Claude Debussy

Although much loved for the charm of particular miniatures like “Clair de lune” from Suite bergamasque (1890/1905) and “La fille aux cheveux de lin” from the first book of Préludes (1909–1910), Debussy was in fact the creator of a major revolution in classical music based on an experimental approach to harmony and piano sonority. Unlike most musical revolutionaries, he only ever seems to have upset a few Paris Conservatoire teachers and music critics; meanwhile with listeners and performers, his music has always been popular because of its beauty and technical perfection. Debussy’s influence has gone both ways: towards the more esoteric kinds of modernism (especially in France), and towards popular and film music, which has often adopted his manner, without, usually, his refinement.

Early Years: The Paris Conservatoire and the Prix de Rome

Achille-Claude Debussy (later Claude-Achille) was a Parisian through and through who never lived anywhere but the French capital, except unwillingly for two years in Rome after winning the Conservatoire’s Prix de Rome. He was born in the western suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to artisan parents. His father, Manuel, kept a china shop in Saint-Germain (now a Debussy museum), traveled selling household goods, and finally became a print worker. At the time of the Paris Commune in early 1871, Manuel fell in with the Communards and subsequently spent a year at the Satory military camp, where a fellow prisoner—hearing that Manuel’s son was a promising pianist—recommended him to his piano-teacher mother. This Antoinette Mauté, supposedly a pupil of Chopin (and actually the mother-in-law of poet Paul Verlaine), was at least well connected, and it was through her that the 10-year-old Achille auditioned for, and was accepted by, the Paris Conservatoire.

Debussy’s parents were not noticeably musical, and his childhood talents in music apparently came out of the blue. But his background was important in a negative sense: it left him without the imprint of a conventional early musical training. At the Conservatoire, he rebelled against the music theory that was still taught there according to rules unchanged since the time of Bach. In a later conversation with his old composition teacher, Ernest Guiraud, he refused to acknowledge the harmonic procedures which Guiraud’s colleagues had taught and argued that the only rule [of music] was the beauty of individual sounds. Rhythm was too strict, the bar line was a straitjacket, and there was too much singing. In fact, everything was too exact; he loved “the poetry of things half said.” 

The Conservatoire may have been stuffy, but it offered opportunities. For Debussy, perhaps the most important was being taken on by the Russian millionaire, Nadezhda von Meck (Tchaikovsky’s patron), as pianist in her house trio, which traveled with her around Europe in the summer of 1880 and to Moscow in 1881. In view of Debussy’s later enthusiasm for Russian music, this was a formative experience. Perhaps more formative still was an affair he embarked on with a certain Marie Vasnier, an excellent singer and a married woman with an inattentive husband. Marie had a lovely soprano voice whose quality can be gleaned from the numerous songs Debussy composed for her. These are his first truly individual compositions, though still within the French tradition of Gounod and Massenet; at their best, they show a refinement of both vocal and keyboard writing that would remain a Debussy fingerprint. Less individual, for good reasons, are the cantatas he wrote as set pieces for the Prix de Rome. When he eventually won the prize in 1884, it was by writing in the most conventional way he could manage. Yet he had no real desire to spend three years in Rome, writing more music to please the Conservatoire moguls while unable to visit his mistress. After only two years, he bailed and returned to Paris.

Middle Period: Finding a Voice

In Paris new experiences awaited him. At the 1889 Exposition Universelle, he heard gamelan music from Java and the sometimes violent music of the Annamite Theatre of Vietnam. He began to frequent the artistic cafes of the Left Bank and get to know various, more or less bohemian, painters and writers. He met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and attended his Tuesday evening literary salons (known simply as “Tuesdays”), where he will have met painters such as Whistler and Gauguin and poets such as Pierre Louÿs, and perhaps Verlaine. A little later he came across, and was impressed by, Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. All this was very far from the world of the Conservatoire. Above all he went to Bayreuth—the great German Wagner festival—and heard Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde for the first time. He had long known and been fascinated by these works in the published scores but resisted the Wagnerism that was infecting much French music of the day. He was more in tune with the sensual and allusive atmosphere that poets like Baudelaire and Verlaine had found in Wagner, and his settings of their verses from the late 1880s absorb Wagner in a highly personal, somewhat anecdotal way.

