in his art.
The early working title of this triptych, Caprices en blanc et noir,
acknowledged an inspiration in Francisco Goya’s great series of
etchings, the Caprichos. But Debussy later decided that this nod
to a collection of images on the broad subject of human folly was
not ‘perfectly adapted to the genre of music it here designates,
especially the second [piece], tragic and a little warlike’.92 Indeed
if neither the first nor the last piece of the triptych bears any particularly strong link to the historical context, the ‘tragic and warlike’
pose of the second attains a blatant topicality exceptional in the
oeuvre. Dedicated to Durand’s nephew Jacques Charlot, who had
been killed in battle in March 1915, this central panel bears as an
epigraph the envoi of François Villon’s ‘Ballad Against the Enemies
of France’. The final two lines – ‘Since those are not worthy to
possess virtues / Who would wish ill of the kingdom of France’
– link the piece to the desire Debussy expressed around the same
time to prove that ‘if there were 30 million boches, they would not
destroy French thought, even after having tried to brutalize it
before annihilating it.’93
The ‘slow, sombre’ opening pages of this piece – whose abrupt
lurches of violent dissonance give rise to melancholy fanfares, then
wisps of folk-like melody, then radiantly scored chordal revelations
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– offer an apt pianistic translation of the universal accents of
mourning traditionally heard in the ‘last post’ and funeral singing.
But the later sections are more problematic. A turbulent ‘battle
scene’ begins and soon becomes infected by what Debussy himself
called the ‘poisonous vapours’ of the Lutheran choral ‘Ein feste
Burg’.94 When this Germanic musical intruder eventually gives way
before a radiant, fortissimo return of the initial fanfares, it is hard
not to think that the occasion of war memorial has been deflected
to bathetic narrative ends.
Years earlier, through similar spatial play with fanfares at the
heart of his Dreyfus-era Nocturnes, Debussy had found a way to
confront his listeners with unresolved questions about the affective
lures of militant patriotism. Here, such interrogative and universalist aspirations seem to have been displaced in favour of faintly
cartoonish topical propaganda. To be sure, this piece, like Fêtes, is
but one ‘panel’ of a triptych; analysis of the whole could conceivably
support a subtler interpretation.95 But a few months later Debussy
would give even more unambiguous expression to propagandistic
sentiments in his final setting of words.
It would be misleading to list Debussy’s last song, ‘Noël pour
les enfants qui n’ont pas une maison’, in the artful lineage of poetic
readings that had ended a couple of years earlier with the Mallarmé
triptych. Nor indeed can the text he himself wrote for the ‘Noël’ –
a pathetic hybrid of complaint and call to arms, sung by children
who have lost all to the enemy – even claim as frail grounds of
literary merit any of the cod-Symbolist inflections in the 1893
Proses lyriques. But perhaps that earlier, overwrought attempt by
Debussy to be both poet and composer is the closest precursor
in the song oeuvre to this last, frankly manipulative ‘expression
of sentiment’, which shamelessly tugs the heartstrings on the
reference to a ‘poor dead mother’ and whips up a frenzy for the
last imprecation: ‘give victory to the children of France!’ There
was surely some rueful cynicism in play when Debussy, informing
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Dukas about the song’s great success at various wartime charity
concerts, again invoked Baudelaire to note how it ‘entered into
the hearts of the citizens’.96
If wartime patriotism can thus be said to have inspired, in the
central panel of En blanc et noir and the ‘Noël’, a pair of extreme
counter-examples to all those previous endorsements of suggestion
over expression and esotericism over audience expectations, other
productions of this same fertile year again add near-contradictory
variety to the composite picture. A couple of days after signing the
contract for En blanc et noir in early July, Debussy left Paris with his
family for the seaside town of Pourville, near Dieppe. There, having
‘recovered the possibility of thinking musically’, he stayed for three
months, composing ‘like a madman, or like someone who is due to
die the next day’.97 Even as work continued on En blanc et noir, he completed twelve Études that set the capstone to his investigations of the
piano’s promises of private intoxication and public display. By early
August he was also able to announce the completion of a sonata
for cello and piano, the first of a projected group of six sonatas ‘for
various instruments’. Only a month later, work on a second sonata
(eventually for flute, viola and harp) was also well advanced.
While each of these projects bears some faint verbal trace of
Debussy’s nationalistic inclinations, no individual etude or movement comes anywhere near the blatant contextual engagement
of En blanc et noir or the ‘Noël’. In the case of the etudes, the only
nationalist gesture is a reverential reference in Debussy’s whimsical
preface to ‘Our old Masters – I mean to say “our” admirable harpsichordists’, meaning the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
school of French harpsichord composers.98 But this is but a passing
nod in a paragraph whose primary intent is ostensibly to offer
Debussy’s excuse for not providing the performer of his Études
any instructions about ‘fingering’.
Perhaps this technical solicitude is in keeping with the musical
aims of a volume that, absent overt indications of evocative intent,
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ostensibly unfolds as a series of dry technical studies (‘for the
five fingers’; ‘for the repeated notes’; ‘for the chords’). But it would
be misleading to take this titular austerity as evidence of a move,
on Debussy’s part, towards the ideal of musical ‘objectivity’ that
was to gain new prominence in all European arts during and after
the First World War. In any careful hearing, it is possible to recognize in the Études a full gamut of familiar Debussyan ‘characters’
and poetic experiences – from music-hall wit through pastoral
idyll; from distorted echoes of Romantic song and dance to
‘escapes to the forest of As You Like It’. In other words, rather
than signalling a disavowal of evocative intent, the blandly technical headings mark a further step beyond the elliptical ‘after-titles’
of the Préludes towards a reluctance to specify music’s evocative
implications. It is in this light that we can read the preface’s closing
exhortation, ‘Let us search for our fingerings!’, as an apt envoi to
Debussy’s whole mature pianistic oeuvre – that is, a final oblique
invitation to the player to embark on an imaginative interrogation of the relationship between materials, techniques and
sonorous poetry.
While none of the three chamber sonatas Debussy ultimately
completed would bear a similar preface, all were published with
a nationalistic signature on their title pages: ‘Claude Debussy,
Musicien Français.’ He clearly intended the signature to imply
certain musical qualities, for he referred more than once to his
attempt to recover an archetypically French ‘suppleness’ in form
and ‘grace’ in expression from beneath the ‘grandiloquence’ of
modern sonatas and ‘epileptic’ emotions of post-Wagnerian
composition.99 But while the concise proportions and delicacy
of thought in all three sonatas loosely link them to seventeenthor eighteenth-century models, to hear them in this light alone
is to underplay the subtlety with which they combine ‘antique’
resonances with the post-Beethovenian principles Debussy had
first elaborated in his String Quartet more than twenty years before.
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Debussy obliquely acknowledged such historical perspective when
he claimed that the longest, most colouristically distinctive second
sonata reminded him ‘of a very ancient Debussy – the one of the
Nocturnes, it seems?’100 This was an appropriate choice of reference.
Effortlessly graceful as they might seem, the instrumental dialogues
that unfurl across the three movements of the Sonata for Flute,
Viola and Harp articulate Debussy’s most intricately unified ‘cyclic’
structure since the orchestral triptych of 1897–9. Godet proved
sensitive to this aspect when he described the sonata in classic
organicist terms as a ‘fruit . . . born complete from its cell, as life
is made, from the inside to the outside’. But he also captured an
essential difference between the sonata and the earlier triptych
when, in describing the effect of its ‘happy combination of timbres’, his language became peppered with references to ‘dreams’,
‘phantoms’ and ‘fantastic landscapes’; and to the ‘echoes’ and
‘transpositions’ that have ‘volatilized’ and ‘confounded’ all accents
of reality within the magic of ‘Debussyan “memory”’.101
Such florid language aptly registers the fact that this sonata,
unlike the Nocturnes, enfolds no worldly materials as vivid and
immediate in affect and association as a military march. The
central section of the sonata’s central movement releases instead
one of Debussy’s most breezily brilliant cascades of pastoral
arabesques, supported by a delicate, euphonious harp murmur
that deepens the sense of otherworldly idyll. Although a later,
brief return to the same material reaches for more imploring
tones, and the last movement soon begins on a stormier note,
the radiantly affirmative close to the sonata stands as the clearest
exemplar of the degree to which Debussy, even while reacting
overtly to the war in the Berceuse, the ‘Noël’ and En blanc et noir,
was able at the same time to effect a surprising degree of separation between life and art.
