Claude Debussy
Achille Claude Debussy (pronounced /aʃil(ə) klod(ə) dəbysi/; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862-Paris, March 25, 1918) was a French composer, one of the most influential of the turn of the century XIX and early XX. Some authors consider him the first impressionist composer, although he categorically rejected the term.
Born into a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, he displayed enough musical talent to be admitted to France's best music study center, the Paris Conservatoire, at the age of ten. He initially studied piano, but found his calling in avant-garde composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatory's conservative professors. It took many years to develop his musical style and he was nearly 40 years old when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he ever completed, Peleas et Melisande ( Pelléas et Mélisande ).
Among his orchestral compositions are Prelude a la siesta de un fauno (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, 1894), Nocturnes (Nocturnes, 1897-1899) and Images (1905-1912). His music was largely a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition. He considered the classical symphony obsolete and sought an alternative in his "symphonic sketches" La mer (1903-1905). His works for piano include two books of preludes ( Préludes ) and two books of studies ( Études ). Throughout his career he wrote mélodies based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own. He was greatly influenced by the symbolist poetic movement of the late XIX century. A small number of his works, such as the early La Damoiselle élue (1887-1889) and the late The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, 1911), include an important part for the choirs. In his later years he focused on chamber music and completed three of the six sonatas he planned to compose for different combinations of instruments.
From the influences of his early years, such as Russian and Far Eastern music, he developed his own style of orchestral color and harmony, being ridiculed—and unsuccessfully combated—by much of the establishment i> musical of the time. His works have greatly influenced a large number of composers, such as Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin or the composer and jazz pianist Bill Evans. He died of colorectal cancer at his home in Paris at the age of 55, after a career of just over 30 years as a composer.
Biography
Early Years
He was born on August 22, 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the former department of Seine-et-Oise, northwest of Paris. He was the eldest of the five children of Manuel-Achille Debussy and his wife, Victorine, née Manoury. His father owned a china shop and his mother was a seamstress.The shop was unsuccessful and closed in 1864; The family then moved to Paris, first to live with Victorine's mother in Clichy and, from 1868, in their own apartment on Rue Saint-Honoré. His father was working at a printing company at the time.
In 1870, to flee the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, his mother, then pregnant, took him and his sister Adéle to their paternal aunt's house in Cannes, where they stayed until the year following. During his stay in the city, Debussy, at the age of seven, received his first piano lessons from him; his aunt paid for his studies with an Italian musician, Jean Cerutti, his father had stayed in Paris and joined the Commune forces; after his defeat by French government troops in 1871 he was sentenced to four years in prison, although he only served one. Among his fellow prisoners in the Commune was his friend Charles de Sivry, who was a musician; Sivry's mother, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, gave piano lessons and, following her advice, the young Debussy became one of her students..
His talent soon became evident and in 1872, at the age of ten, he was admitted to the prestigious Paris Conservatoire, where he studied for the next eleven years. Initially joining Antoine François Marmontel's piano class, he studied music theory with Albert Lavignac and later composition with Ernest Guiraud, harmony with Émile Durand, and organ with César Franck. The course included studies in music history and theory with Louis -Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, but it is not certain that Debussy, who was prone to missing classes, attended them.
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At the Conservatory he initially progressed at a good pace. Marmontel said of him that he was “a charming boy, a truly artistic temperament; much can be expected of him". Émile Durand was less impressed, writing in a report that he "would make an excellent student if he were less superficial and less arrogant"; a year later he described it as "hopelessly neglected". In July 1874 Debussy received a deuxième accessit for his solo performance in the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Chopin at the Conservatoire's annual competition. He was a good pianist and an excellent sight reader and probably could have pursued a professional career if he had wished, but he was only intermittently diligent in his studies. At the annual competitions he was awarded a premier accessit in 1875 and the second prix in 1877, but he did not reach the top positions in those of 1878 and 1879. These results disqualified him from continuing his piano studies at the Conservatory, but he continued studying harmony, music theory and, later, composition.
With the help of Marmontel, Debussy secured a summer job in 1879 as resident pianist at the Château de Chenonceau, where he soon acquired a taste for luxury that would remain with him throughout his life. compositions, two arrangements of poems by Alfred de Musset: "Ballade à la lune" and "Madrid, princesse des Espagnes". The following year he got a job as a pianist at the home of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's patron. He traveled with the von Meck family during the summers of 1880 to 1882, staying at various locations in France, Switzerland, and Italy, as well as at their home in Moscow. He composed his Piano Trio in G major for the von Meck musical ensemble, and scored a three-dance piano duet from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.
Prize of Rome
At the end of 1880, while he continued his studies at the Conservatoire, he was hired as an accompanist for Marie Moreau-Sainti's singing classes, a job he held for four years. There he met Marie Vasnier, wife of Henri Vasnier, a prominent official, and much younger than her husband. Debussy was strongly attracted to her and soon became his lover and muse: he composed 27 songs dedicated to her during their seven years of relationship. It is not clear if Vasnier was content to tolerate his wife's affair with the young student or he just didn't know it, but he had an excellent relationship with Debussy and encouraged the composer in his career.
