Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy, photo by Félix Nadar, ca. 1908.

Achille-Claude Debussy (IPA /aʃil klod dəby'si/) (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel he is considered the most prominent figure working within the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French composers but also a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth century. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to twentieth century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as Symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

Biography

Early life and studies

Debussy at the Villa Médici in Rome, 1885, at centre in the white jacket

Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye in 1862. His father owned a china shop and his mother was a seamstress. Debussy began music instruction when he was seven years old. His talents soon became evident, and, at age eleven, Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire. During Debussy's twelve years at the Paris Conservatoire, beginning in 1872, he studied with Ernest Guiraud, César Franck and other significant figures of the era. From 1880 to 1882, he was employed by the patron of Tchaikovsky, Nadezhda von Meck, giving music lessons to her children.

As the winner of the Prix de Rome, he received a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which included a four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further his studies (1885-1887). According to letters from this period, Debussy often was depressed and unable to compose, but he also met Franz Liszt, and finally composed four pieces that were sent to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima, after Heinrich Heine; the orchestral piece Printemps; the cantata La damoiselle élue (1887-1888), which was criticized by the Academy as "bizarre"; and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra. The third piece was the first in which stylistic features of Debussy's later style emerged. The fourth piece was heavily based on César Franck's music and withdrawn by the Debussy himself.

With his visits to Bayreuth in 1888, Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which had a lasting impact on his work. Wagner's influence is evident in La damoiselle élue and the 1889 piece Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire. Other songs of the period, notably the settings of Verlaine—Ariettes oubliées, Trois mélodies, and Fêtes galantesare all in a more capricious style.

Later, during 1889, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward.

Early works

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

Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner's style and heavy emotionalism. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring harmonic exploration. In this work he utilised the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales, such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony.

The Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement. This suite contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, Clair de Lune.

Influenced by the contemporary symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy wrote one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In contrast to the large orchestras so favoured by late-romanticism, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing instrumental colour and timbre. Despite Mallarmé himself, and colleague and friend Paul Dukas having been impressed by the piece, it was controversial at its premiere. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns thought it "pretty" but lacking any "style". Prélude subsequently placed Debussy into the spotlight as one of the leading composers of the era.

Middle works

The three Nocturnes (1899), include characteristic studies in veiled harmony and texture as demonstrated in Nuages; exuberance in Fêtes; and whole-tones in Sirènes. La Mer (1903-1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement, Jeux de vagues, which proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour. The three Images pour orchestre (1905-1911) are more loosely linked, and the largest, Ibéria, is itself a triptych medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions.

In reaction to Wagner and his extremely elaborate late-romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would be his only complete opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.

During this period Debussy wrote much for the piano. The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano (1901) utilises rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music. His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905) combine harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: Reflets dans l'eau is a musical description of rippling water; Hommage à Rameau, the second piece, is slow and yearningly nostalgic. It takes as its inspiration a melody of Jean-Philippe Rameau's, Castor et Pollux.

The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pagodes is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by the Javanese music. Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1909) for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, whom he nicknamed Chou-chou. The suite recalls classicism—the opening piece Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum refers to Muzio Clementi's collection of instructional piano compositions Gradus ad Parnassum, as well as a new wave of rag-time music. In the popular final piece of the suite, Golliwog's Cakewalk, Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner by mimicking the opening bars of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

The first book of Preludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy's preludes are replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral). Debussy wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces and so he placed the titles at the end of each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.

The music for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911), a lush and dramatic work and written in only two months, is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.

Late works

Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies. The forms are far more irregular and fragmented. These chords who seemingly had no resolution were described by Debussy himself as "floating chords", and were used to set tone and mood in many of his works. The whole tone scale dominates much of Debussy's late music.

His two last volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915) interprets similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises and includes pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

With the sonatas of 1915–1917, there is a sudden shift in the style. These works recall Debussy's earlier music, in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. Despite the thinner textures of the violin sonata (1917) there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves. This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism which became popular after Debussy's death. Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in 1918 so that he only completed three (cello, flute-viola-harp and violin sonatas).

The last orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its own field of motivic connection. At first Jeux was overshadowed by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, composed in the same year as Jeux and premiered only two weeks later by the same ballet company. Decades later, composers such as Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué pointed out parallels to Anton Webern's serialism in this work. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet, who also helped Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre de St. Sébastien.