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A ‘Terrible Finale’
Debussy himself was to note this extreme separation with bemusement when finally announcing the hard-won completion of the third
sonata (for violin and piano) in mid-1917, and observing to Godet
that ‘by an extremely human contradiction, it is full of joyous
tumult.’102 Beyond all the widely shared wartime anxieties, by that
point he had yet more personal reasons for wonder at the ‘joy’
that spills infectiously from the three fleet, fine-boned movements
of this sonata, his last significant composition. Those few months
at Pourville in 1915 proved his last span of intense productivity. On
his return to Paris, not only did he quickly lose the creative fluency
he had recovered so briefly at the Normandy coast, but he soon
received a first unambiguous, official diagnosis of the rectal cancer
whose symptoms had been plaguing him for some time, and which
was to kill him within less than three years.
It is clear that he was well aware of the seriousness of the
diagnosis. Before his first surgery on 15 December 1915 he took
the precaution of writing a farewell note to Emma: ‘and you, my
dear little one who will remain, love me in our little Chouchou . . .
you are the only two souls who keep me from wishing to disappear
without delay’.103 An initial, somewhat flippant comparison of his
own physical condition to that of an invaded département of France
soon took on crueller poignancy when the initial phases of radium
treatment in early 1916 left him feeling ‘like a trench one defends
for one hour, but which the sickness retakes the next hour’.104
The new costs of treatment only further exacerbated longstanding
financial difficulties; to make matters worse, even as he found
Durand’s generosity stretched to breaking point, his ex-wife Lilly
secured a court judgement against him in July 1916 for his failure
to pay her alimony for all of six years.
Surrounded by ‘catastrophes’, by late summer, when Emma and
Chouchou had both also fallen ill with whooping-cough, Debussy
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Debussy, visibly weakened by illness, with his daughter Chouchou at Moulleau in
the Gironde, 1916.
felt that his own house was becoming more and more like the
decrepit ‘House of Usher’ in the Poe opera he was still vainly
struggling to complete. In mid-September, the family left Paris
again to stay in a hotel near Arcachon on the Atlantic coast, whose
atmosphere was considered beneficial for the lungs. Although
Debussy was able to express some amusement at the ‘stupefying
encores’ life was able to throw up (he had visited Arcachon in 1880
with Mme von Meck, and then again with Emma in late 1904 to
escape the fuss about Lilly’s suicide attempt), his sickness, coupled
with irritations that included a young girl playing Franck incessantly on one of the hotel pianos, seems to have thwarted any
renewed creative fluency.105
After the return to Paris, a plan to transform Le Martyre de SaintSébastien into an opera arose only to be postponed as excessively
ambitious in his present state of health. The younger composer
Darius Milhaud, who joined two colleagues to play the Sonata for
Flute, Viola and Harp for Debussy chez Durand, left touching testimony to his frail condition at the time when recalling that in spite
of his excitement at meeting a musician ‘who occupied so important
a place in his heart’ he could not bring himself to mention his own
music due to Debussy’s ‘ashen complexion and hands seized by a
frail trembling’.106 Even in this condition, however, Debussy was
strong enough to continue participating in wartime charity concerts,
including one on 21 December for the ‘Clothing of the prisoners of
war’ – an organization with which Emma was closely involved –
which featured, along with En blanc et noir and the inevitable ‘Noël’,
two of his greatest song triptychs, Chansons de Bilitis and Le promenoir
des deux amants, sung by Jane Bathori-Engel.
Early 1917 found Debussy, in his turn, begging for a bit of charity
from Durand. An extreme cold snap was made all the more miserable
by the fact that the occupation of the Northern départements had
created a terrible shortage of coal in Paris. Debussy managed to
secure brief respite in a way that showed some persistence of wit.
178
A merchant having undertaken to secure him some coal in return
for an original composition, Debussy wrote for him what was to be
both his last piece for piano and his last nod to the literary wellsprings of so many accomplishments. Titling this slight, desperate
offering with a line from Baudelaire’s Le Balcon, ‘The evenings
illuminated by the glow of the coal’, and seeding it with references
to several piano preludes (including the Baudelairean ‘Les sons et
les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’), Debussy made it both a
whimsical nod to present woes and a compact node of ‘Debussyan
“memory”’.107 But while it briefly had the desired effect – thanking
the merchant, Debussy noted Chouchou’s joy: ‘in our time, little
girls prefer sacks of coal to dolls!’ – he was to be disappointed at
the lack of further deliveries, and by the middle of March was
again pleading for relief from the cold.108
In spite of such discomforts, during the same month Debussy
managed to participate in further charity concerts even while
continuing to wrestle with the ‘terrible finale’ of the violin sonata.
As he suffered the ongoing freeze – and endured, as well, the
rationing of sugar, milk and cheese; the constricted hours of the
butchers; and the weekly two-day closures of the pastry shops – he
found it in himself to quip to Durand that the inability to get hold
of his favourite type of music paper ‘is much more important than a
couple of days without cakes’.109 In May, while refusing an invitation
from Fauré to perform his own Études due to a ‘phobia’ of having ‘not
enough fingers’, he nonetheless felt able to accompany the violinist
Gaston Poulet in the premiere of the violin sonata on a charity concert
that also featured the Villon and Louÿs song triptychs, and the ‘Noël’,
sung by Rose Féart. The sonata was not well received; a certain bitterness tinged Debussy’s letter to the one musician who bothered to
send a warm response: ‘After all, musicians perhaps do not like
music? or – more precisely, do they not like my music?’110
Perhaps this query gives plaintive evidence of an awareness
that even in his spare and compact late sonatas – which bear some
179
relationship to the ‘neoclassical’ tendencies soon to gain widespread prominence – Debussy was still, in some sense, out of
step with the latest artistic trends. Although he attended the
Ballets russes programme on 25 May, he left no record of his
response to Diaghilev’s latest succès de scandale, the ballet Parade
with music by Satie and sets by Picasso. In fact, he had become
estranged from Satie in recent years due in part to his resentment
at the once-marginal composer’s rise to prominence in younger
avant-garde circles. In mid-1917, at any rate, he was still able
to find some affirmation of his own continuing relevance in a
brilliant performance of La Mer at the Société de la Conservatoire under the baton of Bernardino Molinari, a conductor he
greatly admired.
A few days later, the family left for a last extended trip, to StJean-de-Luz in the French Basque country. Beyond its promises
of warmth and peace, this locale was also chosen for its proximity
to the house of Debussy’s long-time collaborator Paul-Jean Toulet,
with whom he had recently revived exchanges on their proposed
adaptation of As You Like It. But the project did not go as smoothly
as hoped. As Emma reported, in the lassitude of his illness Debussy
found the ‘nervousness’ of his collaborator wearying.111 (Emma
attributed Toulet with a ‘mysterious malady’; Debussy described
him more simply as an alcoholic.) With his usual acerbic perspective on travel, Debussy wrote to Godet of the ‘little mountains
without pretension’, and the nearby bay ‘where some people who
could conceivably be less ugly go to bathe, and where a coal-boat
rests, useful but ruining the horizon’. A more telling indication
of his mood was the little poem he quoted before signing off. One
of his favourite poets, Jules Laforgue, had provided him a gloomy,
oft-repeated late refrain: ‘I am toiling in the factories of nothingness.’ Now Laforgue also became the source of four slightly
misquoted lines, grim testimony to the latest depths of fatalism:
‘The dead / It is discreet / They sleep / Well in the cold.’112
180
Further performances of the violin sonata at charity concerts
in St-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz fared little better than the Parisian
premiere – indeed one critic now trumped Debussy’s comparisons
of his sick body to a war-scarred landscape when claiming to hear
in the sonata ‘the impression of the Somme or something else
similarly devastated’.113 If it is hard to understand how a work in
which Godet heard a ‘simple and direct accent that denotes the
good will to banter with brothers of all ages’ could inspire such
dark imagery, it is possible the critic was responding more to the
precariousness of the performance than to the composition itself.114
As Emma recalled on returning to Paris in October, she had been
desperately worried about whether or not her exhausted husband
would make it to the end of the concert.