At the Conservatoire, Debussy had earned the disapproval of the teachers, particularly his composition teacher, Guiraud, for not respecting the orthodox rules of composition that prevailed at the time. However, in 1884, he won the France's most prestigious musical award, the Prix de Rome, with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. The award included a stay at the Villa Médici, seat of the French Academy in Rome, to expand the studies of the winner. He stayed there from January 1885 to March 1887, with three or possibly four absences of several weeks in which he returned to France, mostly to see Marie Vasnier.
He initially found the artistic atmosphere of the Villa Médici stifling, the company crude, the food poor, and the accommodation "dreadful". He also did not like Italian opera, considering operas by Donizetti and Verdi not to his liking. He was much more impressed by the music of the composers of the XVI century Palestrina and Lasso, which he heard performed in the church of Santa Maria dell& He often felt depressed and unable to compose, but was inspired by Franz Liszt, who paid a visit to the students and played for them. In June 1885, he wrote a text in which he expressed his desire to follow his own path, saying: «I am sure that the Institute will not approve it, because, naturally, it considers that the path it marks is the only correct one. But there is nothing to do! I am too in love with my freedom, too attached to my own ideas!"
He composed four pieces that he presented to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima, based on a text by Heinrich Heine; the orchestral piece Printemps; the cantata La Damoiselle élue (1887-1888), the first piece in which the stylistic features of his later music begin to manifest; and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, which was largely inspired by Franck's music and which Debussy eventually decided to withdraw. The Academy reprimanded him for writing music it deemed "strange, incomprehensible and unplayable". Although the works showed the influence of Jules Massenet, Massenet claimed that Debussy "is an enigma". During his years in Rome he composed—but did not for the Academy—most of his Verlaine cycle, Ariettes oubliées, which had little impact at the time, but was successfully republished in 1903, by which time the composer had already achieved fame.
Return to Paris, 1887
A week after his return to Paris in 1887, Debussy heard the first act of Wagner's opera Tristan et Isolde at the Concerts Lamoureux, deeming it "undoubtedly the best I know of." ». In 1888 and 1889 he attended the annual festivals of Wagner's operas in Bayreuth. He reacted positively to and was for a time influenced by Wagner's sensuality, mastery of form, and powerful harmonies, but unlike other French composers of his generation, he concluded that it was useless. to try to adopt and develop Wagner's style. In 1903 he commented that Wagner was "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a sunrise".
In 1889, on a visit to the World's Fair in Paris, he heard Javanese gamelan music for the first time. The scales, melodies, rhythms and textures of the gamelan ensembles appealed to him, and their echoes are perceived in "Pagodes", one of the movements of his piano suite Estampes. He attended two music concerts by Rimsky-Korsakov, conducted by the composer himself. They also impressed him, and their harmonic freedom and non-Teutonic color tones influenced the development of his own musical style.
Marie Vasnier broke off her relationship with Debussy shortly after his last visit from Rome, although the relationship remained friendly enough for her to dedicate one more song, "Mandoline", to him in 1890. In 1890 she met Erik Satie, who proved to be a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemian, enjoying the same café culture and struggling to stay afloat financially.That same year she began a relationship with Gabrielle (Gaby) Dupont, daughter of a Lisieux tailor; in July 1893 they began to live together.
He continued to compose songs, piano pieces, and other works, some of which were performed in public, but his music made little more than a modest effect, though his fellow composers recognized his potential by choosing him to serve on the committee of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1893. His Quatuor à cordes en sol mineur was premiered by Eugène Ysaÿe's string quartet at the Société Nationale that same year. In May 1893 he attended a theatrical event of great importance for his later career, the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, which he immediately decided to turn into an opera; in November he traveled to the house de Maeterlinck in Ghent to get his consent for an operatic adaptation.
1894-1902: Peleas and Melisande
In February 1894, he finished the first draft of Act I of his operatic version of Pelléas et Mélisande and worked for the better part of a year to complete the work. While living with Gaby Dupont he had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, and in 1894 announced their engagement. His conduct was highly criticized; anonymous letters circulated denouncing his treatment of both women, as well as their financial irresponsibility and their debts. The engagement was called off and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including the composer Ernest Chausson, hitherto one of his greatest supporters.
In the field of musical recognition, Debussy took a big step forward in December 1894, when the symphonic poem Prelude to a Faun's Siesta (Prélude à l'après -midi d'un faune), based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, premiered at a Société Nationale concert. The following year he completed the first draft of Pelléas and began the work for its staging. In May 1898 he established his first contacts with André Messager and Albert Carré, musical director and general director, respectively, of the National Theater of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, for the presentation of the opera.
