
Achille Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first
Impressionist
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of ten to France's leading music college, the
Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris (), or the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (; CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue Jean Ja ...
. He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, ''
Pelléas et Mélisande''.
Debussy's orchestral works include ''
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
''Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune'' ( L. 86), known in English as ''Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'', is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed ...
'' (1894), ''
Nocturnes'' (1897–1899) and ''
Images
An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a project ...
'' (1905–1912). His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against
Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most o ...
and the German musical tradition. He regarded the classical
symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning c ...
as obsolete and sought an alternative in his "symphonic sketches", ''
La mer'' (1903–1905). His piano works include sets of 24
Préludes and 12
Études. Throughout his career he wrote ''
mélodies'' based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own. He was greatly influenced by the
Symbolist
Symbolism or symbolist may refer to:
*Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea
Arts
*Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea
** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...
poetic movement of the later 19th century. A small number of works, including the early ''
La Damoiselle élue'' and the late ''
Le Martyre de saint Sébastien'' have important parts for chorus. In his final years, he focused on chamber music, completing three of
six planned sonatas for different combinations of instruments.
With early influences including Russian and Far Eastern music and works by
Chopin, Debussy developed his own style of harmony and orchestral colouring, derided – and unsuccessfully resisted – by much of the musical establishment of the day. His works have strongly influenced a wide range of composers including
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hunga ...
,
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...
,
George Gershwin
George Gershwin (; born Jacob Gershwine; September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist whose compositions spanned jazz, popular music, popular and classical music. Among his best-known works are the songs "Swan ...
,
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithology, ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th century, he was also an ou ...
,
George Benjamin, and the
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
pianist and composer
Bill Evans
William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, block chords, innovative chord voicings, a ...
. Debussy died from
cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...
at his home in Paris at the age of 55 after a composing career of a little more than 30 years.
Life and career
Early life
Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in
Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Saint-Germain-en-Laye () is a Communes of France, commune in the Yvelines Departments of France, department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris, from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. ...
,
Seine-et-Oise
Seine-et-Oise () is a former department of France, which encompassed the western, northern and southern parts of the metropolitan area of Paris. Its prefecture was Versailles and its administrative number was 78. Seine-et-Oise was disbanded in ...
, on the north-west fringes of Paris.{{refn, Debussy's birthplace is now a museum dedicated to him. In addition to displays depicting his life and work, the building contains a small auditorium in which an annual season of concerts is given., group= n He was the eldest of the five children of Manuel-Achille Debussy and his wife, Victorine, ''née'' Manoury. Debussy senior ran a china shop and his wife was a seamstress.
[Lesure & Howat, 2001] The shop was unsuccessful, and closed in 1864; the family moved to Paris, first living with Victorine's mother, in
Clichy, and, from 1868, in their own apartment in the
Rue Saint-Honoré. Manuel worked in a printing factory.
["Formative Years"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140926042121/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio1_62-82.php , date=26 September 2014 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 18 April 2018
In 1870, to escape the
siege of Paris during the
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 Janua ...
, Debussy's pregnant mother took him and his sister Adèle to their paternal aunt's home in
Cannes
Cannes (, ; , ; ) is a city located on the French Riviera. It is a communes of France, commune located in the Alpes-Maritimes departments of France, department, and host city of the annual Cannes Film Festival, Midem, and Cannes Lions Internatio ...
, where they remained until the following year. During his stay in Cannes, the seven-year-old Debussy had his first piano lessons; his aunt paid for him to study with an Italian musician, Jean Cerutti.
[ Manuel Debussy remained in Paris and joined the forces of the Commune; after its defeat by French government troops in 1871 he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, of which he only served one year. His fellow Communard prisoners included his friend Charles de Sivry, a musician. Sivry's mother, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, gave piano lessons, and at his instigation the young Debussy became one of her pupils.{{refn, Biographers of Debussy, including Edward Lockspeiser, Stephen Walsh and Eric Frederick Jensen, comment that although Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville was a woman of some affectations, with the assumed manner of a grande dame, she was a fine teacher. She claimed to have studied with Chopin, and although many of Debussy's biographers have been sceptical about this, her artistic prowess was vouched for not only by Debussy, but by her son-in-law, ]Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine ( ; ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolism (movement), Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the ''fin de siècle'' ...
., group= n
Debussy's talents soon became evident, and in 1872, aged ten, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris (), or the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (; CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue Jean Ja ...
, where he remained a student for the next eleven years. He first joined the piano class of Antoine François Marmontel, and studied solfège
In music, solfège (British English or American English , ) or solfeggio (; ), also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a mnemonic used in teaching aural skills, Pitch (music), pitch and sight-reading of Western classical music, W ...
with Albert Lavignac and, later, composition with Ernest Guiraud
Ernest Guiraud (; 23 June 18376 May 1892) was an American-born French composer and music teacher. He is best known for writing the traditional orchestral recitatives used for Bizet's opera '' Carmen'' and for Offenbach's opera '' Les contes d ...
, harmony with Émile Durand, and organ with César Franck
César Auguste Jean Guillaume Hubert Franck (; 10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French Romantic music, Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium.
He was born in Liège (which at the time of h ...
.[Prod'homme, J. G]
Claude Achille Debussy
''The Musical Quarterly'', October 1918, p. 556 {{subscription The course included music history and theory studies with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, but it is not certain that Debussy, who was apt to skip classes, actually attended these.
At the Conservatoire, Debussy initially made good progress. Marmontel said of him, "A charming child, a truly artistic temperament; much can be expected of him". Another teacher was less impressed: Émile Durand wrote in a report, "Debussy would be an excellent pupil if he were less sketchy and less cavalier." A year later he described Debussy as "desperately careless". In July 1874 Debussy received the award of ''deuxième accessit''{{refn, That is, fourth prize, after the ''premier accessit'', the runner-up (''second prix'') and the winner (''premier prix'')., group= n for his performance as soloist in the first movement of Chopin's Second Piano Concerto at the Conservatoire's annual competition. He was a fine pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career had he wished, but he was only intermittently diligent in his studies. He advanced to ''premier accessit'' in 1875 and second prize in 1877, but failed at the competitions in 1878 and 1879. These failures made him ineligible to continue in the Conservatoire's piano classes, but he remained a student for harmony, solfège and, later, composition.[
With Marmontel's help Debussy secured a summer vacation job in 1879 as resident pianist at the Château de Chenonceau, where he rapidly acquired a taste for luxury that was to remain with him all his life.][ His first compositions date from this period, two settings of poems by ]Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (; 11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.His names are often reversed "Louis Charles Alfred de Musset": see "(Louis Charles) Alfred de Musset" (bio), Biography.com, 2007 ...
: "Ballade à la lune" and "Madrid, princesse des Espagnes".[ The following year he secured a job as pianist in the household of Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of ]Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular ...
. He travelled with her family for the summers of 1880 to 1882, staying at various places in France, Switzerland and Italy, as well as at her home in Moscow. He composed his Piano Trio in G major for von Meck's ensemble, and made a transcription for piano duet of three dances from Tchaikovsky's ''Swan Lake
''Swan Lake'' ( rus, Лебеди́ное о́зеро, r=Lebedínoje ózero, p=lʲɪbʲɪˈdʲinəjə ˈozʲɪrə, links=no ), Op. 20, is a ballet composed by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1875–76. Despite its initial failu ...
''.[{{refn, In September 1880 von Meck sent the manuscript of Debussy's ''Danse bohémienne'' for Tchaikovsky's perusal; a month later Tchaikovsky wrote back, mildly complimenting the work but remarking on its slightness and brevity. Debussy did not publish it, and the manuscript remained in the von Meck family and was not published until 1932.][Andres, Robert]
"An introduction to the solo piano music of Debussy and Ravel"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170406130044/http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/raveldebussy/recital1.shtml , date=6 April 2017 , BBC, retrieved 15 May 2018, group= n
Prix de Rome
At the end of 1880 Debussy, while continuing his studies at the Conservatoire, was engaged as accompanist for Marie Moreau-Sainti's singing class; he took this role for four years. Among the members of the class was Marie Vasnier; Debussy was greatly taken with her, and she inspired him to compose: he wrote 27 songs dedicated to her during their seven-year relationship. She was the wife of Henri Vasnier, a prominent civil servant, and much younger than her husband. She soon became Debussy's lover as well as his muse. Whether Vasnier was content to tolerate his wife's affair with the young student or was simply unaware of it is not clear, but he and Debussy remained on excellent terms, and he continued to encourage the composer in his career.
At the Conservatoire, Debussy incurred the disapproval of the faculty, particularly his composition teacher, Guiraud, for his failure to follow the orthodox rules of composition then prevailing.{{refn, The director of the Conservatoire, Ambroise Thomas
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas ''Mignon'' (1866) and ''Hamlet (opera), Hamlet'' (1868).
Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the C ...
, was a deeply conservative musician, as were most of his faculty. It was not until Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. ...
became director in 1905 that modern music such as Debussy's or even Wagner's was accepted within the Conservatoire., group= n Nevertheless, in 1884 Debussy won France's most prestigious musical award, the Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome () or Grand Prix de Rome was a French scholarship for arts students, initially for painters and sculptors, that was established in 1663 during the reign of Louis XIV of France. Winners were awarded a bursary that allowed them t ...
, with his cantata
A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian language, Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal music, vocal Musical composition, composition with an musical instrument, instrumental accompaniment, ty ...
'' L'enfant prodigue''. The Prix carried with it a residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome
The French Academy in Rome (, ) is an academy located in the Villa Medici, within the Villa Borghese, on the Pincio (Pincian Hill) in Rome, Italy.
History
The Academy was founded at the Palazzo Capranica in 1666 by Louis XIV under the dire ...
, to further the winner's studies. Debussy was there from January 1885 to March 1887, with three or possibly four absences of several weeks when he returned to France, chiefly to see Marie Vasnier.["Prix de Rome"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171016090958/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio2_83-87.php , date=16 October 2017 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 16 March 2018
Initially Debussy found the artistic atmosphere of the Villa Medici stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the accommodation "abominable". Neither did he delight in Italian opera, as he found the operas of Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian Romantic composer, best known for his almost 70 operas. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the ''bel canto'' opera ...
and Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi ( ; ; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto, a small town in the province of Parma, to a family of moderate means, recei ...
not to his taste. He was much more impressed by the music of the 16th-century composers Palestrina
Palestrina (ancient ''Praeneste''; , ''Prainestos'') is a modern Italian city and ''comune'' (municipality) with a population of about 22,000, in Lazio, about east of Rome. It is connected to the latter by the Via Prenestina. It is built upon ...
and Lassus, which he heard at Santa Maria dell'Anima
Santa Maria dell'Anima () is a church in central Rome, Italy, just west of the Piazza Navona and near the Santa Maria della Pace church. It was founded during the course of the 14th century by Dutch merchants, who at that time belonged to the Ho ...