For his part, Debussy may have found his return from a trip
whose ‘three long months’ had passed, this time, leaving ‘nothing
behind them’ somewhat lightened by the letters Godet sent, full of
fulsome praise, after his latest voyages through Debussy’s music.115
As he toiled on La Boîte à joujoux (a work, he affirmed, ‘conceived
in a wholly French spirit’) and the opera version of Le Martyre, he
would surely have been touched to find enclosed in one of these
missives a copy of a letter Godet had received from a frontline
soldier for whom Debussy’s music remained one of the finest
products of the patrie he was defending with his life.116 But however
such an affirmation may have satisfied Debussy’s own nationalist
leanings, it could hardly have provided much lasting consolation
in the rapidly worsening health that largely confined him to his
bed through another cold winter, of 1917–18.
In a few last, near-indecipherable letters to Emma, Debussy, in
spite of his ‘sadly constrained’ condition, did his best to honour the
tradition of bidding her New Year’s greeting. Through January and
February, as he managed at Godet’s behest to undertake detailed
revisions to the Nocturnes for a performance in Switzerland conducted by Ernest Ansermet, her letters recorded his constantly
181
worsening condition and her desperation at the little she could do
to help. Even in these terminal phases of illness, there were still
thoughts of official honours. In mid-March, husband and wife
both sought, through the ‘perpetual secretary’ of the Académie
des Beaux-Arts, Charles-Marie Widor, to secure Debussy’s election
to the chair Widor himself had vacated at the Académie years before.
But the way remained barred due to the intransigence of Camille
Saint-Saëns, who had received En blanc et noir as the latest of the
composer’s ‘atrocities’ – worthy, he put it, of standing ‘alongside
cubist paintings’.117
As Laloy reported it, on his last visit on 21 March Debussy was
able to express breezy regret – ‘say hello to Monsieur Castor!’ –
at his inability to attend the staging of Rameau’s opera Castor et
Pollux, which was proceeding in spite of German bombardments.118
A few days later, a last visit from Durand found Debussy in distress
at the danger he was causing others due to his inability to descend
with them to the basement – and fully aware, as he requested a
last cigarette, that ‘it was only a question of hours’.119 Somehow
the next day, on 24 March, he found the energy to write to the
president of the Institut de France in support of his candidacy to
the Académie. By the next evening he was dead. Of the fifty or so
people who gathered at the house for the funeral procession many
were to peel away into streets still tense from continuing bombardments, leaving barely twenty to observe the temporary interment
in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Later, Debussy’s remains were
moved back closer to home, to lie in the Passy Cemetery not far
from the Bois.
182
Epilogue
Within months of Debussy’s death at least one leading polemicist
was already eager to begin relegating him to outmoded history.
In late 1918 the polymath artist and writer Jean Cocteau, who had
brought Picasso and Satie together for the ballet Parade, urged in
his pamphlet Le Coq et l’arlequin for a restoration of pure French
values (the Cock) after excessive reliance on foreign influences (the
Harlequin). For Cocteau, even the late musicien français had fallen
afoul of ‘harlequin’ tendencies:
Debussy went astray, because from the German pit he
fell into the Russian trap. Once again, the pedal melts the
rhythm, creates a sort of fluid ambience friendly to myopic
ears. Satie remains intact. Listen to his Gymnopédies, so clean
in their line and their melancholy. Debussy orchestrates
them, befogs them, envelops the exquisite architecture in a
cloud. . . . Satie speaks of Ingres; Debussy transposes Claude
Monet à la Russe.1
The glib simplification of Debussy’s negotiations amidst various
influences aside, there is something snidely opportunistic about
Cocteau’s use of those slight orchestral arrangements as primary
support for his invidious distinction between Satie’s Ingresque
neo-classicism and Debussy’s music in the style of Monet. The
association that had first arisen in the Institut’s reactionary
183
critique of ‘vague, Impressionist’ tendencies recurs here as one
more counter in a game of avant-garde rhetoric.
While the ideals hailed in The Cock were to be abundantly exemplified by some of Satie’s musical followers, not everyone in the
immediate post-war years saw a similar need to disavow Debussy.
One countervailing view emerged a couple of years later when
the young musicologist Henry Prunières devoted the second,
December 1920 issue of his new journal La Revue Musicale to a
special issue in the composer’s memory.2 Prunières chose to begin
the issue with a panegyric by his friend André Suarès whose
nationalistic inflections seem like a direct rebuttal to Cocteau:
If French music is at present, just as it was in the lively Middle
Ages and the tumultuous times of the early Renaissance, the
example and the model for all Europe, we truly owe this only
to Debussy alone. He has renewed everything: the sung poem;
piano music; and the musical drama.3
Not all the contributors (some of whom were foreign) were content
to echo Suarès’s nationalistic inflections. But most, adopting similarly hagiographic tones about Debussy’s generic ‘renewals’, also
felt a need to reject Cocteau’s casual ‘Impressionist’ indictment
and insist instead on the literary qualities of Debussy’s imagination.
If Suarès’s blithe assertion that Debussy was ‘the Rimbaud of
music’ now seems a mere curiosity, Godet’s emphasis in his contribution on the ‘six great French voices’ central to his song writing
– Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé; Villon, d’Orléans, and
l’Hermite – clearly rests on stronger ground.4 But Godet’s primary
aim was simply to insist that, in contrast to any ‘realistic’ intent,
‘the Debussyste kind of naturalism . . . is essentially “expressive”.’5
Suarès had put the same point more crudely when claiming that
‘Debussy sees nothing all around him but emotion.’6 Alfred Cortot,
picking up the thread in an essay on the piano music, adds nuance:
184
It is rare to find at the basis of his inspiration one of those sentiments that, since the Beethovenian revelation, has moved the
soul of composers as it animates their works, that is to say the
human passions, woes or enthusiasms. This is not to say that he
repudiates or disdains musical emotion, but, by means of a sort
of aristocratic reserve, he would rather suggest it to us obliquely
than make us feel it directly.7
In this light, Cortot suggests, Debussy’s music ‘demands a more
literary and more nuanced imaginative collaboration than any
previous music’.8
All this defensive hyperbole about Debussyan ‘emotion’ might
now seem trivial and passé. But it can be taken as symptomatic
of central emerging concerns of the post-Debussyan musical era.
A telling illustration of the issues at stake can be found by leafing
through the last pages of the memorial issue to the musical supplement appended under the title Tombeau de Claude Debussy. This
musical ‘tomb’ gathers, behind a lithographic title page by Raoul
Dufy, ten works dedicated to Debussy by notable contemporaries.
As if to exemplify Suarès’s sense of pan-European impact, it includes,
alongside music by Frenchmen Dukas, Ravel and Satie, eminent
representatives of Hungary (Bartók), Spain (de Falla), Russia
(Stravinsky), Italy (Malipiero) and Britain (Goossens).
Given that only some wrote expressly for the Tombeau and others
contributed work in progress, the collection projects a somewhat
haphazard air. For one thing, it gives strangely little room to compositional ‘reading’. After opening with a piano piece by Dukas,
‘La plainte, au loin, du faune . . .’, which refers pointedly to Debussy’s
Mallarmé Prélude, it closes with its only song – ironically, written
‘In Memory of an admiring and warm friendship of thirty years’
by Cocteau’s hero Satie. The imagery in the Lamartine poem Satie
set in this little song might be said to let the cliché about ‘nature
painting’ in by the back door:
185
What use to me these valleys, these palaces, these cottages,
Vain objects from which for me the charm has flown?
Rivers, rocks, forests, solitudes so precious,
One single soul is missing and everything is depopulated!
Hints of proto-Impressionist scenery aside, however, the song is
startling for its intense personal appeal. Expressive crescendi through
the second and fourth lines reach something like a visceral cry for
the last word, giving powerful voice to the emotion Godet and others
had heard as central to Debussy’s musical art.
Such quasi-ritualistic anguish was of course perfectly appropriate
to a Tombeau. But to leaf through the collection again with an eye
for expressive force rather than literary attunement is to find that
a different piece now stands out from all the others. Dukas, Roussel
and Goossens pepper their contributions with espressivo (‘expressive’)
indications and dynamic markings; De Falla and Bartók summon a
mesto (‘mournful’) mood; even Ravel’s Duo for violin and cello, later
to become a sonata movement in the spirit of Debussy’s last chamber
works, does not take its classicizing pose so far as to efface all
invitations to expressive sensitivity. The seventh contribution is
the exception. Stravinsky’s Fragment from the Symphonies of Wind
Instruments . . . in memory of C. A. Debussy bears no dynamic indications and few phrase marks on its two pages of austere piano
chords. Absent any invitation to mourn, or any hints to help a
‘literary and imaginative collaboration’, it gives only a metronome
marking as guidance to the performer.