She left Dupont for her friend Marie-Rosalie Texier, known as "Lilly", whom he married in October 1899, threatening suicide if she refused him. She was a loving, practical, straightforward, and well-liked woman. by the composer's friends and colleagues, but he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensibility. The marriage lasted barely five years.
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In 1900, he began attending meetings of Les Apaches (“The Vandals”), an informal group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians who had adopted his name as representatives of their condition as "artistic outsiders". The membership was very varied, but on several occasions included such well-known artists as Maurice Ravel, Ricardo Viñes, Ígor Stravinski or Manuel de Falla. In that same year two of his three Nocturnes. Although they were not very successful with the public, they received good reviews from musicians such as Paul Dukas, Alfred Bruneau and Pierre de Bréville. The complete works were presented the following year.
Like many other composers of the day, he supplemented his income by teaching and criticizing. For most of 1901 he was music critic for La Revue Blanche under the pseudonym "Monsieur Croche". He expressed his views on composers ("I hate sentimentality - his name is Camille Saint-Saëns"), institutions (on the Paris Opera: "A stranger would take it for a train station and, once inside, the mistaken for a Turkish bath"), conductors ("Nikisch is a unique virtuoso, to the point that his virtuosity seems to make him forget the demands of good taste"), musical politics ("The English believe that a musician can successfully running an opera house!"), or the public ("his almost narcotic expression of boredom, indifference and even stupidity"). He later collected his criticisms with the intention of publishing them in book form; they were finally published after his death under the title Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante.
In January 1902, rehearsals began at the Opéra-Comique for the premiere of Peleas and Melisande; for three months she attended rehearsals practically every day. In February there was a conflict between Maeterlinck on the one hand and Debussy, Messager and Carré on the other, over the choice of the singer for the role of Melisande. Maeterlinck wanted the role to go to his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, and was outraged when Scottish soprano Mary Garden was finally cast. The opera opened on 30 April 1902, and although the first-night audience was divided admirers and skeptics alike, the work quickly became a success. Debussy became a household name in France and abroad; The Times commented that the opera had "provoked more debate than any other work of modern times, except, of course, Richard Strauss's." Les Apaches, led for Ravel (who attended every one of the 14 performances of the first season), they offered great support; the conservative faculty of the Paris Conservatoire tried in vain to prevent their students from attending the opera. The vocal score was published in early May and the full orchestral score in 1904.
1903-1918: Last Years
His prestige was publicly recognized when he was made a knight of the Legion of Honor in 1903, but his social standing suffered a major blow when another turn in his private life caused scandal the following year. Among his students was Raoul Bardac, son of Emma, wife of the Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac. Raoul introduced his teacher to his mother, to whom the composer quickly became strongly attracted. She was a sophisticated woman, a brilliant conversationalist, an accomplished singer, and unconcerned about marital fidelity, who had been Gabriel Fauré's mistress and muse a few years earlier. After sending Lilly to her parental home in Bichain, Villeneuve-la-Guyard, on 15 July 1904 Debussy took Emma incognito to Jersey and then to Pourville in Normandy. On 11 August he wrote to his wife from Dieppe, telling her that their marriage was over, but making no mention of it. Bardac. When he returned to Paris, he settled alone in his own apartment, located in another arrondissement. On October 14, five days before the fifth anniversary of their wedding, Lilly Debussy attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest. with a revolver; she survived, although the bullet remained lodged between her vertebrae for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused her to be disowned by Bardac's family and Debussy lost many good friends, including Dukas and Messager. His relationship with Ravel, never very close, took a turn for the worse when the latter joined other former friends of Debussy's in contributing to a support fund for the abandoned Lilly.
The Bardacs divorced in May 1905. Faced with unbearable hostility in Paris, Claude and Emma (who was pregnant) traveled to England; they stayed at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne between July and August, where Debussy corrected proofs for his symphonic sketches La mer, celebrating his divorce from Lilly on 2 August. After a brief visit to London, the couple returned to Paris in September, where they bought a house in a private development on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch), which has since been Debussy's residence for the rest of his life.
In October 1905, his most important orchestral work, La mer, was premiered in Paris by the Lamoureux Orchestra under the direction of Camille Chevillard; the reception was mixed. Some praised the work, but Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, until then an admirer of Debussy, wrote: "I don't hear, I don't see, I don't smell the sea." In the same month he was born in his address Debussy's only daughter; Claude-Emma, affectionately known as "Chouchou", was an inspiration to the composer, who dedicated his suite for piano Children's Corner” to her . The girl barely outlived her father by a year, having died during the diphtheria epidemic of 1919. Mary Garden said, "Honestly, I don't know if Debussy ever really loved anyone. He loved his music, and perhaps himself. I think he was immersed in his "genius", but biographers agree that whatever his relationship with his lovers and friends, Debussy was devoted to his daughter.
Debussy and Emma Bardac were married in 1908 and their troubled union lasted for the rest of their lives. The following year got off to a good start when, at Fauré's invitation, Debussy became a member of the governing council of the Paris Conservatoire. His success in London was consolidated in April 1909, when he conducted Prelude to the Siesta of a Faun and Nocturnos at Queen's Hall; in May he attended the first London performance of Peleas and Melisande, at Covent Garden. That same year he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, from which he would die nine years later.