: "The only church music I will accept".[ He was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by ]Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt (22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic music, Romantic period. With a diverse List of compositions by Franz Liszt, body of work spanning more than six ...
, who visited the students and played for them.[ In June 1885, Debussy wrote of his desire to follow his own way, saying, "I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!"
Debussy finally composed four pieces that were submitted to the Academy: the symphonic ode ''Zuleima'' (based on a text by ]Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (; ; born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was an outstanding poet, writer, and literary criticism, literary critic of 19th-century German Romanticism. He is best known outside Germany for his ...
); the orchestral piece ''Printemps''; the cantata '' La Damoiselle élue'' (1887–1888), the first piece in which the stylistic features of his later music began to emerge; and the ''Fantaisie'' for piano and orchestra, which was heavily based on Franck's music and was eventually withdrawn by Debussy. The Academy chided him for writing music that was "bizarre, incomprehensible and unperformable". Although Debussy's works showed the influence of Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (; 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer of the Romantic music, Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are ''Manon'' (1884 ...
, the latter concluded, "He is an enigma". During his years in Rome Debussy composed – not for the Academy – most of his Verlaine
Verlaine (; ) is a municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Liège, Belgium.
On January 1, 2006, Verlaine had a total population of 3,507. The total area is 24.21 km2 which gives a population density
Population density (in ag ...
cycle, '' Ariettes oubliées'', which made little impact at the time but was successfully republished in 1903 after the composer had become well known.
Return to Paris, 1887
A week after his return to Paris in 1887, Debussy heard the first act of Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde
''Tristan und Isolde'' (''Tristan and Isolde''), WWV 90, is a music drama in three acts by Richard Wagner set to a German libretto by the composer, loosely based on the medieval 12th-century romance ''Tristan and Iseult'' by Gottfried von Stras ...
'' at the Concerts Lamoureux, and judged it "decidedly the finest thing I know".[ In 1888 and 1889 he went to the annual festivals of Wagner's operas at ]Bayreuth
Bayreuth ( or ; High Franconian German, Upper Franconian: Bareid, ) is a Town#Germany, town in northern Bavaria, Germany, on the Red Main river in a valley between the Franconian Jura and the Fichtel Mountains. The town's roots date back to 11 ...
. He responded positively to Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies,[ and was briefly influenced by them, but, unlike some other French composers of his generation, he concluded that there was no future in attempting to adopt and develop Wagner's style. He commented in 1903 that Wagner was "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn".
]
In 1889, at the Paris Exposition Universelle, Debussy first heard Java
Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...
nese gamelan
Gamelan (; ; , ; ) is the traditional musical ensemble, ensemble music of the Javanese people, Javanese, Sundanese people, Sundanese, and Balinese people, Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussion instrument, per ...
music. The gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him, and echoes of them are heard in "Pagodes" in his piano suite '' Estampes''. He also attended two concerts of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, conducted by the composer.[ This too made an impression on him, and its harmonic freedom and non-Teutonic tone colours influenced his own developing musical style.{{refn, Debussy's regard for Rimsky-Korsakov's music was not reciprocated. After hearing ''Estampes'' a decade later, Rimsky wrote in his diary, "Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique; even less imagination. The impudent decadent – he ignores all music that has gone before him, and ... thinks he has discovered America.", group= n
Marie Vasnier ended her liaison with Debussy soon after his final return from Rome, although they remained on good enough terms for him to dedicate to her one more song, "Mandoline", in 1890. Later in 1890 Debussy met ]Erik Satie
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (born 17 May 18661 July 1925), better known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, Paris Conservatoire but was an undi ...
, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially. In the same year Debussy began a relationship with Gabrielle (Gaby) Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux
Lisieux () is a Communes of France, commune in the Calvados (department), Calvados Departments of France, department in the Normandy (administrative region), Normandy Regions of France, region in northwestern France. It is the capital of the Pa ...
; in July 1893 they began living together.["The Bohemian period"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171117105258/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio3_88-93.php , date=17 November 2017 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 16 May 2018
Debussy continued to compose songs, piano pieces and other works, some of which were publicly performed, but his music made only a modest impact, although his fellow composers recognised his potential by electing him to the committee of the Société Nationale de Musique
Groupe Lactalis S.A. (doing business as Lactalis) is a French multinational dairy products corporation, owned by the Besnier family and based in Laval, Mayenne, France. The company's former name was Besnier S.A.
Lactalis is the largest dairy pr ...
in 1893.[ His ]String Quartet
The term string quartet refers to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two Violin, violini ...
was premiered by the Ysaÿe string quartet at the Société Nationale in the same year. In May 1893 Debussy attended a theatrical event that was of key importance to his later career – the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949), also known as Count/Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in ...
's play '' Pelléas et Mélisande'', which he immediately determined to turn into an opera.[ He travelled to Maeterlinck's home in ]Ghent
Ghent ( ; ; historically known as ''Gaunt'' in English) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium, province ...
in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation.[
]
1894–1902: ''Pelléas et Mélisande''
In February 1894 Debussy completed the first draft of Act I of his operatic version of ''Pelléas et Mélisande'', and for most of the year worked to complete the work.[ While still living with Dupont, he had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, and in 1894 he announced their engagement. His behaviour was widely condemned; anonymous letters circulated denouncing his treatment of both women, as well as his financial irresponsibility and debts.]["From L'aprés-midi d'un faune to Pelléas"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171117105321/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio4_94-02.php , date=17 November 2017 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 18 May 2018
The engagement was broken off, and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including Ernest Chausson, hitherto one of his strongest supporters.
In terms of musical recognition, Debussy made a step forward in December 1894, when the symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term ( ...
''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
''Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune'' ( L. 86), known in English as ''Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'', is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed ...
'', based on Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French Symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools o ...
's poem, was premiered at a concert of the Société Nationale.[ The following year he completed the first draft of ''Pelléas'' and began efforts to get it staged. In May 1898 he made his first contacts with ]André Messager
André Charles Prosper Messager (; 30 December 1853 – 24 February 1929) was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty , opérettes and other stage works, among which his ballet (1 ...
and Albert Carré, respectively the musical director and general manager of the Opéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique () is a Paris opera company which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular Théâtre de la foire, theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with – and for a time took the name of – its chief riva ...
, Paris, about presenting the opera.[
Debussy abandoned Dupont for her friend Marie-Rosalie Texier, known as "Lilly", whom he married in October 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him. She was affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well liked by Debussy's friends and associates, but he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity.][Orledge, p. 4] The marriage lasted barely five years.["The Consecration"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170630195833/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio5_03-09.php , date=30 June 2017 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 18 May 2018
From around 1900 Debussy's music became a focus and inspiration for an informal group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians who began meeting in Paris. They called themselves '' Les Apaches'' – roughly "The Hooligans" – to represent their status as "artistic outcasts". The membership was fluid, but at various times included Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism in music, Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composer ...
, Ricardo Viñes, Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...
and Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla y Matheu (, 23 November 187614 November 1946) was a Spanish composer and pianist. Along with Isaac Albéniz, Francisco Tárrega, and Enrique Granados, he was one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20t ...
.{{#tag:ref, Other members were the composers Florent Schmitt
Florent Schmitt (; 28 September 187017 August 1958) was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are ''La tragédie de Salome'' and ''Psaume XLVII'' ( Psalm 47). He has been described as "one of t ...
, Maurice Delage and Paul Ladmirault, the poets Léon-Paul Fargue and Tristan Klingsor, the painter Paul Sordes and the critic Michel Calvocoressi., group= n In the same year the first two of Debussy's three orchestral '' Nocturnes'' were first performed. Although they did not make any great impact with the public they were well reviewed by musicians including Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas ( 1 October 1865 – 17 May 1935) was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-k ...
, Alfred Bruneau and Pierre de Bréville. The complete set was given the following year.[
Like many other composers of the time, Debussy supplemented his income by teaching and writing.{{refn, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Massenet, Fauré and Ravel were all known as teachers,] and Fauré, Messager and Dukas were regular music critics for Parisian journals., group= n For most of 1901 he had a sideline as music critic of '' La Revue Blanche'', adopting the pen name "Monsieur Croche". He expressed trenchant views on composers ("I hate sentimentality – his name is Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (, , 9October 183516 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic music, Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Piano ...
"), institutions (on the Paris Opéra: "A stranger would take it for a railway station, and, once inside, would mistake it for a Turkish bath"), conductors (" Nikisch is a unique virtuoso, so much so that his virtuosity seems to make him forget the claims of good taste"), musical politics ("The English actually think that a musician can manage an opera house successfully!"), and audiences ("their almost drugged expression of boredom, indifference and even stupidity"). He later collected his criticisms with a view to their publication as a book; it was published posthumously as ''Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante''.
In January 1902 rehearsals began at the Opéra-Comique for the opening of ''Pelléas et Mélisande''. For three months, Debussy attended rehearsals practically every day. In February there was conflict between Maeterlinck on the one hand and Debussy, Messager and Carré on the other about the casting of Mélisande. Maeterlinck wanted his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, to sing the role, and was incensed when she was passed over in favour of the Scottish soprano Mary Garden
Mary Garden (20 February 1874 – 3 January 1967) was a Scottish-American operatic lyric soprano, then mezzo-soprano, with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her chil ...
.[Schonberg, Harold C]
"Maeterlinck's Mistress Assumed She Was Going to Sing Melisande. But ..."
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180520123924/https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/15/archives/maeterlincks-mistress-assumed-she-was-going-to-sing-melisande-but.html , date=20 May 2018 , ''The New York Times'', 15 March 1970, p. 111{{refn, Mary Garden was Messager's mistress at the time, but as far as is known she was chosen for wholly musical and dramatic reasons. She is described in the ''Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language '' Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and th ...
'' as "a supreme singing-actress, with uncommonly vivid powers of characterization ... and a rare subtlety of colour and phrasing.", group= n The opera opened on 30 April 1902, and although the first-night audience was divided between admirers and sceptics, the work quickly became a success.[ It made Debussy a well-known name in France and abroad; '']The Times
''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...
