All in all, the 1860s must be reckoned as a low point in French
musical life. Tannhäuser had been whistled off the Opéra stage in
1861 and a complete performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens,
finished in 1858, never arrived there at all before his death in
1869. In the 1860s Offenbach was all the rage, and it's rumoured
that Bismarck, visiting Paris for the 1867 Exhibition, saw in
these operettas signs of French weakness. Certainly, after
France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Offenbach was in some
quarters held responsible for a al softening of French morale.
But Debussy, born in 1862, chose his time well. When he entered
the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, French music was just embarking
on a radical remake of itself, headed by the recently formed
Société Nationale de Musique, which, under its banner ars
gallica, ed to outdo German music by meeting it on the fronts
where it had been supreme, namely chamber and orchestral music.
Opera of course never ceased to occupy French minds, but as
outlets for it came nowhere near meeting demand, a change of
focus was in any case only sensible. After winning the Prix de
Rome in 1884, Debussy spent two years in that city, but not happy
ones - for one thing he had left a mistress in Paris. But, not
for the last time, he also chafed at the institutional
restraints, while realizing that his technique was still far
short of what he needed: writing a vocal work about the goddess
Diana, he worked in vain at creating music that was beautiful but
cold, without any hint of passion, but which was slowly
transformed by love.
Needless to say, the example of Wagner could not be far away from
such an enterprise, and Debussy followed the lead of many other
French composers in going to Bayreuth, seeing Parsifal and
Meister¬singer in 1888 and Tristan und Isolde the year after. The
immediate results of these visits were the Cinq Poèmes de
Baudelaire, in which Debussy's keyboard writing reached a peak of
richness and complexity. In the years following, he began to find
a personal way through this jungle of chromatic striving, where
others such as Chabrier and Chausson laboured under what Debussy
called "the ghost of old Klingsor". One support in this quest was
the Annamite theatre he saw at the 1889 Exhibition, in which "a
small, furious clarinet is in charge of emotion; a tam-tam is the
organizer of terror ... and that's all!" Less, he realized, could
be more.
From this realization stemmed his first masterpiece. In September
1893, shortly after his thirty-first birthday, he complained to
Chausson that "there are things I can't yet do (write
masterpieces, for example, or, among other things, be completely
serious - I'm too prone to dream my life away ...)". Yet he was
near finishing the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, whose
dreamworld awoke modern music, in Pierre Boulez's memorable
phrase. That simple opening line on the flute ... and the
extraordinary bar of silence ... Music had suddenly moved out of
the salon and concert hall and embraced Nature with a new
sensuousness and eroticism. Debussy had taxed his friend Chausson
with putting too much weight on his ideas and cluttering up his
textures with complicated inner parts. Instead, the task was to
find a simple idea (like the opening of L'Après-midi) and allow
it to lead on according to the composer's whims - which Debussy
had shocked a straitlaced professor by calling "mon plaisir", as
sed to perceived duty or technical correctness.
At the same time there was a part of Debussy that wanted to be
measured against accepted norms, even if he would never accept
any limitations on what he might or should write. His string
quartet was a case in point. Simply by composing in this medium
he was inviting comparison with Beethoven and, more recently,
César Franck. While the work's cyclic construction obviously
derives from the latter, the Scherzo sets the spirits dancing
with almost irreverent gaiety. Plaisir is combined with
technique, as in De's ballet dancers (Debussy greatly admired
this painter, whom he always referred to respectfully as
"Monsieur" De).
By the mid 1890s it was clear to the more perceptive critics that
a major talent had arrived. Debussy himself was much less sure.
His motto, as delivered to a female journalist, was "ever
higher". Right up to his death in 1918 he never sat back on his
laurels, and one might say that this chronic unease is one of the
more fascinating aspects of his genius. From 1895 to 1902 his
energies were largely spent on preparing his opera Pelléas et
Mélisande for performance, whether in orchestrating it or - a far
more difficult task - persuading a Paris theatre to take it on.
He knew that his opera flew in the face of the traditions of his
time and place: no big arias, no extrovert choral numbers,
endless conversation (Richard Strauss, hearing it for the first
time, anxiously asked his neighbour around the end of Act I: "Is
it all like this?"). Then there was the question of what the
opera "means", something still hotly debated over a century
later. As recently as 2011, Natalie Dessay, a wonderful
Mélisande, admitted that the character "is an absolute mystery. I
still don't understand her - and that's how it should be."
Nowhere is Debussy's unease more evident than in his slow
development of an individual style of piano writing. It was left
to Ravel, thirteen years his junior, to inaugurate with his Jeux
d'eau of 1901 the style of pianism generally known as
"Impressionist" (even though neither he nor Debussy liked the
term). Estampes of 1903 also established the composer's interest
in other cultures: Chinese in "Pagodes", with reminiscences of
the gamelan he'd heard at the 1889 Exhibition, Spanish in "La
Soirée dans Grenade". The final piece, "Jardins sous la pluie",
turns to a previous French culture, that of the Baroque
harpsichordists, though it develops in ways that would have
surprised them considerably. The subsequent sets of Images and
Préludes pursue the same picturesque goals with an ever deeper
level of invention and imagination. Popular music finds a place
in "Minstrels" and "`General Lavine' - eccentric" (the young
Darius Milhaud was shocked by this lack of seriousness), and the
whole-tone murk of the vault scene in Pelléas reappears as
"Voiles", a picture of sails on the water (according to Debussy's
widow, not veils).