His works began to appear more and more on national and international concert programs. In 1910 Gustav Mahler conducted Nocturnes and Prelude to the Nap of a Faun in New York in successive months. That same year, on a visit to Budapest, he commented that his works they were better known there than in Paris. In 1912, Sergei Diaghilev commissioned him to write a ballet score, Jeux, which, together with the three Images pour orchester, premiered at the The following year, they were the composer's last orchestral works. Jeux was unfortunate at the time: two weeks after the premiere, in March 1913, Diaghilev presented the first performance of The Consecration of Stravinsky's Spring, a sensational event that monopolized debates in musical circles and pushed aside Jeux along with Fauré's Pénélope, which had premiered a week before.
In 1915, he underwent one of the first colostomy operations; it only brought temporary relief and caused him great frustration: "There are mornings when the effort to dress seems like one of the twelve labors of Hercules." At this time he had a fierce enemy in Camille Saint-Saëns, who in a letter a Fauré repudiated Debussy's suite for two pianos En blanc et noir: "It is incredible, and the door of the Institute must be closed at all costs against a man capable of committing such atrocities." Saint-Saëns had been a member of the Institute since 1881, Debussy never became one.
His health continued to decline; He gave his last concert, the premiere of his Violin Sonata, on September 14, 1917, and was forced to become bedridden in early 1918. He died at home on March 25, 1918. World War I was still raging and Paris was subjected to German artillery and aerial bombardment. The military situation did not allow the honor of a public funeral with ceremonies at his grave. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets to a temporary grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery as German guns shelled the city. His mortal remains were transferred the following year to the small Passy cemetery, located behind the Trocadero Gardens, fulfilling his wish to rest "among the trees and the birds"; his wife and his daughter are buried next to him.
Work
Compositions
In an analysis of Debussy's work shortly after the composer's death, the British critic and musicologist Ernest Newman wrote: "It would not be an exaggeration to say that Debussy devoted a third of his life to discovering himself, a third to the free and happy realization of himself and the last third to the partial and painful loss of himself." Later commentators have assessed some of his later works more favorably than Newman and other of his contemporaries, but certainly much of the The music for which the composer is best known is from his mid-career.
Analyst David Cox wrote in 1974 that Debussy, who admired Wagner's attempts to combine all the creative arts, "created a new, instinctive and dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective, a kind of art that, indeed, it seemed to reach into every aspect of the experience." In 1988 the British composer and critic Wilfrid Mellers wrote:
"Because of his concern for the chords themselves, more than despite them, he disconnected the music from the sense of harmonic progression, broke the domain of three centuries of harmonic tones and showed how the melodic conceptions of the tonality typical of primitive folk music and medieval music could be relevant in the century.XX.».
Debussy gave no opus numbers to his works, apart from his String Quartet in G minor op. 10 (it is also the only work in which the composer's title includes a key). His works were cataloged and indexed by musicologist François Lesure in 1977 (revised 2003) and his Lesure number ("L » followed by a number) is sometimes used as a suffix to its title in concert programs and on recordings.
Early works, 1879-1892
His musical development was slow, and as a student he was adept enough to present his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire with works that conformed to his conservative premises. His friend Georges Jean-Aubry commented that Debussy "admirably imitated Massenet's melodic turns" in the cantata L'enfant prodigue (1884) which won him the Prix de Rome. A more characteristically Debussian work from his early years is La Damoiselle élue, which reformulates the traditional form of oratorios and cantatas, using a chamber orchestra and a small body of choral tone using new scales and harmonies. or long neglected. His early mélodies, inspired by Marie Vasnier, are more virtuoso in character than his later works in this genre, with extensive wordless vocalization; starting with the Ariettes oubliées (1885-1887), he developed a more sober style. He wrote the poems himself for the Proses lyriques (1892-1893), although, according to music scholar Robert Orledge, "his literary talent was not a match for his musical imagination." ».
The French musicologist Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme wrote that both La Demoiselle élue, the Ariettes oubliées and the Cinq poemes de Charles Baudelaire (1889) reveal "the strange new path the young musician will follow in the future". Newman concurred: "There is a great deal of Wagner, especially Tristan, in the language. But the work as a whole is characteristic, and the first in which we catch a hint of the Debussy we would later meet: the lover of vague contours, half-lights, mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour, the apostle of the languid, the exclusive in thought and in style." Over the next few years, she developed her personal style without, at this stage, breaking radically with French musical traditions. Most of his music from this time is on a small scale, such as Deux arabesques, Valse romantique, Suite bergamasque and the early mélodie from Fêtes galantes. Newman noted that, like Chopin, the Debussy of this period appears as a liberator of Germanic styles of composition, offering instead "an exquisite and pellucid" capable of conveying "not only playfulness and whimsy, but also an emotion of a deeper character". In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto considers Debussy's early works to be no harmonically bolder than the music he already offered. Fauré; in a 2007 book on piano works, Margery Halford notes that Deux arabesques (1888-1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of the later style of Debussy", but which are not harmonically innovative. Halford cites the popular "Moonlight" (1890) by the Suite bergamasque as a transitional work pointing towards the composer's mature style.