'' commented that the opera had "provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting, of course, those of Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (; ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his Tone poems (Strauss), tone poems and List of operas by Richard Strauss, operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Roman ...
". The Apaches, led by Ravel (who attended every one of the 14 performances in the first run), were loud in their support; the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire tried in vain to stop its students from seeing the opera. The vocal score was published in early May, and the full orchestral score in 1904.[
]
1903–1918
In 1903 there was public recognition of Debussy's stature when he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur
The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and Civil society, civil. Currently consisting of five cl ...
,[ but his social standing suffered a great blow when another turn in his private life caused a scandal the following year. One of his pupils was Raoul Bardac, son of Emma and her husband, Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac. Raoul introduced his teacher to his mother, to whom Debussy quickly became greatly attracted. She was sophisticated, a brilliant conversationalist, an accomplished singer, and relaxed about marital fidelity, having been the mistress and muse of ]Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. ...
a few years earlier. After despatching Lilly to her parental home at Bichain in Villeneuve-la-Guyard on 15 July 1904, Debussy took Emma away, staying incognito in Jersey
Jersey ( ; ), officially the Bailiwick of Jersey, is an autonomous and self-governing island territory of the British Islands. Although as a British Crown Dependency it is not a sovereign state, it has its own distinguishing civil and gov ...
and then at Pourville in Normandy.[ He wrote to his wife on 11 August from ]Dieppe
Dieppe (; ; or Old Norse ) is a coastal commune in the Seine-Maritime department, Normandy, northern France.
Dieppe is a seaport on the English Channel at the mouth of the river Arques. A regular ferry service runs to Newhaven in England ...
, telling her that their marriage was over, but still making no mention of Bardac. When he returned to Paris he set up home on his own, taking a flat in a different arrondissement
An arrondissement (, , ) is any of various administrative divisions of France, Belgium, Haiti, and certain other Francophone countries, as well as the Netherlands.
Europe
France
The 101 French departments are divided into 342 ''arrondissem ...
.[ On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly Debussy attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest with a revolver;][{{refn, A fictionalised and melodramatic dramatisation of the affair, ''La femme nue'', played in Paris in 1908. A myth grew up that Lilly Debussy shot herself in the Place de la Concorde, rather than at home. That version of events is not corroborated by Debussy scholars such as Marcel Dietschy, Roger Nichols, Robert Orledge and Nigel Simeone; and no mention of the Place de la Concorde appeared in even the most sensational press coverage at the time.][ Another inaccurate report of the case, in '']Le Figaro
() is a French daily morning newspaper founded in 1826. It was named after Figaro, a character in several plays by polymath Pierre Beaumarchais, Beaumarchais (1732–1799): ''Le Barbier de Séville'', ''The Guilty Mother, La Mère coupable'', ...
'' in early January 1905, stated that Lilly had made a second attempt at suicide.[Jensen, p. 85], group= n she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebra
Each vertebra (: vertebrae) is an irregular bone with a complex structure composed of bone and some hyaline cartilage, that make up the vertebral column or spine, of vertebrates. The proportions of the vertebrae differ according to their spina ...
e for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused Bardac's family to disown her, and Debussy lost many good friends including Dukas and Messager. His relations with Ravel, never close, were exacerbated when the latter joined other former friends of Debussy in contributing to a fund to support the deserted Lilly.
The Bardacs divorced in May 1905.[ Finding the hostility in Paris intolerable, Debussy and Emma (now pregnant) went to England. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne in July and August, where Debussy corrected the proofs of his symphonic sketches'' La mer'', celebrating his divorce on 2 August.][ After a brief visit to London, the couple returned to Paris in September, buying a house in a courtyard development off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch), Debussy's home for the rest of his life.][
In October 1905 ''La mer'', Debussy's most substantial orchestral work, was premiered in Paris by the ]Orchestre Lamoureux
The Orchestre Lamoureux () officially known as the Société des Nouveaux-Concerts and also known as the Concerts Lamoureux) is an orchestral concert society which once gave weekly concerts by its own orchestra, founded in Paris by Charles Lamoure ...
under the direction of Camille Chevillard;[ the reception was mixed. Some praised the work, but Pierre Lalo, critic of '']Le Temps
' (, ) is a Swiss French-language daily newspaper published in Berliner format in Geneva by Le Temps SA. The paper was launched in 1998, formed out of the merger of two other newspapers, and (the former being a merger of two other papers), ...
'', hitherto an admirer of Debussy, wrote, "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea".[Lalo, Pierre. "Music: ''La Mer'' – Suite of three symphonic pictures: its virtues and its faults", ''Le Temps'', 16 October 1905, ''quoted'' in Jensen, p. 206]{{refn, Lalo objected to what he felt was the artificiality of the piece: "a reproduction of nature; a wonderfully refined, ingenious and carefully composed reproduction, but a reproduction none the less".[ Another Parisian critic, Louis Schneider, wrote, "The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer.", group= n In the same month the composer's only child was born at their home.][ Claude-Emma, affectionately known as "Chouchou", was a musical inspiration to the composer (she was the dedicatee of his '']Children's Corner
''Children's Corner'', L. 113, is a six-movement suite for solo piano by Claude Debussy. It was published by Durand in 1908, and was first performed by Harold Bauer in Paris on 18 December that year. In 1911, an orchestration by André Caple ...
'' suite). She outlived her father by scarcely a year, succumbing to the diphtheria
Diphtheria is an infection caused by the bacteria, bacterium ''Corynebacterium diphtheriae''. Most infections are asymptomatic or have a mild Course (medicine), clinical course, but in some outbreaks, the mortality rate approaches 10%. Signs a ...
epidemic of 1919.[ Mary Garden said, "I honestly don't know if Debussy ever loved anybody really. He loved his music – and perhaps himself. I think he was wrapped up in his genius",][Garden and Biancolli, p. 302] but biographers are agreed that whatever his relations with lovers and friends, Debussy was devoted to his daughter.
Debussy and Emma Bardac eventually married in 1908, their troubled union enduring for the rest of his life. The following year began well, when at Fauré's invitation, Debussy became a member of the governing council of the Conservatoire.[ His success in London was consolidated in April 1909, when he conducted ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' and the ''Nocturnes'' at the ]Queen's Hall
The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect Thomas Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. Fro ...
; in May he was present at the first London production of ''Pelléas et Mélisande'', at Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London, on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit-and-vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist sit ...
. In the same year, Debussy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer
Colorectal cancer (CRC), also known as bowel cancer, colon cancer, or rectal cancer, is the development of cancer from the Colon (anatomy), colon or rectum (parts of the large intestine). Signs and symptoms may include Lower gastrointestinal ...
, from which he was to die nine years later.[
Debussy's works began to feature increasingly in concert programmes at home and overseas. In 1910 ]Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic music, Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and ...
conducted the ''Nocturnes'' and ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' in New York in successive months.["From Préludes to Jeux"]
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120628052255/http://www.debussy.fr/encd/bio/bio6_10-14.php , date=28 June 2012 , Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 18 May 2018
In the same year, visiting Budapest, Debussy commented that his works were better known there than in Paris.[ In 1912 ]Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev ( ; rus, Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев, , sʲɪrˈɡʲej ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ ˈdʲæɡʲɪlʲɪf; 19 August 1929), also known as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario an ...
commissioned a new ballet score, '' Jeux''. That, and the three ''Images
An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a project ...
'', premiered the following year, were the composer's last orchestral works.[ ''Jeux'' was unfortunate in its timing: two weeks after the premiere, in March 1913, Diaghilev presented the first performance of Stravinsky's '']The Rite of Spring
''The Rite of Spring'' () is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky ...
'', a sensational event that monopolised discussion in musical circles, and effectively sidelined ''Jeux'' along with Fauré's '' Pénélope'', which had opened a week before.
In 1915 Debussy underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations. It achieved only a temporary respite, and occasioned him considerable frustration ("There are mornings when the effort of dressing seems like one of the twelve labours of Hercules"). He also had a fierce enemy at this period in the form of Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (, , 9October 183516 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic music, Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Piano ...
, who in a letter to Fauré condemned Debussy's ''En blanc et noir
''En blanc et noir'' (; ), L. 134, CD. 142, is a suite in three movements for two pianos by Claude Debussy, written in June 1915. He composed the work on the Normandy coast, suffering from cancer and concerned about the prospects of France in t ...
'': "It's incredible, and the door of the Institut e Francemust at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities". Saint-Saëns had been a member of the Institut since 1881: Debussy never became one. His health continued to decline; he gave his final concert on 14 September 1917 and became bedridden in early 1918.["War and Illness"]
Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 18 May 2018
Debussy died of colon cancer on 25 March 1918 at his home, aged 55. The First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
was still raging and Paris was under German aerial and artillery bombardment. The military situation did not permit the honour of a public funeral with ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery (, , formerly , ) is the largest cemetery in Paris, France, at . With more than 3.5 million visitors annually, it is the most visited necropolis in the world.
Buried at Père Lachaise are many famous figures in the ...
as the German guns bombarded the city. Debussy's body was reinterred the following year in the small Passy Cemetery
Passy Cemetery () is a small cemetery in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France.
History
The current cemetery replaced the old cemetery (''l'ancien cimetière communal de Passy'', located on Rue Lekain), which was closed in 1802.
...
sequestered behind the Trocadéro, fulfilling his wish to rest "among the trees and the birds"; his wife and daughter are buried with him.
Works
{{see also, List of compositions by Claude Debussy
In a survey of Debussy's oeuvre shortly after the composer's death, the critic Ernest Newman wrote, "It would be hardly too much to say that Debussy spent a third of his life in the discovery of himself, a third in the free and happy realisation of himself, and the final third in the partial, painful loss of himself".[Newman, Ernest]
"The Development of Debussy"
''The Musical Times'', May 1918, pp. 119–203 {{subscription Later commentators have rated some of the late works more highly than Newman and other contemporaries did, but much of the music for which Debussy is best known is from the middle years of his career.[
The analyst David Cox wrote in 1974 that Debussy, admiring Wagner's attempts to combine all the creative arts, "created a new, instinctive, dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective – a kind of art, in fact, which seemed to reach out into all aspects of experience". In 1988 the composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers wrote of Debussy:
{{blockquote, Because of, rather than in spite of, his preoccupation with chords in themselves, he deprived music of the sense of harmonic progression, broke down three centuries' dominance of harmonic tonality, and showed how the melodic conceptions of tonality typical of primitive folk-music and of medieval music might be relevant to the twentieth century}
Debussy did not give his works ]opus number
In music, the opus number is the "work number" that is assigned to a musical composition, or to a set of compositions, to indicate the chronological order of the composer's publication of that work. Opus numbers are used to distinguish among ...
s, apart from his String Quartet
The term string quartet refers to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two Violin, violini ...