This work was actually an appropriate offering to Debussy’s
tomb, for it was modelled on the music for the Russian Orthodox
office of the dead. But while Stravinsky referred to the Symphonies,
early on, in aptly expressive terms – ‘austere ritual’; ‘short litanies’;
soft ‘chanting’ – these traditional, humane roots were subsequently
lost from view as the piece gained iconic status, aided by Stravinsky’s
later polemics for an anti-expressive aesthetic, as a precursor of
186
high-modernist musical abstraction.9 In the view of Stravinsky expert
Richard Taruskin, the highly influential, deliberately revisionist
reception history of this and many other major products of the
‘Russian period’ can be seen to exemplify the gradual hardening
of a quintessentially modernist approach to all music as ‘the music
itself ’ – that is, as pure sound patterns, just as bleached of emotive
or social powers as those two stark pages in the Tombeau de Claude
Debussy.10
Taruskin too has his polemical investments. But even so, the
historiographical resonance he sees in those two pages can invite
reflection, for example, about the fact that Boulez could affirm
that ‘modern music awakens in the afternoon of a faun’ in a few
paragraphs whose paeans to the formal freedom and orchestral
imagination of the Prélude include minimal reference to poetry
or agonistic post-wagnérisme; or about how Barraqué’s discussion
of the thought-like fluidity of the ‘theme-objects’ and ‘structural
relations’ in La Mer could so underplay the visceral force and
affective depth of the work’s tidal surges, whirling waltzes and
post-Romantic inflections.11 If anything, such questions come
even more insistently to mind in the face of the extreme schematic
abstraction of some prominent late-twentieth-century analytical
approaches to Debussy’s music – which occasionally bring to mind
his report to Laloy of a discussion with their mutual friend Jean
Marnold: ‘Music, it is all numbers, he said to me. And you are
another, I was tempted to respond.’12
Still, the fact that Marnold himself could follow his assertively
formalist response to the Nocturnes with an extravagantly anthropomorphic account of La Mer can be taken as a reminder that the
full range of Debussyan criticism has always been even more heterogeneous than the music in the 1920 Tombeau. Latterly, it seems
that simplistic ‘representational’ assumptions and aridly scientistic
approaches alike are finally being balanced by critical reflections of
a more nuanced, cultural-historical and literary-critical sensitivity.
187
Debussy’s work table with the manuscript of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Arguably, this kind of approach has the potential to restore to
a hearing of this exquisitely literary musical art some of the
Baudelairean and Mallarméan depths so often effaced by modernist
technocratic methods.
Any considered exploration of these latest developments being
impractical here, it might nonetheless be possible to adumbrate
their promise, in conclusion, by glancing back before Boulez and
Barraqué and Prunières and Cocteau into a stage of reception
Debussy himself would have been able to appreciate. No doubt the
consolatory letters Godet wrote him during the war carry some of
the same hagiographic hyperbole later inscribed into the memorial
issue of La Revue musicale. But when he extravagantly compared
Debussy’s music, at one point, to a ‘bath that cures, by enchantment,
all wounds’, he did so in words that can serve as a lasting summons
to seek in his music some kind of mediation of the very terms that
have remained central to debates about his historical significance:
188
Whenever my mind, always running a bit behind my sensibility,
despairs of accompanying it through its modulations and I find
myself like a man forced to jump over difficult hurdles, you
intervene . . . a stroke of the baton . . . and voilà: harmony is
established between head and heart (and indeed, at the same
time, between the two worlds that compose our universe of
men: that which we see outside of us, and think about; that
which, from within, reacts, and which one feels).13
Whether or not Godet exaggerates the magical powers of Debussy’s
baton, his image of a frail bridge between ‘two worlds’ succinctly
encapsulates the questions that can still be heard within the sounds
it once inspired.
189
References
Introduction
1 Claude Debussy, Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. François Lesure and
Denis Herlin (Paris, 2005), p. 1313. All translations are my own unless
otherwise indicated.
2 Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et Autres Écrits, ed. François Lesure,
2nd edn (Paris, 1987), pp. 52–3.
3 E. Vuillermoz, ‘Le monument de Claude Debussy à Paris’, unpaginated article in the programme for a dedicatory concert at the Théâtre de
Champs-Elysées, 17 June 1932. My thanks to Alexandra Laederich,
Curator of the Centre de Documentation Claude Debussy in Paris.
4 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 586.
1 A Music that Clothes the Poetry
François Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie Critique (Paris, 1994), p. 15.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 21.
A fifth child, born in 1873, died in 1877.
See e.g. the reminiscences of Camille Bellaigue and Gabriel Pierné
quoted in Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans.
Maire and Grace O’Brien (Oxford, 1933), p. 6.
6 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 25.
7 Maurice Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande de Claude Debussy, 2nd edn
(Paris, 1950), p. 11.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
1
2
3
4
5
190
9 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 29.
10 Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande, p. 17.
11 Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et Autres Écrits, 2nd edn, ed.
François Lesure (Paris, 1987), p. 65.
12 Vallas, Claude Debussy, p. 9.
13 Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (London, 1962), vol. i,
p. 207.
14 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 39.
15 Gabriel Pierné and Paul Vidal, ‘Souvenirs d’Achille Debussy’, Revue
musicale, vii (1 May 1926), pp. 10–16, at 12.
16 Only one page of music for ‘Madrid’ survives, without words; the
other song is lost.
17 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 43.
18 Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande, p. 19.
19 Edward Lockspeiser, ‘Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Madame von Meck’,
The Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936), pp. 38–44, at p. 39.
20 Ibid., p. 41.
21 No copy of the Swan Lake arrangements published in Russia has been
discovered. See Lockspeiser, Debussy, pp. 46–7.
22 Ibid., p. 46.
23 On this point, see André Schaeffner, ‘Debussy et ses Rapports avec la
Musique Russe’, in his Essais de musicologie (Paris, 1980).
24 This, at any rate, is how she identified him to Tchaikovsky. See
Lockspeiser, ‘Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and Madame von Meck’, p. 38.
25 Vallas, Claude Debussy, p. 20; Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande, pp.
20–21.
26 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 48.
27 Ibid., p. 37.
28 See Lockspeiser, Debussy, pp. 66–7.
29 This is the dedication for the unpublished song ‘Tragédie’ on words
by Léon Valade. See Margaret G. Cobb, ed., Richard Miller, trans.,
The Poetic Debussy: A Collection of His Song Texts and Selected Letters,
2nd edn (Rochester, 1994), p. 29.
30 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 53
31 Edward Lockspeiser, ‘Claude Debussy Dans la Correspondance de
Tchaikovsky et de Mme von Meck’, Revue musicale, xviii (November
1937), pp. 217–21, at p. 218.
191
32 Georges Favre, Compositeurs français méconnues (Paris, 1983),
pp. 36–7.
33 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 60.
34 Ibid., p. 61.
35 Pierné and Vidal, ‘Souvenirs d’Achille Debussy’, p. 15.
36 See e.g. the recollections quoted in Lesure, Claude Debussy, pp. 66–8.
37 Claude Debussy, Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. F. Lesure and D.
Herlin (Paris, 2005), p. 1015.
38 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 69.
39 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 189.
40 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 29.
41 See for example Mallarmé’s letter to his friend Cazalis of 28 April
1866, in Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal
(Paris, 1998), p. 696.
42 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 43.
43 Ibid., p. 29.
44 Ibid., p. 49.
45 Ibid., p. 46.
46 Ibid., p. 25; p. 27.
47 Ibid., p. 33.
48 Ibid., p. 45.
49 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 84.
50 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1927.
51 Pierné and Vidal, ‘Souvenirs d’Achille Debussy’, p. 15.
52 Debussy, Correspondance, pp. 51–4.
53 Ibid., p. 59.
54 Trans. in Vallas, Debussy, p. 42.
55 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 59.
56 Ibid., pp. 61–2.
57 Ibid., p. 64, n. 4.
58 See Richard Langham Smith, ‘Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites’,
19th-century Music, v/2 (1981), pp. 95–109.