Intermediate Works, 1893-1905
Both in his time and today, musicians agree in considering it Prelude to the siesta of a faun (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , 1894) as his first orchestral masterpiece. Newman considered it "wholly original in conception, utterly personal in style, and logical and coherent throughout, without a superfluous measure or even note." »; Pierre Boulez stated: «Modern music woke up with Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune». they were written between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s, as Quatuor à cordes (1893), Peleas and Melisande (Pelléas et Mélisande, 1893-1902), Nocturnes (Nocturnes, 1899) and La mer (1903-1905). The suite Pour le piano (1894-1901) is, according to Halford, one of the first examples of Debussy's maturity as a piano composer: "an important milestone... and an ex expansion of the use of sonorities on the piano".
In the pizzicatos and the cross rhythmic of the scherzo from Quatuor à cordes (1893) you can appreciate the sounds of gamelan music which the composer had listened to for four years; his biographer, Edward Lockspeiser, considered this move to show the composer's rejection of the "traditional dictate that stringed instruments should be predominantly lyrical". The work influenced Ravel who, in his own Quatuor à cordes written ten years later, shows markedly Debussian characteristics. Academic and journalist Stephen Walsh describes Peleas and Melisande (begun 1893, premiered 1902) as " a key work of the 20th century". Composer Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by its "extraordinary harmonic qualities and... transparent instrumental texture". This opera is composed in what the British critic and musicologist Alan Blyth describes as a sustained and heightened recitative style, with "sensual and intimate" vocal lines. He influenced composers as diverse as Stravinsky and Puccini.
Orledge describes the Nocturnes as exceptionally varied in texture, "ranging from the Mussorgskian opening of 'Nuages', through the nearby marching band parade in 'Fêtes', to the chorus wordless feminine from “Sirènes”»; he also considers the last movement a preliminary echo of the marine textures of La mer. Estampes for piano (1903) offers sensations of exotic locales, with additional echoes of gamelan in its pentatonic structures. Debussy believed that since Beethoven the traditional symphonic form had become a formulaic, repetitive and outdated expression. Franck's cyclical and three-part Symphony in D minor (1888) was more to his liking and his influence can be seen in La mer which, from the In Orledge's view, it uses a quasi-symphonic form, in which its three sections make up one gigantic movement in sonata form with a cyclical theme in the style of Franck's. The central movement "Jeux de vagues" has the function of a section symphonic development leading up to the final "Dialogue du vent et de la mer", "a powerful essay in orchestral color and sonority", according to Orledge, which takes up themes from the first movement. Opinions were sharply divided. Some critics considered the treatment less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even as a step backwards; others praised its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colors and sharp lines.
Last works, 1906-1917
Of his later orchestral works, Images (1905-1912) is better known and performed than Jeux (1913). used in Nocturnes and La mer, but distinguishes itself by its use of traditional British and French folk tunes, and by making the central movement, "Ibéria", much more longer than the external ones and for subdividing it in turn into three parts, all of them inspired by scenes from Spanish life. While considering Images "the pinnacle of Debussy's career as a composer for orchestra", Trezise records a contrary view that the honor belongs to the ballet score Jeux. The latter failed as a ballet due to what Jann Pasler describes as a banal argument, and the score was ignored for some years. Some current analysts have found in the work a link between the traditional continuity and thematic development of the score and the desire to create a discontinuity that is reflected in turn-of-the-century music XX. In this piece, Debussy abandoned the major second scale he had previously used in favor of the octatonic scale in what Debussy scholar François Lesure describes as its tonal ambiguities.
Among his last works for piano are the two books of Preludes (Préludes, 1909-10, 1911-13), short pieces with a wide variety of themes. Lesure comments that they range from the festivities of the minstrels in Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat "Général Lavine" "to the dead leaves and the sounds and smells of the night air". En blanc et noir (1915), a three-movement work for two pianos, is a predominantly somber piece, reflecting war and national danger. Opinions differ on Études (1915). In a review written shortly after the composer's death, Newman found this work tiring: "a strange last chapter in the life of a great artist"; eighty years later, Lesure considered it to be among Debussy's best late works: "Behind a pedagogical exterior, these twelve pieces explore abstract intervals, or—in the last five—the sounds and timbres of the piano." In 1914 Debussy began work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments. His fatal illness prevented him from completing the work, but those for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola, and harp (1915), and violin and piano (1917, his last completed work) are concise, three-movement works of a natural nature. more diatonic than some of his other late works.