, Op. 10 in G minor (also the only work where the composer's title included a key). His works were catalogued and indexed by the musicologist François Lesure
François Lesure (23 May 1923 – 21 June 2001) was a French musicologist and librarian. He specialized in the life and works of Claude Debussy, but also wrote numerous bibliographies, studies in the sociology of music, and historical French top ...
in 1977 (revised in 2003) and their Lesure number ("L" followed by a number) is sometimes used as a suffix to their title in concert programmes and recordings.
Early works, 1879–1892
{{Listen, type=music,
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Debussy's musical development was slow, and as a student he was adept enough to produce for his teachers at the Conservatoire works that would conform to their conservative precepts. His friend Georges Jean-Aubry commented that Debussy "admirably imitated Massenet's melodic turns of phrase" 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'', recasting the traditional form for ]oratorio
An oratorio () is a musical composition with dramatic or narrative text for choir, soloists and orchestra or other ensemble.
Similar to opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguisha ...
s and cantatas, using a chamber orchestra and a small body of choral tone and using new or long-neglected scales and harmonies.[Jean-Aubry, Georges. (trans. Frederick H. Martens)]
"Claude Debussy"
''The Musical Quarterly'', October 1918, pp. 542–554 {{subscription His early '' mélodies'', inspired by Marie Vasnier, are more virtuosic in character than his later works in the genre, with extensive wordless '' vocalise''; from the '' Ariettes oubliées'' (1885–1887) onwards he developed a more restrained style. He wrote his own poems for the ''Proses lyriques'' (1892–1893) but, in the view of the musical scholar Robert Orledge, "his literary talents were not on a par with his musical imagination".[Orledge, Robert]
"Debussy, (Achille-)Claude"
''The Oxford Companion to Music'', Oxford University Press, 2011, retrieved 21 May 2018 {{subscription
The musicologist Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme wrote that, together with ''La Demoiselle élue'', the ''Ariettes oubliées'' and the '' Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire'' (1889) show "the new, strange way which the young musician will hereafter follow". Newman concurred: "There is a good deal of Wagner, especially of ''Tristan'', in the idiom. But the work as a whole is distinctive, and the first in which we get a hint of the Debussy we were to know later – the lover of vague outlines, of half-lights, of mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour, the apostle of languor, the exclusivist in thought and in style."[ During the next few years Debussy developed his personal style, without, at this stage, breaking sharply away from French musical traditions. Much of his music from this period is on a small scale, such as the '' Two Arabesques'', '' Valse romantique'', '']Suite bergamasque
''Suite bergamasque'' (List of compositions by Claude Debussy by Lesure number, L. 75) () is a piano suite (music), suite by Claude Debussy. He began composing it around 1890, at the age of 28, but significantly revised it just before its 1905 ...
'', and the first set of '' Fêtes galantes''.[ Newman remarked that, like Chopin, the Debussy of this period appears as a liberator from Germanic styles of composition – offering instead "an exquisite, pellucid style" capable of conveying "not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort".][ In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy's early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Fauré; in a 2007 book about the piano works, Margery Halford observes that ''Two Arabesques'' (1888–1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of Debussy's later style" but are not harmonically innovative. Halford cites the popular "Clair de Lune" (1890), the third of the four movements of ''Suite Bergamasque'', as a transitional work pointing towards the composer's mature style.][Halford, p. 12]
Middle works, 1893–1905
Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have regarded ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
''Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune'' ( L. 86), known in English as ''Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'', is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed ...
'' (1894) as his first orchestral masterpiece.[ Newman considered it "completely original in idea, absolutely personal in style, and logical and coherent from first to last, without a superfluous bar or even a superfluous note";][ ]Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Born in Montb ...
observed, "Modern music was awakened by ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune''". Most of the major works for which Debussy is best known were written between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s.[ They include the String Quartet (1893), '' Pelléas et Mélisande'' (1893–1902), the '' Nocturnes for Orchestra'' (1899) and '' La mer'' (1903–1905).][ The suite '' Pour le piano'' (1894–1901) is, in Halford's view, one of the first examples of the mature Debussy as a composer for the piano: "a major landmark ... and an enlargement of the use of piano sonorities".][
In the String Quartet (1893), the gamelan sonorities Debussy had heard four years earlier are recalled in the ]pizzicato
Pizzicato (, ; translated as 'pinched', and sometimes roughly as 'plucked') is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of instrument:
* On bowe ...
s and cross-rhythms of the scherzo
A scherzo (, , ; plural scherzos or scherzi), in western classical music, is a short composition – sometimes a movement from a larger work such as a symphony or a sonata. The precise definition has varied over the years, but scherzo often r ...
.[ Debussy's biographer Edward Lockspeiser comments that this movement shows the composer's rejection of "the traditional dictum that string instruments should be predominantly lyrical". The work influenced Ravel, whose own ]String Quartet
The term string quartet refers to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two Violin, violini ...
, written ten years later, has noticeably Debussian features.[Nichols (1977), p. 52] The academic and journalist Stephen Walsh calls ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' (begun 1893, staged 1902) "a key work for the 20th century".[Walsh (1997), p. 97] The composer Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithology, ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th century, he was also an ou ...
was fascinated by its "extraordinary harmonic qualities and ... transparent instrumental texture".[ The opera is composed in what ]Alan Blyth
Geoffrey Alan Blyth (27 July 1929 – 14 August 2007) was an English music critic, author, and musicologist who was particularly known for his writings within the field of opera. He was a specialist on singers and singing. Born in London, Blyth ...
describes as a sustained and heightened recitative
Recitative (, also known by its Italian name recitativo () is a style of delivery (much used in operas, oratorios, and cantatas) in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms and delivery of ordinary speech. Recitative does not repeat lines ...
style, with "sensuous, intimate" vocal lines. It influenced composers as different as Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of ...
and Puccini
Giacomo Puccini (22 December 1858 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, s ...
.[
Orledge describes the ''Nocturnes'' as exceptionally varied in texture, "ranging from the Musorgskian start of 'Nuages', through the approaching brass band procession in 'Fêtes', to the wordless female chorus in 'Sirènes{{'". Orledge considers the last a pre-echo of the marine textures of ''La mer''. '' Estampes'' for piano (1903) gives impressions of exotic locations, with further echoes of the gamelan in its ]pentatonic
A pentatonic scale is a Scale (music), musical scale with five Musical note, notes per octave, in contrast to heptatonic scales, which have seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale).
Pentatonic scales were developed inde ...
structures.[ Debussy believed that since Beethoven, the traditional symphonic form had become formulaic, repetitive and obsolete.][{{refn, He described the symphonies of Schumann and Mendelssohn as "respectful repetition"][Donnellon, p. 49], group= n The three-part, cyclic symphony by César Franck (1888) was more to his liking, and its influence can be found in ''La mer'' (1905); this uses a quasi-symphonic form, its three sections making up a giant sonata-form movement with, as Orledge observes, a cyclic theme, in the manner of Franck.[ The central "Jeux de vagues" section has the function of a symphonic development section leading into the final "Dialogue du vent et de la mer", "a powerful essay in orchestral colour and sonority" (Orledge) which reworks themes from the first movement.][ The reviews were sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even a step backward; others praised its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colours and definite lines.
]
Late works, 1906–1917
Of the later orchestral works, ''Images
An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a project ...
'' (1905–1912) is better known than '' Jeux'' (1913).[ The former follows the tripartite form established in the ''Nocturnes'' and ''La mer'', but differs in employing traditional British and French folk tunes, and in making the central movement, "Ibéria", far longer than the outer ones, and subdividing it into three parts, all inspired by scenes from Spanish life. Although considering ''Images'' "the pinnacle of Debussy's achievement as a composer for orchestra", Trezise notes a contrary view that the accolade belongs to the ballet score ''Jeux''.][Trezise (2003), p. 250] The latter failed as a ballet because of what Jann Pasler describes as a banal scenario, and the score was neglected for some years. Recent analysts have found it a link between traditional continuity and thematic growth within a score and the desire to create discontinuity in a way mirrored in later 20th century music.[Pasler, Jann]
"Debussy, ''Jeux'': Playing with Time and Form"
''19th-Century Music'', Summer 1982, pp. 60–75 {{subscription In this piece, Debussy abandoned the whole-tone scale he had often favoured previously in favour of the octatonic scale
An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. However, the term most often refers to the ancohemitonic symmetric scale composed of alternating whole and half steps, as shown at right. In classical theory (in contrast to jazz theory), ...
with what the Debussy scholar François Lesure
François Lesure (23 May 1923 – 21 June 2001) was a French musicologist and librarian. He specialized in the life and works of Claude Debussy, but also wrote numerous bibliographies, studies in the sociology of music, and historical French top ...
describes as its tonal ambiguities.[
{{Listen, type=music, header=Pieces from first book of ''Préludes'' (1909–1910),
filename=The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.ogg, title= ''La fille aux cheveux de lin'', description=Performed by Mike Ambrose,
filename2=La Cathédrale engloutie - Claude Debussy - performed by Ivan Ilic.ogg, title2=''La cathédrale engloutie'', description2=Performed by Ivan Ilic
Among the late piano works are two books of '' Préludes'' (1909–10, 1911–13), short pieces that depict a wide range of subjects. Lesure comments that they range from the frolics of minstrels at Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat "General Lavine" "to dead leaves and the sounds and scents of the evening air".][ '']En blanc et noir
''En blanc et noir'' (; ), L. 134, CD. 142, is a suite in three movements for two pianos by Claude Debussy, written in June 1915. He composed the work on the Normandy coast, suffering from cancer and concerned about the prospects of France in t ...