The second set of Preludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, sometimes utilising dissonant harmonies to evoke moods and images, especially in the mysterious Canope; the title refers to a burial urn which stood on Debussy's working desk and evokes a distant past. The pianist Claudio Arrau considered the piece to be one of Debussy's greatest preludes: "It's miraculous that he created, in so few notes, this kind of depth."

Private life

Debussy's private life was turbulent. He cohabited in Paris with Gabrielle Dupont for nine years before marrying her friend Rosalie Texier, a fashion model, in 1899. Dismayed by her intellectual limitations, he left Texier in 1904 for Emma Bardac, the mother of one of his students and wife of a Parisian banker. Texier, like Dupont before her, attempted suicide with a pistol. The scandal obliged Debussy and Bardac (already carrying his child) to flee to Eastbourne, England, (where he was to complete his symphonic suite La Mer) until the hysteria subsided. The couple were eventually married in 1908. The child, a daughter (and the composer's only child), was named Claude-Emma, more affectionately known as Chou-Chou, the dedicatee of Debussy's Children's Corner suite. Claude-Emma outlived her father by scarcely a year, succumbing to the diphtheria epidemic of 1919.

Death

Debussy's grave at Cim. de Passy

Claude Debussy died in Paris on March 25, 1918 from colorectal cancer (he had survived one of the first colostomy operations ever performed two years earlier). He died in the midst of the German aerial and artillery bombardment of Paris during the Spring Offensive of World War I. At this time, the military situation in France was desperate, and circumstances did not permit his being paid the honour of a public funeral or ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets as shells from the German guns ripped into his beloved city. It was just eight months before France would celebrate victory. He was interred in the Cimetière de Passy, and French culture has ever since celebrated Debussy as one of its most distinguished representatives.

Musical style

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

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

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

The application of the term "impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908, he wrote "I am trying to do 'something different'-in a way realities-what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics." The opposing side argues that Debussy may have been reacting to unfavorable criticism at the time, and the negativity that critics associated with impressionism. It can be argued that he would have been pleased with application of the current definition of impressionism to his music.

Mathematical structuring

Given that Debussy's music is apparently so concerned with mood and colour, it is somewhat unexpected to discover that, according to one author, many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat (1983) suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. Sometimes these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure. In other pieces they appear to mark out other significant features of the music. The 55 bar-long introduction to 'Dialogue du vent et la mer' in La Mer, for example, breaks down into 5 sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars in length. The golden mean point of bar 34 in this structure is signalled by the introduction of the trombones, with the use of the main motif from all three movements used in the central section around that point (Howat, 1983).

The only evidence that Howat introduces to support his claim appears in changes Debussy made between finished manuscripts and the printed edition, with the changes invariably creating a Golden Mean proportion where previously none existed. Perhaps the starkest example of this comes with La cathédrale engloutie. Published editions lack the instruction to play bars 7-12 and 22-83 at twice the speed of the remainder, exactly as Debussy himself did on a piano-roll recording. When analysed with this alteration, the piece follows Golden Section proportions. At the same time, Howat admits that in many of Debussy's works, he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably in the late works) and that no extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.

Influence on later composers

Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Bela Bartok, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass as well as the influential Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. He also influenced many important figures in Jazz, most notably Thelonious Monk,Duke Ellington, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jimmy Giuffre and Brad Mehldau.

Debussy in film and pop culture

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

It was first used legally in 1948 in the David O. Selznick film Portrait of Jennie in which various compositions ("Reverie," "Arabesque" the "Nocturnes" and "La fille aux cheveux de lin" inter alii) can be heard. His music has featured in numerous films, plays, and television programs ever since. The film director Ken Russell made a visually stunning film about Debussy for the famous BBC arts programme Monitor in the late 1960s. It featured a particularly evocative staging of Fetes (from Nocturnes) showing a crowd of revellers with torches coming out of the night onto a beach.