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, 1911), originally a five-act musical based on a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio, which required almost five hours of performance, was not successful, and today it is more common to hear it in a concert (or study) adaptation with a narrator, or as an orchestral suite of "Fragments symphoniques". Debussy enlisted the help of André Caplet to orchestrate and arrange the score. Two late works, the ballets Khamma (1912) and La Boîte à joujoux (1913), were left with the orchestration incomplete and were completed by Charles Koechlin and Caplet, respectively.
Style
Debussy and impressionism
Some authors consider Debussy the first Impressionist composer, although the application of this term both to him and to the music he influenced has been much debated, both during the composer's lifetime and later. British musicologist Richard Langham Smith is of the opinion that Impressionism was originally a term coined to describe a style of French painting from the late 19th century, characterized by scenes suffused with reflected light, in which the overall impression is emphasized rather than outline or clarity of detail, as in the works of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and others.Langham Smith points out that the term was transferred to the compositions of Debussy and others that "dealt with the representation of the landscape or natural phenomena, in particular the images of water and light that are so appreciated by the impressionists, through subtle textures impregnated with colors instrumentals".
Among painters, Debussy especially admired Turner, but he also drew inspiration from Whistler. With the latter in mind, the composer wrote to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe in 1894 describing the orchestral Nocturnes as “an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from a single color (which in painting would be a study of gray).
Debussy strongly opposed the use of the word "impressionism" to refer to his (or anyone else's) music, but the term has always been linked to this composer ever since the professors at the Paris Conservatoire it was first applied, as opprobrium, to Printemps, one of his early works. Langham Smith is of the opinion that the composer wrote many piano pieces with titles evoking nature ("Reflets dans l'eau" (1905), "Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" (1910) or "Brouillards" (1913)) and suggests that the use of brushstrokes and dots by Impressionist painters it has parallels with his music. Although Debussy said that anyone who used the term (whether referring to painting or music) was an imbecile, some scholars of the composer's work have taken a less absolute line. Lockspeiser calls La mer "the greatest example of an impressionist orchestral work", and more recently Nigel Simeone comments in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy: "It doesn't seem overly farfetched see a parallel in Monet's seascapes." In this sense, one can situate Debussy's pantheistic praise of nature in a 1911 interview with the writer and journalist Henry Malherbe:
I have made mysterious Nature my religion... When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvellous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth,... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration.I have made the mysterious nature my religion... When I look at the sky at sunset and spend hours contemplating its wonderful and ever-changing beauty, I am overwhelmed by an extraordinary emotion. Nature in all its immensity is reflected in my sincere but weak soul. Around me are the trees that extend their branches into the sky, the perfumed flowers that cheer the meadow, the soft weeded earth, and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of worship.
In contrast to characterizing his music as Impressionist, several writers have argued that at least some of his music was structured around rigorous mathematical guidelines. In 1983 Scottish pianist and musicologist Roy Howat published a book in the which claimed that some of the composer's works are proportioned using mathematical models, even using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat suggests that some of his works can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, which is obtained by ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Simon Trezise, in his 1994 book Debussy: La Mer, considers this fact inherently "remarkable", while noting that no written or referenced evidence indicates that Debussy deliberately sought these proportions. Lesure shares a similar view, supporting Howat's conclusions, but not that Debussy did so consciously..
Musical language
Debussy wrote: «We have to agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it is made'. We must preserve at all costs this magic that is characteristic of music and for which music, by its nature, constitutes the most receptive of all the arts."
However, there are many pointers to the sources and elements of the composer's musical language. In 1958, the Serbian pianist, composer, and music analyst Rudolph Reti summarized six features of his music that he said "established a new concept of tonality in European music": the frequent use of prolonged pedal notes, "not merely pedal notes." basses in the current sense of the term, but “pedals” sustained in any voice»; brilliant passages and networks of figurations that hide the occasional absence of tonality; the frequent use of parallel chords that are "essentially not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies; bitonality, or at least bitonal chords; use of whole tone and pentatonic scales; and improvised modulations, "without any harmonic bridge". Reti concludes that Debussy's great achievement was the synthesis of a monophonic "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".
In 1889, Debussy had discussions with his former teacher Ernest Guiraud, during which they explored the harmonic possibilities of the piano. The discussions, as well as Debussy's keyboard chord improvisations, were recorded by a younger student of Guiraud's, Maurice Emmanuel. The chord sequences played by Debussy contain some of the elements identified by Reti. They may also be indicators of the influence of Satie's work Trois Sarabandes (1887) on the composer. Among the improvisations performed by Debussy was a sequence of whole-tone harmonies that may have been inspired by the music by Glinka or Rimsky-Kórsakov that was becoming fashionable in Paris at the time. During the meeting he told Guiraud: "There is no theory. You just have to listen. Pleasure is the law! », Although he also admitted: « I feel free because I have suffered, and I do not write in a fugal style because I know what it is ».