'' (In white and black, 1915), a three-movement work for two pianos, is a predominantly sombre piece, reflecting the war and national danger. The '' Études'' (1915) for piano have divided opinion. Writing soon after Debussy's death, Newman found them laboured – "a strange last chapter in a great artist's life";[ Lesure, writing eighty years later, rates them among Debussy's greatest late works: "Behind a pedagogic exterior, these 12 pieces explore abstract intervals, or – in the last five – the sonorities and timbres peculiar to the piano."][ In 1914 Debussy started work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments. His fatal illness prevented him from completing the set, but those for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola and harp (1915), and violin and piano (1917 – his last completed work) are all concise, three-movement pieces, more ]diatonic
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair ...
in nature than some of his other late works.[
'' Le Martyre de saint Sébastien'' (1911), originally a five-act musical play to a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio that took nearly five hours in performance, was not a success, and the music is now more often heard in a concert (or studio) adaptation with narrator, or as an orchestral suite of "Fragments symphoniques". Debussy enlisted the help of ]André Caplet
André Caplet (23 November 1878 – 22 April 1925) was a French composer and conductor of classical music. He was a friend of Claude Debussy and completed the orchestration of several of Debussy's compositions as well as arrangements of severa ...
in orchestrating and arranging the score. Two late stage works, the ballets '' Khamma'' (1912) and '' La boîte à joujoux'' (1913), were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were completed by Charles Koechlin
Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin (; 27 November 186731 December 1950), commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is '' Les Heures persanes'', a set of piano pieces based on th ...
and Caplet, respectively.[
]
Style
Debussy and Impressionism
The application of the term "Impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced has been much debated, both during his lifetime and since. The analyst Richard Langham Smith writes that Impressionism was originally a term coined to describe a style of late 19th-century French painting, typically scenes suffused with reflected light in which the emphasis is on the overall impression rather than outline or clarity of detail, as in works by Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (, ; ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of Impressionism painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his ...
, Pissarro
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( ; ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but t ...
, Renoir and others.[Langham Smith, Richard]
"Impressionism"
''The Oxford Companion to Music'', Oxford University Press, 2011, retrieved 17 May 2018 {{subscription Langham Smith writes that the term became transferred to the compositions of Debussy and others which were "concerned with the representation of landscape or natural phenomena, particularly the water and light imagery dear to Impressionists, through subtle textures suffused with instrumental colour".[
Among painters, Debussy particularly admired ]Turner
Turner may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Turner (surname), a common surname, including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
* Turner (given name), a list of people with the given name
*One who uses a lathe for tur ...
, but 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 one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting."
Debussy strongly objected to the use of the word "Impressionism" for his (or anybody else's) music,{{refn, In a letter of 1908 he wrote: "I am trying to do 'something different' – an effect of reality ... what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to .M.W.Turner
Turner may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Turner (surname), a common surname, including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
* Turner (given name), a list of people with the given name
*One who uses a lathe for tur ...
, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art.", group= n but it has continually been attached to him since the assessors at the Conservatoire first applied it, opprobriously, to his early work ''Printemps''. Langham Smith comments that Debussy wrote many piano pieces with titles evocative of nature – "Reflets dans l'eau" (1905), "Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" (1910) and "Brouillards" (1913){{refn, Respectively, Reflections in the Water, Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air, and Mists.[, group= n – and suggests that the Impressionist painters' use of brush-strokes and dots is paralleled in the music of Debussy.][ Although Debussy said that anyone using the term (whether about painting or music) was an imbecile, some Debussy scholars have taken a less absolutist line. Lockspeiser calls ''La mer'' "the greatest example of an orchestral Impressionist work",][ and more recently in ''The Cambridge Companion to Debussy'' Nigel Simeone comments, "It does not seem unduly far-fetched to see a parallel in Monet's seascapes".][Simeone (2007), p. 109]{{refn, Roy Howat writes that Debussy, like Fauré "often juxtaposes the same basic material in different modes or with a strategically shifted bass" which, Howat suggests, is "arguably his most literal approach to true Impressionist technique, the equivalent of Monet's fixed object (be it cathedral or haystack) illuminated from different angles".[, group= n
In this context may be placed Debussy's ]pantheistic
Pantheism can refer to a number of Philosophy, philosophical and Religion, religious beliefs, such as the belief that the universe is God, or panentheism, the belief in a non-corporeal divine intelligence or God out of which the universe arise ...
eulogy to Nature, in a 1911 interview with Henry Malherbe:
{{blockquote, 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.}
In contrast to the "impressionistic" characterisation of Debussy's music, several writers have suggested that he structured at least some of his music on rigorous mathematical lines. In 1983 the pianist and scholar Roy Howat published a book contending that certain of Debussy's works are proportioned using mathematical models, even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form
The sonata form (also sonata-allegro form or first movement form) is a musical form, musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of t ...
. Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio
In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their summation, sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities and with , is in a golden ratio to if
\fr ...
, which is approximated by ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence
In mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence is a Integer sequence, sequence in which each element is the sum of the two elements that precede it. Numbers that are part of the Fibonacci sequence are known as Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted . Many w ...
. Simon Trezise, in his 1994 book ''Debussy: La Mer'', finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", with the caveat that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy deliberately sought such proportions. Lesure takes a similar view, endorsing Howat's conclusions while not taking a view on Debussy's conscious intentions.[
]
Musical idiom
Debussy wrote "We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery ..we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' We must at all costs preserve this magic which is peculiar to music and to which music, by its nature, is of all the arts the most receptive."[Nichols (1980), p. 310]
Nevertheless, there are many indicators of the sources and elements of Debussy's idiom. Writing in 1958, the critic Rudolph Reti
Rudolph Reti, also Réti (; November 27, 1885 – February 7, 1957), was a musical analyst, composer and pianist. He was the older brother of the chess master Richard Réti, but unlike his brother, Reti did not write his surname with an acute acc ...
summarised six features of Debussy's music, which he asserted "established a new concept of tonality in European music": the frequent use of lengthy pedal point
In music, a pedal point (also pedal note, organ point, pedal tone, or pedal) is a sustained Musical note, tone, typically in the bass note, bass, during which at least one foreign (i.e. consonance and dissonance, dissonant) harmony is sounded in ...
s – "not merely bass pedals in the actual sense of the term, but sustained 'pedals' in any voice"; glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality; frequent use of parallel chord
In music theory, a major scale and a minor scale that have the same starting note ( tonic) are called parallel keys and are said to be in a parallel relationship. Forte, Allen (1979). ''Tonal Harmony'', p.9. 3rd edition. Holt, Rinehart, and Wils ...
s which are "in essence 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 the whole-tone and pentatonic scale
A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to heptatonic scales, which have seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale).
Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancient ci ...
s; and unprepared modulation
In music, modulation is the change from one tonality (tonic (music), tonic, or tonality, tonal center) to another. This may or may not be accompanied by a change in key signature (a key change). Modulations articulate or create the structure or ...
s, "without any harmonic bridge". Reti concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".
In 1889, Debussy held conversations with his former teacher Guiraud, which included exploration of harmonic possibilities at the piano. The discussion, and Debussy's chordal keyboard improvisations, were noted by a younger pupil of Guiraud, Maurice Emmanuel.[ The chord sequences played by Debussy include some of the elements identified by Reti. They may also indicate the influence on Debussy of Satie's 1887 '' Trois Sarabandes''. A further improvisation by Debussy during this conversation included a sequence of whole tone harmonies which may have been inspired by the music of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov which was becoming known in Paris at this time. During the conversation, Debussy told Guiraud, "There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law!" – although he also conceded, "I feel free because I have been through the mill, and I don't write in the fugal style because I know it."][Nichols (1980), p. 307]
Influences
Musical
{{Quote box , bgcolor=#FFFFF0 , salign=quote ="Chabrier, Moussorgsky, Palestrina, voilà ce que j'aime" – they are what I love. , source = Debussy in 1893, align= width=20%
Among French predecessors, Chabrier was an important influence on Debussy (as he was on Ravel and Poulenc); Howat has written that Chabrier's piano music such as "Sous-bois" and "Mauresque" in the '' Pièces pittoresques'' explored new sound-worlds of which Debussy made effective use 30 years later. Lesure finds traces of Gounod
Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been ''Faust (opera), Faust'' (1859); his ''Roméo et Juliette'' (18 ...
and Massenet in some of Debussy's early songs, and remarks that it may have been from the Russians – Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular ...
, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky – that Debussy acquired his taste for "ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules". Lesure also considers that Mussorgsky's opera ''Boris Godunov
Boris Feodorovich Godunov (; ; ) was the ''de facto'' regent of Russia from 1585 to 1598 and then tsar from 1598 to 1605 following the death of Feodor I, the last of the Rurik dynasty. After the end of Feodor's reign, Russia descended into t ...
'' directly influenced Debussy's ''Pelléas et Mélisande''.[ In the music of ]Palestrina
Palestrina (ancient ''Praeneste''; , ''Prainestos'') is a modern Italian city and ''comune'' (municipality) with a population of about 22,000, in Lazio, about east of Rome. It is connected to the latter by the Via Prenestina. It is built upon ...
, Debussy found what he called "a perfect whiteness", and he felt that although Palestrina's musical forms had a "strict manner", they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers.[Jensen, p. 146] He drew inspiration from what he called Palestrina's "harmony created by melody", finding an arabesque
The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Another definition is "Foliate ...
-like quality in the melodic lines.
Debussy opined that Chopin was "the greatest of them all, for through the piano he discovered everything"; he professed his "respectful gratitude" for Chopin's piano music.[Wheeldon (2001), p. 261] He was torn between dedicating his own Études to Chopin or to François Couperin
François Couperin (; 10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733) was a French Baroque music, Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as ''Couperin le Grand'' ("Couperin the Great") to distinguish him from other members of the musi ...
, whom he also admired as a model of form, seeing himself as heir to their mastery of the genre.[ Howat cautions against the assumption that Debussy's Ballade (1891) and Nocturne (1892) are influenced by Chopin – in Howat's view they owe more to Debussy's early Russian models – but Chopin's influence is found in other early works such as the ''Two arabesques'' (1889–1891). In 1914 the publisher A. Durand & fils began publishing scholarly new editions of the works of major composers, and Debussy undertook the supervision of the editing of Chopin's music.][{{refn, Debussy examined some existing editions, and chose to base his on that of ]Ignaz Friedman
Ignaz Friedman (born Salomon Izaak Freudmann; ; ; February 13, 1882January 26, 1948) was a Polish pianist and composer. Critics (e.g. Harold Schonberg) and colleagues (e.g. Sergei Rachmaninoff) alike placed him among the supreme piano virtuosi ...