On the orchestral front, La Mer took the programme symphony to
new heights and depths: if the first movement shows a mastery of
complex counterpoint, with as many as seven different ideas heard
simultaneously at one point, the central "Jeux de vagues" is an
uninhibited display of playfulness, at the same time passionate
and insubstantial. It makes clear, as does Debussy's savage
review a few years later of a symphony by Théodore Dubois, that
for him the great enemies were "respect" and "boredom"
(chronically impatient, he was, by every account, an impossibly
exacting teacher). In combating these enemies, humour was a prime
resource. Even if, after Pelléas and the accolade of the Légion
d'honneur, and now supporting a second wife with expensive
tastes, Debussy left a bohemian life for a bourgeois one, a
childish streak persisted, nourished by the birth of his adored
daughter Chouchou in 1905. Children's Corner, dedicated to her
"with her her's tender apologies for what follows", pokes fun
at Clementi piano exercises in "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum" and
at Tristan und Isolde in the middle of the "Golliwogg's Cakewalk"
(at the first performance, Debussy paced about nervously outside
the hall in case he had caused offence ...). In every case, real
life was at the heart of his music, like the watermelon seller
and the whistling urchins he heard in the orchestral Image
"Ibéria", which explains why, as mentioned above, he had little
time for the term "Impressionism". We know, of course, that this
artistic movement was in fact based on strict scientific
principles, but what bothered Debussy was the general
appreciation of it as something casual and undisciplined. This
view of his music has been encouraged, alas, by the fact that its
firm structures are adorned with surfaces of brilliance and
beauty, a perfect example of art concealing art. But a look at
any of his mature scores reveals an obsession with detail, and it
was not for nothing that he had spent twelve years of study at
the Conservatoire.
He seems to have reached some kind of crisis around 1911: he had
troubles with money and with his wife, and Stravinsky's Petrushka
felt like serious competition. "There are no precautions or
pretensions," he wrote of this work. "It's childish and savage.
Even so, the organization is extremely delicate." This was the
eternal battle, between what the poet Apollinaire called ordre
and aventure, and in the last seven years of his life Debussy
continued to find new solutions to it.
For these he went back to the past. For his ballet Jeux,
commissioned by Diaghilev for his 1913 season, he wanted to
"invent an orchestra `without feet'. Not that I'm thinking of a
band composed exclusively of legless cripples! No! I'm thinking
of that colour which seems to be lit from behind, of which there
are such wonderful examples in Parsifal!" He wrote further of
Jeux's "almost cheerful" mood and its "quaint gestures". If
Wagner's music lived on in him, it was that he simply took what
he needed and eschewed the rest - notably the sheer length and
the grandiloquence. The result was also Wagnerian in being "music
of the future", ignored for decades before its rediscovery by
Boulez and colleagues in the 1950s.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, German music was banned from
French halls and opera houses. This chimed in with what Debussy
had been saying for years, that French music had been polluted by
its German cousin - not just by Wagner, but from Gluck onwards.
Condemned by age and incipient cancer to being an onlooker in the
conflict, he directed his patriotism towards composing: not
tub-thumping marches (hardly his style) but music that looked
back to the grace and elegance of 17th- and 18th-century France
and to what he termed "emotion without epilepsy".
Between June and October 1915 he was granted an, almost final,
period of extraordinary productivity. In the two-piano suite En
blanc et noir he envisaged the rampant "Ein' feste Burg" swept
aside by a delicately sunny version of the "Marseillaise", and in
the piano Études he looked both back to Chopin and Schumann and
forward to Bartók and Boulez - he was rightly proud of the study
in fourths which overturned the centuries-old hegemony of thirds
and sixths. Finally, in the three sonatas that were all he
completed of a planned set of six, he turned on the irresistible
charm that had won him friends, male and female, all through his
life. Not a note in these is wasted. They also bring to mind the
composing advice he gave a young friend on his deathbed:
"Distrust the exceptional!"
Debussy's was a quiet revolution. The banners under which it
proceeded were in themselves not startling: honesty, continual
self-questioning and a search for "the naked of emotion".
He acquiesced in suffering long stretches of silence (1906 was an
almost completely blank year) and believed the Muse, even in
light-hearted works, should be treated with deference. As his
friend Pierre Louÿs said, he never wrote a note that he did not
mean. Debussy the man ended up ill, heavily in debt, and in a
marriage riven with many stormy moments. But for those composers
and music lovers who have followed him, it is we who are in debt,
for a body of work that is strong yet subtle, colourful yet
logical, seductive yet profound. Vive Claude Debussy, "musicien
français"!
Roger Nichols
2/2012