Influences
Musical
«Chabrier, Moussorgski, Palestrina, voilà ce que j'aime». —Debussy in 1893 |
Among his French predecessors, Chabrier had a major influence on Debussy (as well as Ravel and Poulenc); Howat considers Chabrier's piano music, such as "Sous-bois" and "Mauresque" in Pièces pittoresques, explored new worlds of sound that Debussy used thirty years later. Lesure finds traces of Gounod and Massenet in some of Debussy's early melodies, noting that the composer may have acquired from the Russian school—Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky—his taste for "old and oriental modes and vivid coloration, as well as a certain contempt for academic rules". Lesure also considers Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov directly influenced Debussy's Peleas and Melisande. In the music of Palestrina Debussy found what he described as "perfect whiteness" and considered that, although the musical forms of this composer had a "strict form," were more of his g Just like the rigid rules that prevailed among French teachers and composers of the 19th century. He was inspired by what he called the « harmony created by melody" by Palestrina, finding an arabesque-like stylistic quality in the melodic lines.
He considered Chopin "the greatest, because through the piano he discovered everything", and expressed his "respectful gratitude" for his piano music. He was undecided whether to dedicate his own Études Chopin or François Couperin, whom he also admired as a model of form, seeing himself as heir to his mastery of the genre. Howat is against the assumption that "Ballade" (1891) and "Nocturne" (1892)) are influenced by Chopin, as he is of the opinion that it owes more to Debussy's early Russian models, but that Chopin's influence can be seen in other of his early works, such as Deux arabesques (1889-1891). In 1914 the publisher A. Durand & fils began to publish new specialized editions of the works of great composers, and Debussy took over supervision of Chopin's music.
Although Debussy recognized Wagner's greatness, his influence can only be seen in two early works, La Damoiselle élue and Cinq poemes de Baudelaire (both from 1887).. According to Pierre Louÿs, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone could do beyond Tristan'", although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to prevent "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, from appearing at the turn of a bar". After Debussy's brief Wagnerian stint, he became interested in non-Western music and its unusual approaches to composition. The piano piece "Golliwogg's Cakewalk", from the suite Children's Corner (1908), includes a parody of the music from the introduction to Tristan, in which, in the opinion of the American musicologist Lawrence Kramer, Debussy distances himself from the shadow of the old composer and "playfully relativizes Wagner into insignificance".
A contemporary influence was that of Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy's "most faithful friend" among French musicians. According to musicologist Richard Taruskin, Debussy's 1896 orchestration of Satie's work Gymnopédies (written in 1887) "put its composer on the map" and the "Sarabande" from Debussy's Pour le piano (1901) "shows that [Debussy] knew Trois Sarabandes de Satie at a time when only a personal friend of the composer could have known them" (they were not published until 1911). Debussy's interest in the popular music of his time manifested itself not only in Golliwogg& #39;s Cakewalk and in other ragtime pieces for piano, such as The Little Nigar (1909), but also in the waltz La plus which lens, based on the style of the gypsy violinist from a Parisian hotel (to whom he gave the manuscript of the piece).
In addition to the composers who influenced his own compositions, Debussy had very strong opinions about others. He was generally enthusiastic about Strauss and Stravinsky, respectful of Mozart and an admirer of Bach, whom he called "le Bon Dieu de la musique " (the Good Lord of music). with Beethoven it was complex; he was said to have referred to him as "le vieux sourd" (the deaf old man) and to have asked a young student not to perform Beethoven music because "it is as if someone were dancing on my grave".; but he believed that Beethoven had profound things to say, but did not know how to say them, "because he was caught in a web of incessant assertion and German aggressiveness". a "simple and elegant clerk".
With the outbreak of World War I he became ardently patriotic in his musical views. Writing to Stravinsky, he asked: "How could we not have foreseen that these men were plotting the destruction of our art, just as they had plotted the destruction of our country?" In 1915 he complained that "since Rameau no we have had a purely French tradition... We tolerated inordinate orchestras, devious forms... we were about to give the stamp of approval to even more dubious naturalizations when the sound of gunshots brought it all to a sudden end." Taruskin wrote that some have seen in this comment a reference to composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, both Jewish by birth. In 1912 he commented to his publisher about the opera Ariana and Barbazul by the composer (also Jewish) Paul Dukas: "You are right, it is a masterpiece, but it is not a musical masterpiece." French”.
Literary
Despite lacking formal education, Debussy read widely and drew inspiration from literature for his compositions. Lesure wrote: “The development of free verse in poetry and the suppression of the subject or pattern in painting led him to reflect on questions of musical form.” He was influenced by the Symbolist poets. These writers, among whom were Paul Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck or Rimbaud, opposed the realism, naturalism, objectivity and formal conservatism that prevailed in the 1870s and preferred poetry based on the imagination instead of the direct expression; the literary scholar Chris Baldrick considers that they evoke "subjective moods through the use of personal symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinions". Debussy was very favorable to the symbolists' desire to bring poetry closer to music, he became friends with several of its main exponents and composed many symbolist works throughout his career.