59 Claude Debussy, Correspondance, p. 70, n. 5.
60 See for example the famous book by Seurat’s student Paul Signac,
D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-Impressionisme (Paris, 1899).
61 For a reproduction of Debussy’s completed questionnaire, see Roger
Nichols, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998), p. 70.
192
62 A key reference point is Baudelaire’s oft-reprinted 1861 essay ‘Richard
Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris’. On this much-discussed aspect of the
songs see for example Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London,
1979), pp. 42–9.
63 Louise Liebich, Claude-Achille Debussy (London, 1908), p. 33.
64 Debussy playfully acknowledged the change in a letter to Robert
Godet, Correspondance, p. 77.
65 Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, p. 42.
66 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 229; Robert Godet, ‘En marge de la
marge’, La Revue musicale, vii (1926), pp. 51–86, at p. 55.
67 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 78.
68 Lockspeiser, Debussy, p. 205.
69 Ibid., p. 206.
70 Ibid., p. 207.
71 See for example Richard Mueller, ‘Javanese Influence on Debussy’s
Fantaisie and Beyond’, 19th-century Music, x/2 (1986), pp. 157–86.
72 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 87.
73 Ibid., p. 1204.
74 Mendès also provided financial support for the engraving of the
Fantaisie.
75 Lockspeiser, Debussy, p. 205.
76 Paul Dukas, Correspondance, ed. Georges Favre (Paris, 1971), p. 21.
77 Vallas, Claude Debussy, p. 77.
78 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 103.
79 René Peter, Claude Debussy, 2nd edn (Paris, 1944), p. 32.
80 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 115.
2 A Dream from Which One Draws Back the Veils
1 This and the next several quotes are drawn from Claude Debussy,
Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin
(Paris, 2005), pp. 113–17.
2 Only the first two were published, in October 1892, in the Entretiens
politiques et littéraires.
3 On Seurat’s representation of a new culture of leisure see for example
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and
193
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
His Followers (Princeton, nj, 1984), pp. 261–8.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 112.
Ibid., p. 120, n. 2.
Ibid., p. 126.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 1098.
Paul Dukas, Correspondance, ed. Georges Favre (Paris, 1971), p. 21.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 157.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 155.
Ibid., p. 161.
Ibid., p. 157.
See Gordon Millan, Pierre Louÿs ou le culte de l’amitié (Aix-en-Provence,
1979), p. 212; and Pierre Louÿs, Milles lettres inédites de Pierre Louÿs à
Georges Louis 1890–1917 (Paris, 2002), p. 1016.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 176.
See François Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie Critique (Paris, 1994),
p. 144.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 192
Ibid., pp. 174–5.
Ibid., p. 191.
Ibid., pp. 196–8.
See Vincent d’Indy, Cours de Composition Musicale (Paris, 1903–50).
See David J. Code, ‘Debussy’s String Quartet in the Brussels Salon of
La Libre Esthétique’, 19th-Century Music, xxx/3 (Spring 2007), pp.
257–87.
The review appeared in the Guide Musical of 4 March. See Léon
Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans. Maire and Grace
O’Brien (Oxford, 1933), p. 98.
See Madeleine Octave Maus, Trente années de lutte pour l’art: Les XX et
La Libre Esthétique 1884–1914 (Brussels, 1926).
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 200.
Quoted in Pasteur Vallery-Radot, Tel était Claude Debussy (Paris, 1958),
pp. 41–3.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 217.
Ibid., p. 351.
194
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
René Peter, Claude Debussy, 2nd edn (Paris, 1944), p. 53.
Debussy, Correspondance, pp. 218–19; p. 215.
Ibid., p. 222.
Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et Autres Écrits, ed. François Lesure,
2nd edn (Paris, 1987), p. 293.
Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, ed. and trans. William
Ashbrook and Margaret G. Cobb (Oxford, 1990), p. 93.
Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 158.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 278.
Ibid., p. 229.
Ibid., p. 229.
Ibid., p. 286.
Pierre Boulez, Relevés d’Apprenti (Paris, 1966), p. 336.
Peter, Claude Debussy, p. 76.
See David J. Code, ‘The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmé’s Faun’,
Representations lxxxvi (Spring 2004), pp. 76–119.
See David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après
Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, liv/3 (2001), pp. 493–554.
Hector Berlioz, Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (Paris, 1843)
See for example Alfred Lavignac, Le Voyage Artistique à Bayreuth (Paris,
1897).
Carolyn Abbate, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-century
Music, v/2 (1981), pp. 117–41, at p. 138.
Universal Classics released a cd under this title in 1995, subtitled
‘Music to Caress Your Innermost Thoughts’.
On the formal ‘suspension’ typical of Virgilian pastoral, see for example Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, il, 1996).
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 270.
See Denis Herlin, ‘Une oeuvre inachevée: La Saulaie’, Cahiers Debussy,
xx (1996), pp. 3–23.
H. P. Clive, P. Louÿs (1870–1925): A Biography (Oxford, 1978), p. 551.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 551.
Ibid., p. 330.
The collection was reprinted several times by the end of the century,
both in the original and in several translations.
195
56 Oscar Thompson, Debussy: Man and Artist, 2nd edn (New York, 1967),
p. 110.
57 Debussy, Correspondance, pp. 425–6.
58 See Schiller, ‘Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung’, in Friedrich
Schiller: Werke und Briefe, ed. Otto Dann et al., vol. viii (Frankfurt am
Main, 1992), pp. 706–810.
59 The scale known as the ‘whole-tone scale’ (because it consists of six
whole steps) became specifically associated with Debussy due to the
exceptional frequency with which he used it, although he was far from
the only composer to do so.
60 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 326.
61 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 52.
62 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 62.
63 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 63.
64 See Debussy, Correspondance, p. 313 n. 1; p. 343 n. 6. The collaboration
with René Peter resulted in a complete draft of one play, Frèresen Art,
which was never performed, and only discovered after Debussy’s
death. For a brief discussion see Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics
and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Oxford,
1999), pp. 174–5.
65 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 185.
66 See an example in Lockspeiser, Debussy, p. 131.
67 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 394.
68 For a critical polemic along these lines from Satie’s later champion see
Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (Paris,
1918).
69 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 185.
70 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 343.
71 Ibid., p. 418.
72 Ibid., p. 380; p. 394; p. 398.
73 Ibid., p. 400.
74 Ibid., p. 419.
75 Jean Marnold, ‘Les “Nocturnes” de Claude Debussy’, Le Courrier musical, v/5 (1 March 1902), pp. 68–71.
76 Thompson, Debussy, pp. 319–20.
77 ‘The Chinese scale’ was a common term for what is now termed the
pentatonic. See for example Mallarmé’s early poem ‘Las de l’amer
196
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
repos’, whose lyric persona wishes to ‘forsake the ravenous Art of
cruel lands’ and emulate the ‘Chinese of fine and limpid soul’.
See Claude Debussy, Nocturnes, ed. Denis Herlin. Oeuvres complètes,
série v, vol. 3 (Paris, 1999), p. xxvii.
See ‘Les Petites Vielles’ (‘The Little Old Women’) in Les Fleurs du mal.
Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 46.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 585.
Debussy, Nocturnes, ed. Herlin, p. xxii.
See Rosamonde Sanson, Les 14 Juillet (1789–1935) (Paris, 1976).
See James R. Lehning, To Be A Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early
French Third Republic (Ithaca, ny, 2001).
For the ‘carnivalesque’ as a trope transmitted into nineteenth-century
art through Goethe, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World,
trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, in, 1984), pp. 244–56.
See Debussy, Correspondance, p. 395; Urbain Gohier, L’Armée contre la
Nation (Paris, 1898); Ferdinand Brunétière, La Nation et L’Armée
(Paris, 1899).
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 347.
Ibid., p. 446.
Ibid., p. 468; p. 477.
Ibid., p. 531.
Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 194.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 538.
Ibid., p. 539.
Ibid., p. 549, n. 1.
Paul Dukas, Écrits sur la musique, ed. Gustave Samazeuilh (Paris,
1948), p. 502.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 553.
Ibid., p. 559.
3 The Art of a Curious Savage
1 Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et Autres Écrits, ed. François Lesure,
2nd edn (Paris, 1987), p. 23.