. He wrote to Durand: "In Friedmann's 'sic''preface (Breitkopf Edition, which is quite superior to the Peters), Chopin's influence on Wagner is indicated for the first time"., group=n
Although Debussy was in no doubt of Wagner's stature, he was only briefly influenced by him in his compositions, after ''La damoiselle élue'' and the ''Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire'' (both begun in 1887). According to Pierre Louÿs
Pierre-Félix Louÿs (; 10 December 1870 – 4 June 1925) was a Belgian poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perf ...
, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone can do beyond Tristan'," although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, appearing at the turning of a bar".[ After Debussy's short Wagnerian phase, he started to become interested in non-Western music and its unfamiliar approaches to composition.][ The piano piece " Golliwogg's Cakewalk", from the 1908 suite '']Children's Corner
''Children's Corner'', L. 113, is a six-movement suite for solo piano by Claude Debussy. It was published by Durand in 1908, and was first performed by Harold Bauer in Paris on 18 December that year. In 1911, an orchestration by André Caple ...
'', contains a parody of music from the introduction to ''Tristan'', in which, in the opinion of the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, Debussy escapes the shadow of the older composer and "smilingly relativizes Wagner into insignificance".
A contemporary influence was Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy's "most faithful friend" amongst French musicians. Debussy's orchestration in 1896 of Satie's '' Gymnopédies'' (which had been written in 1887) "put their composer on the map" according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin
Richard Filler Taruskin (April 2, 1945 – July 1, 2022) was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as ...
, and the Sarabande from Debussy's ''Pour le piano'' (1901) "shows that ebussyknew Satie's '' Trois Sarabandes'' 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 is evidenced not only by the ''Golliwogg's Cakewalk'' and other piano pieces featuring rag-time, such as ''The Little Nigar
''The Little Nigar'' (CD 122, L. 114) is the original title by composer Claude Debussy for a short piece for piano, composed in 1909 for a piano method and published the same year. It was later also published as a single piece, entitled ''The L ...
'' (Debussy's spelling) (1909), but by the slow waltz
The waltz ( , meaning "to roll or revolve") is a ballroom dance, ballroom and folk dance, in triple (3/4 time, time), performed primarily in closed position. Along with the ländler and allemande, the waltz was sometimes referred to by the ...
''La plus que lente
''La plus que lente'', List of compositions by Claude Debussy by Lesure Numbers, L. 121 (, "The more than slow"), is a waltz for solo piano written by Claude Debussy in 1910, shortly after his publication of the Préludes (Debussy), Préludes, B ...
'' (''The more than slow''), based on the style of the gipsy violinist at a Paris hotel (to whom he gave the manuscript of the piece).[
In addition to the composers who influenced his own compositions, Debussy held strong views about several others. He was for the most part enthusiastic about ]Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (; ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his Tone poems (Strauss), tone poems and List of operas by Richard Strauss, operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Roman ...
and Stravinsky, respectful of Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...
and was in awe of Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (German: �joːhan zeˈbasti̯an baχ ( – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the or ...
, whom he called the "good God of music" ({{Lang, fr, le Bon Dieu de la musique).[Wheeldon (2017), p. 173]{{refn, He remarked to a colleague that if Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven could come to his door and ask him to play ''Pelléas'' to them, he would gladly do so, but if it were Bach, he would be too in awe to dare.[, group= n His relationship to Beethoven was complex; he was said to refer to him as {{Lang, fr, le vieux sourd ('the old deaf one') and asked one young pupil not to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave;" but he believed that Beethoven had profound things to say, yet did not know how to say them, "because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness." He was not in sympathy with ]Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (; ; 31 January 179719 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical period (music), Classical and early Romantic music, Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a List of compositions ...
, Schumann
Robert Schumann (; ; 8 June 181029 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic music, Romantic era. He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber ...
, Brahms and Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonie ...
, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".
With the advent of the First World War, Debussy became ardently patriotic in his musical opinions. 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 planned the destruction of our country?" In 1915 he complained that "since Rameau we have had no purely French tradition ..We tolerated overblown orchestras, tortuous forms ..we were about to give the seal of approval to even more suspect naturalizations when the sound of gunfire put a sudden stop to it all." Taruskin writes that some have seen this as a reference to the composers Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic music, Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and ...
and Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...
, both born Jewish. In 1912 Debussy had remarked to his publisher of the opera ''Ariane et Barbe-bleue
''Ariane et Barbe-bleue'' (, ''Ariadne and Bluebeard'') is an opera in three acts by Paul Dukas. The French libretto is adapted (with very few changes) from the symbolist play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck, itself loosely based on the ...
'' by the (also Jewish) composer Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas ( 1 October 1865 – 17 May 1935) was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-k ...
, "You're right, tis a masterpiece – but it's not a masterpiece of French music."
On the other hand, Charles Rosen argued in a review of Taruskin's work that Debussy was instead implying "that ukas'sopera was too Wagnerian, too German, to fit his ideal of French style", citing Georges Liébert, one of the editors of Debussy's collected correspondence, as an authority, saying that Debussy was not antisemitic.
Literary
Despite his lack of formal schooling, Debussy read widely and found inspiration in literature. Lesure writes, "The development of free verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free ...
in poetry and the disappearance of the subject or model in painting influenced him to think about issues of musical form."[ Debussy was influenced by the ]Symbolist
Symbolism or symbolist may refer to:
*Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea
Arts
*Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea
** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...
poets. These writers, who included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Rimbaud, reacted against the realism, naturalism, objectivity and formal conservatism that prevailed in the 1870s. They favoured poetry using suggestion rather than direct statement; the literary scholar Chris Baldrick writes that they evoked "subjective moods through the use of private symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinion". Debussy was much in sympathy with the Symbolists' desire to bring poetry closer to music, became friendly with several leading exponents, and set many Symbolist works throughout his career.
Debussy's literary inspirations were mostly French, but he did not overlook foreign writers. As well as Maeterlinck for ''Pelléas et Mélisande'', he drew on Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
and Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the great ...
for two of his Préludes for piano – "La Danse de Puck" (Book 1, 1910) and " Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C." (Book 2, 1913). He set Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brother ...
's '' The Blessed Damozel'' in his early cantata, ''La Damoiselle élue'' (1888). He wrote incidental music for ''King Lear
''The Tragedy of King Lear'', often shortened to ''King Lear'', is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is loosely based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his ...
'' and planned an opera based on ''As You Like It
''As You Like It'' is a pastoral Shakespearean comedy, comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wil ...
'', but abandoned that once he turned his attention to setting Maeterlinck's play. In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely re ...
's '' The Fall of the House of Usher'' and later sketched the libretto for an opera, '' La chute de la maison Usher''. Another project inspired by Poe – an operatic version of '' The Devil in the Belfry'' did not progress beyond sketches. French writers whose words he set include Paul Bourget, Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (; 11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.His names are often reversed "Louis Charles Alfred de Musset": see "(Louis Charles) Alfred de Musset" (bio), Biography.com, 2007 ...
, Théodore de Banville
Théodore Faullain de Banville (; 14 March 1823 – 13 March 1891) was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century.
Biography
Banville was born in Moulins in Allier ...
, Leconte de Lisle
Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (; 22 October 1818 – 17 July 1894) was a French poet of the Parnassian movement. He is traditionally known by his surname only, Leconte de Lisle.
Biography
Leconte de Lisle was born on the French overseas i ...
, Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier ( , ; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.
While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and rema ...
, Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine ( ; ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolism (movement), Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the ''fin de siècle'' ...
, François Villon
François Villon (; Modern French: ; ; – after 1463) is the best known French poet of the Late Middle Ages. He was involved in criminal behavior and had multiple encounters with law enforcement authorities. Villon wrote about some of these e ...
, and Mallarmé – the last of whom also provided Debussy with the inspiration for one of his most popular orchestral pieces, ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune''.[
]
Influence on later composers
Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.[ Kennedy, Michael, and Joyce Bourne Kennedy]
"Debussy, Achille‐Claude"
''The Oxford Dictionary of Music'', ed. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Oxford University Press, 2012, retrieved 17 May 2018 {{subscription Roger Nichols writes that "if one omits Schoenberg ..a list of 20th-century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th-century composers '' tout court''."[
Bartók first encountered Debussy's music in 1907 and later said that "Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities". Not only Debussy's use of whole-tone scales, but also his style of word-setting in ''Pelléas et Mélisande'', were the subject of study by ]Leoš Janáček
Leoš Janáček (, 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, Music theory, music theorist, Folkloristics, folklorist, publicist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian folk music, Moravian and other Slavs, Slavic music, includin ...
while he was writing his 1921 opera ''Káťa Kabanová
''Káťa Kabanová'' (also known in various spellings including ''Katia'', ''Katja'', ''Katya'', and ''Kabanowa'') is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by the composer based on ''The Storm (Ostrovsky), The Storm'' ...
''. Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of ...
was more ambivalent about Debussy's music (he thought ''Pelléas'' "a terrible bore ... in spite of many wonderful pages") but the two composers knew each other and Stravinsky's ''Symphonies of Wind Instruments
The ''Symphonies of Wind Instruments'' (French title: ''Symphonies d'instruments à vent'') is a concert work written by Igor Stravinsky in 1920, for an ensemble of woodwind and brass instruments. The piece is in one movement, lasting about 9 m ...
'' (1920) was written as a memorial for Debussy.
In the aftermath of the First World War, the young French composers of Les Six
"Les Six" () is a name given to a group of six composers, five of them French and one Swiss, who lived and worked in Montparnasse. The name has its origins in two 1920 articles by critic Henri Collet in '' Comœdia'' (see Bibliography). Their mu ...
reacted against what they saw as the poetic, mystical quality of Debussy's music in favour of something more hard-edged. Their sympathiser and self-appointed spokesman Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau ( , ; ; 5 July 1889 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th-c ...
wrote in 1918: "Enough of ''nuages'', waves, aquariums, ''ondines'' and nocturnal perfumes," pointedly alluding to the titles of pieces by Debussy. Later generations of French composers had a much more positive relationship with his music. Messiaen was given a score of ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' as a boy and said that it was "a revelation, love at first sight" and "probably the most decisive influence I have been subject to". Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Born in Montb ...
also discovered Debussy's music at a young age and said that it gave him his first sense of what modernity in music could mean.
Among contemporary composers George Benjamin has described ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' as "the definition of perfection"; he has conducted ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' and the critic Rupert Christiansen detects the influence of the work in Benjamin's opera '' Written on Skin'' (2012). Others have made orchestrations of some of the piano and vocal works, including John Adams
John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was a Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Before Presidency of John Adams, his presidency, he was a leader of ...