His literary inspiration was mainly from French authors, but he did not ignore foreign writers. In addition to Maeterlinck for Peleas and Melisande, he turned to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens for two of his Preludes for piano: "La Danse de Puck" (Book 1, 1910) and " Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.» (Book 2, 1913). He included Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Maiden in his 1888 cantata La Damoiselle élue. He wrote incidental music for King Lear and screened an opera based on As You Like It , though he abandoned the idea once he turned his attention to the staging of the Maeterlinck's work. In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" going so far as to start the libretto for an opera, La chute de la maison Usher . Another Poe-inspired project, an operatic version of The Devil in the Belfry, remained only in sketches. French writers whose works he used for his compositions include Paul Bourget, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Verlaine, François Villon or Mallarmé, who served as the composer's inspiration for one of his most popular orchestral works, Prelude to a Faun's Siesta.
Legacy
Influence on later composers
He is considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. British musicologist Roger Nichols considers that «if we omit Schönberg [...] a list of composers of the XX century influenced by Debussy is practically a list of composers of the 20th century tout court».
Bartók discovered his music in 1907 and later said that "Debussy's great service to music was to awaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities". Leoš Janáček studied the use of the whole-tone scale of Debussy and his style of wrapping the text in Peleas and Melisande while writing his 1921 opera Katia Kabanová. Stravinsky was more ambiguous about his music (he stated that Peleas was "a terrible bore... despite its many wonderful pages"), but the two composers knew each other and the Symphonies d'instruments à vent (1920) de Stravinsky was written as a memorial to Debussy.
After the Great War, the young French composers in the group known as "Les Six" confronted what they saw as the poetic and mystical nature of Debussy's music in favor of something more characterful. Jean Cocteau, a sympathizer and self-proclaimed spokesperson for the group, wrote in 1918: "Enough of nuages, waves, aquariums, ondines and nocturnal perfumes", alluding to the titles of the pieces. Debussy. Later generations of French composers had a much more positive relationship with his music. Messiaen got a sheet music for Peleas and Melisande as a child and said it was "a revelation, love at first sight" and "probably the most decisive influence I've ever received". Boulez also discovered his music at a early age and said it gave him his first sense of what modernity in music could mean.
Among contemporary composers, George Benjamin has described Prelude to a Faun's Nap as "the definition of perfection"; Benjamin has conducted Peleas and Melisande, and critic Rupert Christiansen sees the influence of this work in his opera Written on Skin (2012). Others have orchestrated some of his works for piano and vocals, such as John Adams' version of four of the songs from Le Livre de Baudelaire (1994) or Robin Holloway's from En blanc et noir (2002).
Pianist Stephen Hough sees his influence as extending to jazz as well, and believes you can hear Reflets dans l'eau in the harmonies of Bill Evans.
Recordings
In 1904, Debussy performed the piano accompaniment to Mary Garden in a recording for the Compagnie française du Gramophone of four of her songs: three mélodies from the Verlaine cycle Ariettes oubliées ("Il pleure dans mon coeur", "L'ombre des arbres" and "Green") and "Mes longs cheveux", from Act III of Peleas and Melisande. In 1913 he recorded a set of pianola rolls for the Welte-Mignon company containing fourteen of his pieces: "D'un cahier d'esquisses", "La plus que lente", "La soirée dans Grenade", all six movements from Children's Corner and five from Préludes: «Danseuses de Delphes», «Le vent dans la plaine», «La cathédrale engloutie», «La danse of Puck" and "Minstrels". The set of recordings, both from 1904 and from 1913, have been digitized on compact disc.
Among Debussy's contemporaries who recorded his music include pianists Ricardo Viñes ("Poissons d'or" from Images and "La soirée dans Grenade" from Estampes); Alfred Cortot (numerous solo pieces, as well as the Violin Sonata with Jacques Thibaud and the Chansons de Bilitis with Maggie Teyte); and Marguerite Long ("Jardins sous la pluie" and "Arabesques"). Among the singers of his melodies or fragments of Peleas and Melisande such as Jane Bathori, Claire Croiza, Charles Panzéra and Ninon Vallin; and among the conductors of the main orchestral works are Ernest Ansermet, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Pierre Monteux and Arturo Toscanini, and in the Petite Suite, Henri Büsser, who had prepared the orchestration for Debussy. Many of these early recordings have been reissued on CD.
In 2018, to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer's death, Warner Classics, with contributions from other companies, released a 33-CD set that the company says includes all of the music composed by Debussy.
Additional bibliography
- RobertsPaul (2001). «Debussy, an impressionist or symbolist?: «Reflets dans l'eau», «La cathédrale engloutie»». (Paul S. McLaney, trad.) Quodlibet: Journal of Musical Specialization (in English) (19): 74-98. ISSN 1134-8615.
- Canedo, Alfredo (2006). "The musical impressionism of Claude Debussy." OpusMusic (in English) (5). Archived from the original on 21 February 2012. Retrieved July 20, 2019.