2 Ibid., p. 60; p. 97.
3 Ibid., p. 150.
197
4 Ibid., p. 29.
5 Claude Debussy, Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. F. Lesure and D.
Herlin (Paris, 2005), p. 596.
6 Albert Carré, Souvenirs de théâtre, ed. Robert Favart (Paris, 1950),
p. 277.
7 Le Figaro, 13 April 1902.
8 Cited in René Peter, Claude Debussy (Paris, 1944), pp. 176–7.
9 Romain Rolland, Richard Strauss et Romain Rolland: Correspondance,
Fragments de Journal (Paris, 1951), p. 160.
10 Ibid., p. 159.
11 Maurice Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande de Claude Debussy, 2nd edn
(Paris, 1950), p. 78.
12 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York, 1952), p. 175.
13 Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande, p. 89.
14 Adolphe Jullien, ‘Théâtre national de l’Opéra-comique: Pelléas et
Mélisande’, Le Théâtre, lxxxiv (June 1902), pp. 5–15, at p. 5.
15 See Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy:
Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge, 1989), p. 65.
16 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 220.
17 Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘Sur les Femmes’, in his Le Trésor des Humbles,
42nd edn (Paris, 1904), pp. 81–98, at p. 96.
18 For more on the work’s allegorical implications, see Katherine
Bergeron, ‘Mélisande’s Hair, or, The Trouble in Allemonde: A
Postmodern Allegory at the Opéra-comique’, in Siren Songs:
Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart
(Princeton, nj, 2000), pp. 160–85.
19 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-century
Music, v/2 (1981), pp. 117–41.
20 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 642.
21 André Messager, ‘Les premières représentations de Pelléas’, La Revue
musicale, vii/7 (1 May 1926), pp. 112–13.
22 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 276.
23 Paul Dukas, Écrits sur la musique, ed. Gustave Samazeuilh (Paris,
1948), p. 575.
24 Le Temps, 20 May 1902.
25 Pierre Boulez, Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin
Cooper (London, 1986), p. 306; Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande, p. 213.
198
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 679.
Ibid., p. 668.
Ibid., p. 736.
Ibid., p. 758.
Ibid., p. 779.
See the gently corrective letter of February 1906 to Pierre Lalo in
Maurice Ravel, Lettres, Écrits, Entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris,
1989), p. 83.
Guido Gatti, ‘The Piano Works of Claude Debussy’, Musical Quarterly,
vii/3 (1921), pp. 418–60, at p. 422.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1212. The comment partly reflected the
experience of living close to the railway that once encircled Paris.
Ibid., p. 1119.
Ibid., p. 1211.
The anomalous inclusion of more than one poet in a song triptych
was to be partly mitigated a few years later when Debussy republished
the l’Hermite song, ‘La Grotte’, as one of a triptych on texts by the
same poet.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 859.
The Trois Chansons de France were also dedicated to her – but more
discreetly, as ‘Mme S. Bardac’.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 848.
Ibid., p. 854; p. 858; p. 861.
Ibid., p. 865; p. 872.
Ibid., p. 901.
See Gordon Millan, Pierre Louÿs ou le culte de l’amitié (Aix-en-Provence,
1979), p. 252.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 896; p. 917.
Jean Lorrain, Pelléastres (Paris, 1910).
See Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, ed. and trans.
William Ashbrook and Margaret G. Cobb (Oxford, 1990),
pp. 133–4.
See again the conversation with Guiraud, in Edward Lockspeiser,
Debussy: His Life and Mind (London, 1962), vol. i, p. 208.
Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 49.
Jean Barraqué, Debussy, 2nd edn, ed. François Lesure (Paris, 1994),
pp. 182–4.
199
50 Louis Schneider, ‘Les Concerts Classiques’, Gil blas, 15 October 1905,
p. 3.
51 Louis Laloy, ‘Concerts Chevillard: La Mer, trois esquisses symphoniques de Claude Debussy […]’, Mercure musical, 1 November
1905, p. 487.
52 Jean Marnold, ‘Concerts Lamoureux – Claude Debussy: La Mer’,
Le Mercure de France, lviii (1905) pp. 131–5, at 134.
53 Bruneau, Le Figaro, 16 October 1905; Carraud, ‘Les Concerts’,
La Liberté, 17 October 1905, p. 3.
54 Le Temps, 14 October 1905.
55 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 928.
56 Ibid., p. 929.
57 Ibid., p. 919.
58 Ibid., p. 778.
59 Ibid., p. 1002; p. 1027.
60 Ibid., p. 1027.
61 Ibid., p. 668.
62 Ibid., p. 1020.
63 See the scornful remarks by ‘l’Ouvreuse’ in Comoedia, 4 November
1907.
64 Debussy, Correspondance, 1055.
65 Comoedia, 20 January 1908.
66 Debussy, Correspondance, 1057.
67 Sir Henry J. Wood, My Life of Music (London, 1946), pp. 228–9.
68 Comoedia, 12 April 1909.
69 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 617.
70 Ibid., p. 999.
71 Louis Laloy, La Musique Retrouvée 1902–1927 (Paris, 1928), pp. 166–7.
72 In the recording of the set Debussy made for the Welt-Mignon piano
rolls in 1913, he perfectly captures a slight sense of technical precariousness.
4 Something New, Which Surprises Even Ourselves
1 Claude Debussy, Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. F. Lesure and D.
Herlin (Paris, 2005), p. 2162.
200
2 Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et Autres Écrits, ed. François Lesure,
2nd edn (Paris, 1987), p. 310.
3 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1952.
4 Ibid., p. 1851.
5 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 311.
6 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1468.
7 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 30.
8 See David J. Code, ‘Parting the Veils of Debussy’s “Voiles”’, Scottish
Music Review, [Online] i/1 (December 2007), pp. 43–67.
9 Pierre Boulez, Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin
Cooper (London, 1986), pp. 318–20.
10 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1253.
11 Ibid., p. 1316; François Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie Critique
(Paris, 1994), p. 328.
12 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1366.
13 Jacques Durand, Quelques Souvenirs d’un Éditeur de Musique (Paris,
1924), p. 124.
14 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1331.
15 Ibid., p. 1341.
16 Ibid., p. 1373.
17 Ibid., p. 1384.
18 Ibid., p. 1384. He mistakenly thought Maud Allan was English.
19 See Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge, 1982),
p. 217.
20 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1335.
21 Ibid., p. 1339.
22 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 317; p. 324.
23 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1445.
24 Comoedia, 18 May 1911.
25 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1418.
26 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 327.
27 Louis Laloy, La Musique Retrouvée 1902–1927 (Paris, 1928), p. 207.
28 Lesure, Claude Debussy, pp. 341–2.
29 Le Matin, 23 May 1911.
30 Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979), p. 158.
31 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 327.
32 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1415.
201
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, p. 230.
Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, pp. 147–9.
Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, p. 232.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1433.
Ibid., p. 1437.
Ibid., p. 1445.
Ibid., p. 1464.
Ibid., p. 1471.
Ibid., p. 1300; p. 1503.
See Jean-Michel Nectoux, ed., Nijinksy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un
faune (Paris, 1989), pp. 21–3.
Ibid., p. 20.
See the Interview of 23 February 1914, quoted in Lesure, Claude
Debussy, pp. 350–51.
See the review by Gaston Calmette in Le Figaro, 30 May 1912, reprinted in Nectoux, ed., Nijinsky: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, p. 47.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1760, n. 1.
Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 243.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1555.
Ibid., p. 1540.
Ibid., p. 1531.
See Herbert Eimert, ‘Debussy’s Jeux’, trans. Leo Black, in Die Reihe, v
(Bryn Mawr, pa, 1961), pp. 3–20, at pp. 19–20.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1619; p. 1758.
Jacques-Émile Blanche, ‘Un Bilan Artistique de la Grande Saison de
Paris’, Revue de Paris, 1913. Reprinted in his Dates (Paris, 1921), pp.
139–82, at p. 171.
Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 365.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1554.
Ibid., p. 1609.
Georges Jean-Aubry, ‘Debussy et Stravinsky’, Revue de musicologie,
xlviii (1962), p. 109.
Igor Stravinsky et al., Avec Stravinsky (Monaco, 1958), p. 23.
Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1687.
Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 210; p. 215.
Guido Gatti, ‘The Piano Works of Claude Debussy’, Musical Quarterly,
vii/3 (1921), pp. 418–60, at 422.