's version of four of the Baudelaire songs (''Le Livre de Baudelaire'', 1994), Robin Holloway
Robin Greville Holloway (born 19 October 1943) is an English composer, academic and writer.
Early life
Holloway was born in Leamington Spa. From 1953 to 1957, he was a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral and was educated at King's College School, ...
's of ''En blanc et noir'' (2002), and Colin Matthews's of both books of ''Préludes'' (2001–2006).
The pianist Stephen Hough
Sir Stephen Andrew Gill Hough (; born 22 November 1961) is a British-Australian classical pianist, composer and writer.
Biography
Hough was born in Heswall (then in Cheshire) on the Wirral Peninsula, and grew up in Thelwall, where he began pi ...
believes that Debussy's influence also extends to jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
and suggests that '' Reflets dans l'eau'' can be heard in the harmonies of Bill Evans
William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, block chords, innovative chord voicings, a ...
.{{refn, In addition to Bill Evans
William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, block chords, innovative chord voicings, a ...
, other jazz musicians influenced by Debussy include Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer. He started his career with trumpeter Donald Byrd's group. Hancock soon joined the Miles Davis Quintet, where he helped to redefine the role of ...
, and McCoy Tyner
Alfred McCoy Tyner (December 11, 1938March 6, 2020) was an American jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet from 1960 to 1965, and his long solo career afterwards. He was an NEA Jazz Masters, NEA J ...
, according to an article in ''Jazz Education in Research and Practice''., group=n
Recordings
In 1904, Debussy played the piano accompaniment for Mary Garden in recordings for the Compagnie française du Gramophone of four of his 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 ''Pelléas et Mélisande''. He made a set of piano rolls
A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music rolls, are continuous rolls of paper with holes punched into them. These perforations represent note control d ...
for the Welte-Mignon
M. Welte & Sons, Freiburg and New York was a manufacturer of orchestrions, organs and reproducing pianos, established in Vöhrenbach by Michael Welte (1807–1880) in 1832.
Overview
From 1832 until 1932, the firm produced mechanical mu ...
company in 1913. They contain fourteen of his pieces: "D'un cahier d'esquisses", "La plus que lente", "La soirée dans Grenade", all six movements of ''Children's Corner'', and five of the ''Preludes'': "Danseuses de Delphes", "Le vent dans la plaine", "La cathédrale engloutie", "La danse de Puck" and "Minstrels". The 1904 and 1913 sets have been transferred to compact disc.
Contemporaries of Debussy who made recordings of his music included the pianists Ricardo Viñes (in "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"). Singers in Debussy's mélodies or excerpts from ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' included Jane Bathori, Claire Croiza, Charles Panzéra
Charles uguste LouisPanzéra (February 16, 1896 in Geneva – June 6, 1976 in Paris) was a Swiss people, Swiss operatic and concert baritone.
Overview
Panzéra's studies at the Conservatoire de Paris, Paris Conservatory under the tuition of ...
and Ninon Vallin; and among the conductors in the major orchestral works were Ernest Ansermet, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Pierre Monteux
Pierre Benjamin Monteux (; 4 April 18751 July 1964) was a French (later American) conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1 ...
and Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini (; ; March 25, 1867January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orche ...
, 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 more recent times Debussy's output has been extensively recorded. In 2018, to mark the centenary of the composer's death, Warner Classics, with contributions from other companies, issued a 33-CD set that is claimed to include all the music Debussy wrote.[Clements, Andrew]
" Debussy: The Complete Works review – a comprehensive and invaluable survey"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180522041632/https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jan/03/debussy-the-complete-works-review-a-comprehensive-and-invaluable-survey , date=22 May 2018 , ''The Guardian'', 3 January 2018
Notes, references and sources
Notes
{{Reflist, group=n, colwidth=24em
References
{{Reflist, colwidth=25em
Sources
{{refbegin, 30em
* {{cite book , last = Barraqué , first = Jean , author-link = Jean Barraqué , title = Debussy , year = 1977 , publication-place = Paris , publisher = Editions du Seuil , isbn = 978-2-02-000242-4
* {{cite book , last = Blyth , first = Alan , author-link = Alan Blyth , title = Opera on CD , year = 1994 , publication-place = London , publisher = Kyle Cathie , isbn = 978-1-85626-103-6
* {{cite book , last = Boulez , first = Pierre , author-link = Pierre Boulez , title = Entretiens de Pierre Boulez, 1983–2013, recueillis par Bruno Serrou (in French) , editor-first = Bruno , editor-last = Serrou , year = 2017 , publication-place = Château-Gontier , publisher = Éditions Aedam Musicae , isbn = 978-2-919046-34-8
* {{cite book , last = Brown , first = Matthew , title = Debussy Redux: The Impact of his Music on Popular Culture , year = 2012 , publication-place = Bloomington , publisher = Indiana University Press , url = https://books.google.com/books?id=DHiAPGOM7_EC , isbn = 978-0-253-35716-8
* {{cite book , last = Cooke , first = Mervyn , title = The Exotic in Western Music , chapter = The East in the West: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music , editor-first = Jonathan , editor-last = Bellman , year = 1998 , publication-place = Boston , publisher = Northeastern University Press , isbn = 978-1-55553-319-9
* {{cite book , last = Cox , first = David , title = Debussy Orchestral Music , year = 1974 , publication-place = London , publisher = BBC , isbn = 978-0-563-12678-2
* {{cite book , last = Debussy , first = Claude , title = Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater , url = https://archive.org/stream/threeclassicsina00debu#page/n7/mode/2up , year = 1962 , orig-year = 1927 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Dover , oclc = 613848806
* {{cite book , last = Debussy , first = Claude , editor1-first = François , editor1-last = Lesure , editor2-first = Roger , editor2-last = Nichols , translator-first = Roger , translator-last = Nichols , title = Debussy Letters , year = 1987 , publication-place = Cambridge, MA , publisher = Harvard University Press , isbn = 978-0-674-19429-8
* {{cite book , last = DeVoto , first = Mark , chapter = The Debussy sound: colour, texture, gesture , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2003 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65478-4 , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0
* {{cite book , last = DeVoto , first = Mark , title = Debussy and the Veil of Tonality , year = 2004 , publication-place = Hillsdale, NY , publisher = Pendragon Press , isbn = 978-1-57647-090-9
* {{cite book , last = Dietschy , first = Marcel , title = A Portrait of Claude Debussy , translator1-first = William , translator1-last = Ashbrook , translator2-first = Margaret , translator2-last = Cobb , year = 1990 , publication-place = Oxford and New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-315469-8 , url = https://archive.org/details/portraitofclaude00diet
* {{cite book , last = Donnellon , first = Déirdre , chapter = Debussy as musician and critic , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2003 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65478-4 , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0
* {{cite book , last = Dumesnil , first = Maurice , author-link = Maurice Dumesnil , title = Claude Debussy, Master of Dreams , year = 1979 , orig-year = 1940 , publication-place = Westport , publisher = Greenwood , isbn = 978-0-313-20775-4
* {{cite book , last= Evans , first= Allan , title= Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist, year= 2009, location= Bloomington , publisher= Indiana University Press, isbn= 978-0-25-335310-8
* {{cite book , last = Fulcher , first = Jane , title = Debussy and his World , year = 2001 , publication-place = Princeton , publisher = Princeton University Press , isbn = 978-1-4008-3195-1
* {{cite book , last1 = Garden , first1 = Mary , author1-link = Mary Garden , last2 = Biancolli , first2 = Louis Leopold , title = Mary Garden's Story , url = https://archive.org/details/marygardensstory00gard , url-access = registration , year = 1951 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Simon & Schuster , oclc = 1001487250
* {{cite book , editor-last = Gorlinski , editor-first = Gini , title = The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time , year = 2009 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Britannica Educational Publishing , isbn = 978-1-61530-006-8
* {{cite book , last = Halford , first = Margery , title = Debussy: An Introduction to his Piano Music , year = 2006 , publication-place = Van Nuys , publisher = Alfred , isbn = 978-0-7390-3876-5
* {{cite book , last = Hartmann , first = Arthur , author-link = Arthur Hartmann , title = Claude Debussy as I knew him , year = 2003 , publication-place = Rochester, NY , publisher = University of Rochester Press , isbn = 978-1-58046-104-7
* {{cite book , last = Holloway , first = Robin , author-link = Robin Holloway , title = Debussy and Wagner , year = 1979 , publication-place = London , publisher = Eulenburg , isbn = 978-0-903873-25-3
* {{cite book , last = Holmes , first = Paul , title = Debussy , year = 2010 , publication-place = London and New York , publisher = Omnibus Press , isbn = 978-0-85712-433-3
* {{cite book , last = Howat , first = Roy , author-link = Roy Howat , title = Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis , year = 1983 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-31145-8 , url-access = , url =
* {{cite book , last = Howat , first = Roy , chapter = Russian imprints in Debussy's piano music , title = Rethinking Debussy , year = 2011 , editor1-first = Elliott , editor1-last = Antokoletz , editor2-first = Marianne , editor2-last = Wheeldon , publication-place = New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-975563-9
* {{cite book , last = Jensen , first = Eric Frederick , title = Debussy , year = 2014 , publication-place = Oxford , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-973005-6
* {{cite book , last = Johnson , first = Graham , author-link = Graham Johnson (musician) , title = A French Song Companion , year = 2002 , publication-place = Oxford and New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-973005-6
* {{cite book , last = Jones , first = J. Barrie , title = Debussy , year = 1979 , publication-place = Milton Keynes , publisher = Open University , isbn = 978-0-335-05451-0
* {{cite book , last = Lesure , first = François , author-link = François Lesure , translator-last = Rolf , translator-first = Marie , title = Claude Debussy: A Critical Biography , year = 2019 , orig-year = translation of 2003 French ed. , publication-place = Rochester , publisher = University of Rochester Press , isbn = 978-1-580-46903-6
* {{Cite Grove , last1 = Lesure , first1 = François , last2= Howat , first2= Roy , date = 2001 , title = Debussy, (Achille-)Claude , url=https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.07353 , url-access=subscription
* {{cite book , last = Lesure , first = François , last2 = Cain , first2 = Julien , author2-link = Julien Cain , title = Claude Debussy, 1862–1918: Exposition organisée pour commémorer le centenaire de sa naissance , year = 1962 , language = fr , publication-place = Bordeaux , publisher = Ville de Bordeaux , oclc = 557859304