Clair de lune is especially popular, having appeared in George Stevens's Giant (1956) when played on the organ in the mansion featured in the film, Casino Royale (1967), The Right Stuff (1983), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Ocean's Eleven (2001), Ocean's Thirteen (2007), Man on Fire (2004) and 'Dog Soldiers (2002), to name a few. Terrence McNally's play Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune uses the work as remedy to a wounded relationship, and the British Granada TV drama series Jewel in the Crown (1984) invokes Walter Gieseking's recording of this piece played on a Victrola during Daphne Manners' date with Ronald Merrick.

Arabesque No 1 was featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) -- played by the Tippi Hedren character -- and in A Good Year (2006), and used as the theme to the TV programme Star Gazer. It is frequently referenced by characters in Shunji Iwai's film All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). Rêverie was adapted by American bandleader Larry Clinton into a popular song, "My Reverie", which was recorded on several occasions in the late 1930s and '40s by musicians Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey, and others.

La Cathédrale Engloutie, from 'Preludes', takes an electronic rendition in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) as underscore for a futuristic Manhattan.

Des pas sur la neige was used as incidental music in the BBC's 1978 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca starring Joanna David and Anna Massey.

The Seduction of Claude Debussy (1999) by the Art of Noise is a concept album depicting the life and works of Debussy. Featuring narration from the actor John Hurt and guest vocal performances from Rakim and Donna Lewis, this ambitious concept album blends excerpts of Debussy's music with a diverse range of 20th century musical influences such as drum and bass, opera, hip-hop and jazz.

The Pet Shop Boys produced a song called "Left to My Own Devices" in which Neil Tennant sings, "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." In the late 1980s, when the duo toured Great Britain, a dancer dressed as Debussy when this song was performed.

Walt Disney prepared a short movie based on Debussy's Clair de Lune to add to the famous movie Fantasia (1940). However, due to the excessive length of the film, that segment was edited out. In the latest DVD release of the movie, the piece has been restored as special feature.

In 1976 The Alan Parsons Project featured Debussy's unfinished "Le Projet", inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", on their album Tales of Mystery and Imagination dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe. This being the first album of the duo Parson-Woolfson, Debussy's operatic work may have inspired the name of the group itself.

In 2002, the Norwegian artist Biosphere produced the album Shenzhou, on which every track (with the exception of the last two tracks) is based on elongated, pitch-shifted samples from Debussy's orchestral work "La Mer".

In 2004-2005, Megumi Noda, the main character for the manga by Tomoko Ninomiya, Nodame Cantabile (のだめカンタービレ, Nodame Kantābire), plays L'Isle Joyeuse by Debussy. It has been licensed in North America by Del Rey Manga. In Japan, the manga already received two adaptations to TV, a live-action drama which aired in 2006 and an anime series which started airing on January 11, 2007. In the live action version of Nodame Cantabile, Nodame plays L'Isle Joyeuse in Episode 10 (in the very beginning of the episode). Also, in episode 9 and 10, there is a funny explanation of how Debussy was inspired to create L'Isle Joyeuse. In the Anime series, Nodame plays L'Isle Joyeuse in episode 20 (at the end of the episode). Both, live action and anime aired a cut version of L'Isle Joyeuse by Debussy but a full version of the song is available in the original soundtrack for the Live action adaptation and Anime series.

List of works

• List of compositions by Claude Debussy by category.
• List of compositions by Claude Debussy by Lesure Numbers

References

• Barraqué, Jean (1977). Debussy (Solfèges). Paris: Editions du Seuil. ISBN 2020002426.
• Howat, Roy (1983). Debussy in Proportion: A musical analysis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521311454.
• Reti, Rudolph (1958). Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313204780.

Further reading

• Fulcher, Jane (ed.) (2001). Debussy and His World (The Bard Music Festival). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691090424. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Trezise, Simon (ed.) (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521654785. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Roberts, Paul (ed.) (2001). Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy. Amadeus Press. ISBN 1574670689. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)

External links

• Debussy Claude Debussy at AllMusic
• Claude Debussy discography at MusicBrainz
• Claude Debussy Catalogue chronologique Template:Fr icon
• Performance of Arabesque at 1st piano
• Performance of Claire de Lune at 1st piano
• Performance of La fille aux cheveux de Lin at 1st piano
• Kunst der Fuge: Claude Debussy performances Template:De icon
• Claude Debussy and Impressionism, at Carolina Classical
• Template:IckingArchive
• Free scores by Debussy at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Performances of works by Claude Debussy in MIDI format at Logos Virtual Library

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