202
62 Ibid., p. 445.
63 See for example Richard Cándida Smith, Mallarmé’s Children:
Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley, ca, 1999).
64 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1667.
65 Ibid., p. 1651.
66 Ibid., p. 1662. For the parodic references see Orledge, Debussy and the
Theatre, p. 182.
67 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1651.
68 Ibid., pp. 1707–8.
69 Ibid., p. 1717.
70 Lazare Saminsky, ‘Debussy à Petrograd’, La Revue musicale, i/2
(1 December 1920), p. 216.
71 Quoted in Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1723, n. 3.
72 Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 156.
73 Ibid., p. 263.
74 Debussy, Correspondance, pp. 1767–8.
75 Ibid., p. 1824.
76 See Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, pp. 248–9.
77 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1836.
78 Ibid., p. 1842.
79 Ibid., p. 1843.
80 Ibid., p. 1911.
81 The reference is to Vincent d’Indy. See ibid., p. 1947.
82 Ibid., p. 1947; p. 1952.
83 See for example the pamphlet by Camille Saint-Saëns, La
Germanophilie (Paris, 1916).
84 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1850.
85 Ibid., p. 1854.
86 Ibid., p. 1847.
87 Ibid. p. 1863. For the Baudelaire reference see ‘Les Petites Vieilles’
in Les Fleurs du Mal.
88 Frédéric Chopin, Valses, ed. Claude Debussy (Paris, 1915), p. ii.
89 Cited in Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1879, n. 2.
90 Ibid., p. 1888.
91 Ibid., p. 1904.
92 Ibid., p. 1917.
93 Ibid., p. 1915.
203
94 Ibid., p. 1916.
95 See for example Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style
(Bloomington, in, 2009), pp. 43–54.
96 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 2093.
97 Ibid., p. 1947.
98 Claude Debussy, Douze Études pour le Piano (Paris, 1915), ii.
99 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 1943; p. 1948; p. 1953.
100 Ibid., p. 2023.
101 Ibid., p. 2071.
102 Ibid., p. 2016.
103 Ibid., p. 1960.
104 Ibid., p. 1997.
105 Ibid., p. 2033.
106 Darius Milhaud, Notes sans musique (Paris, 1949), p. 77.
107 See Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style, pp. 40–43.
108 Debussy, Correspondance, p. 2076.
109 Ibid., p. 2093.
110 Ibid., p. 2105.
111 Ibid., p. 2132.
112 Ibid., p. 2133.
113 La Gazette de Biarritz, 15 September 1917, quoted in ibid., p. 2146, n. 5.
114 Ibid., p. 2140.
115 Ibid., pp. 2161–5.
116 Ibid., p. 2160; p. 2166.
117 Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré, Correspondance: soixante ans
d’amitié (Paris, 1973), p. 108.
118 Laloy, La Musique Retrouvée, p. 228.
119 Durand, Quelques Souvenirs, pp. 90–91.
Epilogue
1 Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (Paris,
1918), pp. 27–8. Published in September 1918, the pamphlet was
actually written before Debussy’s death, and dedicated to the
composer Georges Auric on 19 March.
2 Henry Prunières, ed., ‘Numéro Spécial consacré à la mémoire de
204
Claude Debussy’, La Revue musicale, i/2 (December 1920).
3 André Suarès, ‘Debussy’, in La Revue musicale, i/2 (December 1920),
p. 99.
4 Suarès, ‘Debussy’, p. 112; Robert Godet, ‘Le Lyrisme Intime de Claude
Debussy’, in La Revue musicale, i/2 (December 1920), pp. 167–90, esp.
p. 180 and following.
5 Godet, ‘Le Lyrisme Intime’, p. 189.
6 Suarès, ‘Debussy’, p. 106.
7 Alfred Cortot, ‘La Musique de Piano de Claude Debussy’, in La Revue
musicale, i/2 (December 1920), pp. 127–50, at p. 131.
8 Ibid., p. 132.
9 See Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A
Biography of the Works Through Mavra (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1459–62 and
1486–99.
10 See Richard Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of
Spring, The Tradition of the New, and “The Music Itself ”’, in his
Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays
(Princeton, nj, 1997), pp. 360–88.
11 Pierre Boulez, Relevés d’Apprenti (Paris, 1966), p. 336; Jean Barraqué,
Debussy, 2nd edn, ed. François Lesure (Paris, 1994), esp. pp. 191–4.
12 Claude Debussy, Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. F. Lesure and D.
Herlin (Paris, 2005), p. 1201.
13 Ibid., p. 2163.
205
Select Bibliography
Musical Scores
Detailed information about autograph sources can be found in James R.
Briscoe, Claude Debussy: A Guide to Research (London, 1990). The Durand
edition of the Oeuvres complètes has been in preparation since 1985, first
under the direction of the late François Lesure, latterly under Denis
Herlin. So far, the piano, orchestral and stage works have been published
in full or in part. A useful supplement is Briscoe’s two-volume critical
edition Songs of Claude Debussy (Milwaukee, wi, 1993). See also Margaret
G. Cobb, ed., Richard Miller, trans., The Poetic Debussy: A Collection of His
Song Texts and Selected Letters, 2nd edn (Rochester, 1994).
Letters and Critical Writings
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––, Letters, ed. and trans. François Lesure and Roger Nichols (London, 1987)
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––, Debussy on Music, ed. François Lesure, ed. and trans. Richard Langham
Smith (London, 1977)
Iconography
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Lesure, François, Claude Debussy, Iconographie musicale (Geneva, 1975)
206
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Music, v/2 (1981), pp. 117–41
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a Norton Critical Score (New York, 1970)
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Esthétique’, 19th-century Music, xxx/3 (Spring 2007), pp. 257–87
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Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, liv/3 (2001), pp. 493–554
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Mélisande’, Le Théâtre, lxxxiv (June 1902), pp. 5–15
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207
Liebich, Louise, Claude-Achille Debussy (London, 1908)
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v/5 (1 March 1902), pp. 68–71
Messager, André, ‘Les premières représentations de Pelléas’, La Revue musicale, vii/7 (1 May 1926), pp. 112–13
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19th-century Music, x/2 (1986), pp. 157–86
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––, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998)
––, and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
(Cambridge, 1989)
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Music, vi/1 (1982), pp. 60–75
Peter, René, Claude Debussy, 2nd edn (Paris, 1944)
Pierné, Gabriel and Paul Vidal, ‘Souvenirs d’Achille Debussy’, Revue musicale, vii (1 May 1926), pp. 10–16
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(London, 1999)
Roberts, Paul, Claude Debussy (London, 2008)
––, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, or, 1996)
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O’Brien (Oxford, 1933)
Vallery-Radot, Pasteur, Tel était Claude Debussy (Paris, 1958)
208
Vuillermoz, Emile, C. Debussy (Paris, 1957)
Wenk, Arthur, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley, ca, 1976)
Wheeldon, Marianne, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington, in, 2009)
Context and Contemporaries
Baudelaire, Charles, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, 1975–6)
Berlioz, Hector, Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes
(Paris, 1843)
Blanche, Jacques-Émile, Dates (Paris, 1921)
Boulez, Pierre, Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin
Cooper (London, 1986)
Carré, Albert, Souvenirs de théâtre, ed. Robert Favart (Paris, 1950)
Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (Princeton, nj, 1984)
Clive, H. P., Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925): A Biography (Oxford, 1978)
Cocteau, Jean, Le Coq et l’arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (Paris, 1918)
Code, David J., ‘The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmé’s Faun’, Representations,
lxxxvi (Spring 2004), pp. 76–119
Davis, Mary E., Erik Satie (London, 2007)
Dukas, Paul, Correspondance, ed. Georges Favre (Paris, 1971)
––, Écrits sur la musique, ed. Gustave Samazeuilh (Paris, 1948)
Durand, Jacques, Quelques Souvenirs d’un Éditeur de Musique (Paris, 1924)
Favre, Georges, Compositeurs français méconnues (Paris, 1983)
Fulcher, Jane, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to
the First World War (Oxford, 1999)
––, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940
(Oxford, 2005)
Indy, Vincent d’, Cours de Composition Musicale, ed. Auguste Sérieyx and
G. De Lioncourt (Paris, 1948–57)
Laloy, Louis, La Musique Retrouvée 1902–1927 (Paris, 1928)
Lavignac, Alfred, Le Voyage Artistique à Bayreuth (Paris, 1897)
Lehning, James R., To Be A Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French
Third Republic (Ithaca, ny, 2001)
Louÿs, Pierre, Milles lettres inédites de Pierre Louÿs à Georges Louis 1890–1917
(Paris, 2002)
209
Maeterlinck, Maurice, Le Trésor des Humbles, 42nd edn (Paris, 1904)
Mallarmé, Stéphane, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris, 1998)
Maus, Madeleine Octave, Trente années de lutte pour l’art: Les XX et La Libre
Esthétique 1884–1914 (Brussels, 1926)
Milhaud, Darius, Notes sans musique (Paris, 1949)
Millan, Gordon, Pierre Louÿs ou le culte de l’amitié (Aix-en-Provence, 1979)
Ravel, Maurice, Lettres, Écrits, Entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris, 1989)
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Fragments de Journal (Paris, 1951)
Saint-Saëns, Camille, La Germanophilie (Paris, 1916)
––, and Gabriel Fauré, Correspondance: soixante ans d’amitié (Paris, 1973)
Sanson, Rosamonde, Les 14 Juillet (1789–1935) (Paris, 1976)
Signac, Paul, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-Impressionisme (Paris, 1899)
Smith, Richard Cándida, Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of
Experience (Berkeley, ca, 1999)
Stravinsky, Igor, et al., Avec Stravinsky (Monaco, 1958)
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Works Through Mavra (Oxford, 1996)
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210
Select Discography
Vocal-Orchestral and Stage Works
L’Enfant prodigue (with Arthur Honegger, Symphony no. 3)
Jeanine Micheau, Michel Sénéchal, Pierre Mollet, Coro e Orchestra
Sinfonica rai di Torino, conducted by André Cluytens. Arts Archives
43059–2. Recorded 1962.