The music Debussy began to compose at this point rarely sounds Wagnerian but would mostly be inconceivable without Wagner. One exception is his solitary String Quartet (1893), whose models are, if anything, French. The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1891–94), based on a poem by Mallarmé, descends remotely from the Act 2 love music of Tristan, yet preserves an entirely French, almost decorative, sensuality. The opera he began in 1893—a direct setting of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande—is like a photographic negative of Wagner: in many short scenes, discreetly orchestrated, and sung uninsistently by a cast of doomed, helpless characters in a prose style that respects the floating accents of the French language. It was nine years in the writing, and was the only opera Debussy completed. He began several others and much other theater music, all unfinished apart from music for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s play Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1910–11) and the ballet Jeux (1912) for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Debussy: Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 10

Meanwhile the orchestral Nocturnes (1897–99) evolve a music derived from visual images, and especially from Impressionist painting. The title echoes Whistler (not Chopin), and the harmony and orchestration suggest colors—Debussy’s ideal of beauty, rather than logic, as the crucial test. He developed this style in a great series of piano works between 1902 and 1912: the Estampes (1903), two books of Images (1901–05, 1907), and two books of Préludes (1909–10, 1911–12). At the Conservatoire, he had annoyed his teachers by experimenting at the piano with sequences of chords of particular types, ignoring the rules of classical harmony. Now, in these mature piano works, he brings that style to fruition in pieces inspired by water, light, bells “heard” through foliage, and other strong visual atmospheres—exotic places (Spain, India, the Far East) and the cafes of Montmartre. This music is the real hub of Debussy’s “quiet revolution”: an alternative modernism designed not to shock, but to enchant. To some extent it depends on piano techniques, especially the use of the sustaining pedal. But there are brilliant orchestral works in a similar vein—La Mer (1903–05) and Images pour orchestre (1905–12)—as well as various sets of songs.

Debussy: Images for Piano

Late Period: Sonatas and Études

In 1915 he was diagnosed with rectal cancer but continued to compose, often in great pain, between humiliating bouts of treatment. In these final, wartime years, his style took a new, more austere turn. He embarked on a series of six chamber sonatas, of which he completed three: one for cello (1915), one for flute, viola, and harp (1915), and one for violin (1916–1917). He also completed a set of twelve piano Études (1915) and a suite for two pianos called En blanc et noir (1915). The sonatas in particular are concise and laconic, and suggest a return to a more classical way of thinking. He also continued to work sporadically on an opera based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, but it remained fragmentary when he died.

Debussy married twice: first in 1899 to a dressmaker called Lilly Texier, who shot herself (inaccurately) when he left her for Emma Bardac in 1904. In general, he treated his women shabbily, for the (in his view) good reason that his art came first. He was also a poor money manager and became a music critic in 1900 to make ends meet. He proved a brilliant if eccentric writer on music; his collected reviews are well worth reading, not least as an aid to understanding the mentality behind his music.

Watching and Listening

After writing an early piano trio for the von Meck trio, Debussy produced very little chamber music. However, the String Quartet in G minor (curiously called Op. 10, though no other work of his has an opus number) and the three late sonatas are particularly noteworthy contributions to the genre. The quartet is an uncharacteristically cerebral piece which borrows César Franck’s cyclic method—the same themes in different forms in every movement. The sonatas, written during the war, seem to outline a new, more concise, almost elliptical style, perhaps due to a new vision, or just because he was in pain when he wrote them. Art is, among other things, discipline; drawing inspiration from pain may be the greatest discipline of all.

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