* {{cite book , last = Lockspeiser , first = Edward , title = Debussy: His Life and Mind , year = 1978 , orig-year = 1962 , edition = Second , publication-place = Cambridge and New York , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-22054-5
* {{cite book , last = McAuliffe , first = Mary , title = Twilight of the Belle Epoque , year = 2014 , publication-place = Lanham, MA , publisher = Rowman & Littlefield , isbn = 978-1-4422-2163-5
* {{cite book , last = Mellers , first = Wilfrid , author-link = Wilfrid Mellers , title = Romanticism and the Twentieth Century , year = 1988 , publication-place = London , publisher = Barrie & Jenkins , isbn = 978-0-7126-2050-5 , url-access = registration , url = https://archive.org/details/manhismusic0000harm
* {{cite book , last = Moore Whiting , first = Stephen , title = Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall , year = 1999 , publication-place = Oxford , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-816458-6
* {{cite book , last = Moreux , first = Serge , translator1-last = Fraser , translator1-first = G. S. , translator1-link = G. S. Fraser , translator2-last = Mauny , translator2-first = Erik de , translator2-link = Erik de Mauny , title = Béla Bartók , year = 1953 , publication-place = London , publisher = The Harvill Press , url-access = registration , url = https://archive.org/details/belabartok0000more, oclc=860355
* {{cite book, last= Nectoux , first= Jean-Michel, authorlink=Jean-Michel Nectoux, year= 1991 , title= Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life , location= Cambridge , publisher= Cambridge University Press , isbn= 978-0-52-123524-2, others= Roger Nichols (trans)
* {{cite book , last = Nichols , first = Roger , author-link = Roger Nichols (musical scholar) , chapter = Debussy, (Achille-)Claude , title = The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , editor-last = Sadie , editor-first = Stanley , editor-link = Stanley Sadie , year = 1980 , publication-place = London , publisher = Macmillan , isbn = 978-0-333-23111-1
* {{cite book , last = Nichols , first = Roger, authorlink=Roger Nichols (musical scholar) , title = Debussy Remembered , year = 1992 , publication-place = London , publisher = Faber & Faber , isbn = 978-0-571-15357-2
* {{cite book , last = Nichols , first = Roger , title = The Life of Debussy , year = 1998 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-57887-5
* {{cite book , last = Nichols , first = Roger , title = Ravel , year = 2011 , orig-year = 1977 , publication-place = New Haven, CN and London , publisher = Yale University Press , isbn = 978-0-300-10882-8 , url = https://archive.org/details/mauriceravel00roge
* {{cite book , last = Orenstein , first = Arbie , author-link = Arbie Orenstein , title = Ravel: Man and Musician , year = 1991 , orig-year = 1975 , publication-place = Mineola, US , publisher = Dover , isbn = 978-0-486-26633-6
* {{cite book , last = Orledge , first = Robert , author-link = Robert Orledge , chapter = Debussy the Man , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2003 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65478-4 , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0
* {{cite book , last = Parris , first = Matthew , author-link = Matthew Parris , title = Scorn , year = 2008 , publication-place = London , publisher = Little , isbn = 978-1-904435-98-3
* {{cite book , last = Potter , first = Keith , title = Four Musical Minimalists , year = 1999 , publication-place = Cambridge and New York , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-48250-9
* {{cite book , last = Poulenc , first = Francis , author-link = Francis Poulenc , editor-first = Stéphane , editor-last = Audel , translator-last = Harding , translator-first = James , year = 1978 , title = My Friends and Myself , publication-place = London , publisher = Dennis Dobson , isbn = 978-0-234-77251-5
* {{cite book , last = Reti , first = Rudolph , author-link = Rudolph Reti , title = Tonality–Atonality–Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music , year = 1958 , publication-place = London , publisher = Rockliffe , oclc = 470370109
* {{cite book , last = Rolf , first = Marie , chapter = Debussy's Rites of Spring , title = Rethinking Debussy , year = 2011 , editor1-first = Elliott , editor1-last = Antokoletz , editor2-first = Marianne , editor2-last = Wheeldon , publication-place = New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-975563-9
*{{cite book , last=Rosen , first=Charles , author-link=Charles Rosen, date=2012 , title=Freedom and the Arts , url= , location=Cambridge, Mass , publisher=Harvard University Press , isbn=978-0-674-04752-5
* {{cite book , last = Ross , first = Alex , author-link = Alex Ross (music critic) , title = The Rest Is Noise, year = 2008 , publication-place = London , publisher = Fourth Estate , isbn = 978-1-84115-475-6
* {{cite book , last = Sackville-West , first = Edward , author-link = Edward Sackville-West , last2 = Shawe-Taylor , first2 = Desmond , author2-link = Desmond Shawe-Taylor (music critic) , year = 1955 , title = The Record Guide , publication-place = London , publisher = Collins , oclc = 500373060
* {{cite book , last = Samuel , first = Claude , translator-last = Aprahamian , translator-first = Felix , translator-link = Felix Aprahamian , year = 1976 , title = Conversations with Olivier Messiaen , publication-place = London , publisher = Stainer and Bell , isbn = 978-0-85249-308-3
* {{cite book , last = Schmitz , first = E. Robert , author-link = E. Robert Schmitz , title = The Piano Works of Claude Debussy , year = 1966 , orig-year = 1950 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Dover Publications , isbn = 978-0-486-17275-0
* {{cite book , last = Schonberg , first = Harold C. , author-link = Harold C. Schonberg , title = The Great Pianists , url = https://archive.org/details/greatpianists00scho , url-access = registration , year = 1987 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Simon & Schuster , isbn = 978-0-671-64200-6
* {{cite book , last = Siepmann , first = Jeremy , title = The Piano , year = 1998 , publication-place = Wisconsin , publisher = Hal Leonard Corp. , isbn = 978-0-7935-9976-9
* {{cite book , last = Simeone , first = Nigel , title = Paris – A Musical Gazetteer , year = 2000 , publication-place = New Haven , publisher = Yale University Press , isbn = 978-0-300-08053-7
* {{cite book , last = Simeone , first = Nigel , chapter = Debussy and Expression , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0 , url-access = registration , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2007 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65243-8
* {{cite book , last = Simeone , first = Nigel , chapter = France and the Mediterranean , title = The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera , editor-first = Mervyn , editor-last = Cooke , year = 2008 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-78009-4
* {{cite book , last = Taruskin , first = Richard , author-link = Richard Taruskin , title = Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions , year = 1996 , publication-place = Berkeley , publisher = University of California Press , isbn = 978-0-520-29348-9
* {{cite book , last = Taruskin , first = Richard , title = Music in the Early Twentieth Century , year = 2010 , publication-place = Oxford , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-538484-0
* {{cite book , last = Thompson , first = Oscar , title = Debussy, Man and Artist , url = https://archive.org/details/debussymanartist0000thom , url-access = registration , year = 1940 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Tudor Publishing , oclc = 636471036
* {{cite book , last = Timbrell , first = Charles , chapter = Debussy in Performance , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2003 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65478-4 , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0
* {{cite book , last = Trezise , first = Simon , title = Debussy: La mer , year = 1994 , publisher = Cambridge University Press , publication-place = Cambridge , isbn = 978-0-521-44656-3
* {{cite book , last = Trezise , first = Simon , chapter = Introduction & Debussy's 'rhythmicised time' , title = The Cambridge Companion to Debussy , editor-first = Simon , editor-last = Trezise , year = 2003 , publication-place = Cambridge , publisher = Cambridge University Press , isbn = 978-0-521-65478-4 , url = https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00trez_0
* {{cite book , last = Vallas , first = Léon , author-link = Léon Vallas , translator1-last = O'Brien , translator1-first = Maire , translator2-last = O'Brien , translator2-first = Grace , title = Claude Debussy: His Life and Works , url = https://archive.org/details/claudedebussyhis0000vall , url-access = registration , year = 1933 , publication-place = Oxford , publisher = Oxford University Press , oclc = 458329645
* {{cite book , last = Walsh , first = Stephen , chapter = Claude Debussy , title = The Penguin Opera Guide , editor-first = Amanda , editor-last = Holden , year = 1997 , publication-place = London , publisher = Penguin , isbn = 978-0-14-051385-1 , url = https://archive.org/details/operaguidepengui00nich
* {{cite book , last = Walsh , first = Stephen , title = Debussy: A Painter in Sound , publication-place = London , publisher = Faber & Faber , year = 2018 , isbn = 978-0-571-33016-4
* {{cite book , last = Weintraub , first = Stanley , author-link = Stanley Weintraub , title = Whistler: A Biography , year = 2001 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Da Capo Press , isbn = 978-0-306-80971-2
* {{cite book , last = Wenk , first = Arthur , title = Claude Debussy and the Poets , year = 1976 , publication-place = Berkeley , publisher = University of California Press , isbn = 978-0-520-02827-2
* {{cite book , last = Wheeldon , first = Marianne , title = Debussy's Late Style , year = 2009 , publication-place = Bloomington , publisher = Indiana University Press , isbn = 978-0-253-35239-2
* {{cite book , last = Wheeldon , first = Marianne , chapter = Tombeau de Claude Debussy , title = Rethinking Debussy , year = 2011 , editor1-first = Elliott , editor1-last = Antokoletz , editor2-first = Marianne , editor2-last = Wheeldon , publication-place = New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-975563-9
* {{cite book , last = Wheeldon , first = Marianne , title = Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation , year = 2017 , publication-place = New York , publisher = Oxford University Press , isbn = 978-0-19-063122-2
{{refend
External links
* {{IMSLP, id=Debussy, Claude
* {{ChoralWiki, Claude Debussy
* {{BBC composer page, debussy, Debussy
Website of Debussy museum, St. Germain-en-Laye
{{Claude Debussy, state=uncollapsed
{{Impressionist music
{{Modernism
{{Subject bar, Classical music, Opera, Biography, Music, d=y, auto=1
{{Authority control
{{DEFAULTSORT:Debussy, Claude
1862 births
1918 deaths
19th-century French classical composers
19th-century French male classical pianists
19th-century French classical pianists
20th-century French classical composers
20th-century French male classical pianists
20th-century French classical pianists
Ballets Russes composers
Burials at Passy Cemetery
Knights of the Legion of Honour
Composers for piano
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Deaths from colorectal cancer in France
French ballet composers
French opera composers
Impressionist composers
French male opera composers
Musicians from Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Prix de Rome for composition
Pupils of Antoine François Marmontel
Pupils of Ernest Guiraud