La Damoiselle élue (with the Nocturnes and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien,
symphonic fragments)
Dawn Upshaw, Paula Rasmussen, Women of the Los Angeles Master
Chorale, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka
Salonen. Sony sk 58952. Recorded 1993.
Rodrigue et Chimène (ed. Richard Langham Smith; orch. Edison Denisov)
Donna Brown, Lawrence Dale, Hélène Joussoud, José van Dam, Jules Bastin,
Vincent le Texier; Lyon Opera Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Kent
Nagano. Erato 4509–98508–2. Recorded 1993–4.
Pelléas et Mélisande
Anne Sofie von Otter, Wolfgang Holzmair, Laurent Naouri, French
National Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink. Naïve v4923. Recorded
2001.
Pelléas et Mélisande
Claudine Carlson, Collette Alliot-Lugaz, Didier Henry, Françoise Golfier,
Gilles Cachemaille, Montréal Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted
by Charles Dutoit. Decca 430 502–2. Recorded 1990.
211
Pelléas et Mélisande (dvd)
Alison Hagley, Neill Archer, Donald Maxwell, Kenneth Cox, Penelope
Walker, Samuel Burkey, Peter Massocchi, Orchestra and Chorus of Welsh
National Opera, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Videotaped at the New
Theatre, Cardiff, March 1992. Deutsche Grammophon 073 030–9.
Recorded 2002.
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (incidental music)
Leslie Caron, Sylvia McNair, Ann Murray, Nathalie Stutzmann, London
Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.
Sony sk 48240. Recorded 1991.
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (concert version), with Trois Ballades de
François Villon (orch. Debussy)
Bernard Plantey, André Falcon, Claudine Collart, Jeannine Collard,
Christiane Gayraud, Choeurs et Orchestre de la Radiodiffusion Française,
conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. Testament sbt 1214. Recorded
1955, 1957; remastered 2001.
Songs
Forgotten Songs: Dawn Upshaw sings Debussy with James Levine, piano.
Includes the early ‘Vasnier songbook’, the Ariettes oubliées and the Baudelaire
songs. Sony sk 67190. Recorded 1995.
Debussy: Mélodies
François Le Roux with Noël Lee, piano. Includes most of the later cycles,
the Proses lyriques, and various early songs. Le Chant du Monde. Released
1999.
Nuits d’étoiles: Mélodies françaises (with songs by Fauré and Poulenc)
Véronique Gens with Roger Vignoles, piano. Includes Fêtes galantes i and
the Chansons de Bilitis. Virgin Classics 545360 2. Recorded 1998–9.
Maggie Teyte: Mélodies (with songs by Duparc, Berlioz and Fauré)
With Alfred Cortot and Gerald Moore, piano. Includes both Fêtes galantes,
212
the Chansons de Bilitis, the Baudelaire songs and the Proses lyriques. Pearl
gemm cd 9134. Recorded 1936 and 1940.
Orchestra
Debussy: Orchestral works (2 disc set)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink and
Eduard Beinum. Philips Classics 00289 438 7422. Recorded 1992.
Debussy: Nocturnes, La Mer, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti. Decca 436468.
Released 1992.
Debussy: Orchestral Music (2 disc set)
New Philharmonia Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by
Pierre Boulez. Sony sm2k68327. Recorded 1966–8.
Piano: solo, four hands, two pianos
Claude Debussy: The Composer as Pianist.
Includes six Préludes, one Estampe and Children’s Corner; plus an excerpt
from Pelléas and three songs with Mary Garden. Pierian 0001. WelteMignon piano roll recordings, 1904 and 1913; released 2000.
Estampes, Images, and Préludes (2 disc set)
Claudio Arrau. Philips Classics 432 304. Released 1991.
Complete Works for Solo Piano (2 volumes)
Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Decca 4520222 and 4602472. Released 1996 and
2000.
Preludes (I), Images (I and II), Children’s Corner
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Deutsche Grammophon 413 450–2 and 415
372–2. Recorded 1971 and 1978.
213
Etudes, Michuko Uchida
Decca The Originals 4757559. Recorded 1989.
Images, I and II; Etudes
Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Teldec 8573839402. Released 2003.
En blanc et noir (with works by Bartók and Mozart)
Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich. Philips 476 7938. Recorded
1977.
Chamber Music
Debussy: Musique de Chambre (All the main works, including several for
piano 4 hands and 2 pianos)
Christian Ferras, Pierre Barbizet, Maurice Gendron, Jacques Février,
Michel Debost, Yehudi Menuhin, Lily Laskine, Quatuor Parrenin, Annie
Challan, Michel Béroff, Jean-Philippe Collard, Orchestre de la Société des
Concerts du Conservatoire conducted by André Cluytens. emi Classic cmz
67416. Recorded 1962–82.
Debussy, Ravel: Chamber Music (Includes the incidental music for the
Chansons de Bilitis and Ravel’s Mallarmé songs)
The Nash Ensemble, with Delphine Seyrig and Sarah Walker. Virgin
Classics 5614272. Recorded 1989–90.
Quatuor à cordes en sol mineur, op. 10
Quatuor Ébène. Virgin Classics 5190452. Recorded 2008.
Piano trio in G major (with trios by Ravel and Fauré)
Florestan Trio. Hyperion cda67114. Recorded 1999.
214
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the British Academy and to the University of Glasgow’s
John Robertson Bequest for grants in support of this publication. Thanks
also to Vivian Constantinopoulos at Reaktion Books for commissioning
the book and for her editorial suggestions; to Harry Gilonis and Martha
Jay for their help with illustrations and copy-editing; to Bill Sweeney for
facilitating some valuable teaching release at an early stage of writing; and
to Katherine Bergeron for her ongoing support. The book is dedicated to
Nic, with love and thanks.
215
Photo Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.
© adagp, Paris and dacs, London: p. 9; photo akg-images/Erich Lessing:
p. 6; photo author: p. 9; photos Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris:
pp. 57, 58, 65, 66, 87, 157; from Le Charivari, 1868: p. 38; photo Glasgow
University Library (Special Collections): p. 72; photos Lebrecht Music and
Arts Photo Library: pp. 16, 23, 26, 89, 100, 109, 123, 147, 149, 154; photo
Library of Congress, Washington, dc (Prints and Photographs Division Harris & Ewing Collection): p. 115; Musée de la Musique, Paris: p. 6; Musée
National du Château, Versailles: p. 30; photo The Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York: p. 137; photos Roger-Viollet/Rex Features: pp. 14, 30, 38, 71, 104,
116, 128, 152, 177, 188.
216