Claude
Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old. Bound
only lightly to the past, it floats in time. As it coalesces, bar by
bar, it appears to be improvising itself into being—which is the
effect Debussy wanted. After a rehearsal of his orchestral suite
“Images,” he said, with satisfaction, “This has the air of not
having been written down.” In a conversation with one of his former
teachers, he declared, “There is no theory. You merely have to
listen. Pleasure is the law.”
To
mark the centenary of Debussy’s death, which fell in March, two
handsome boxed sets of his complete works have been issued. They
befit a man who treasured pretty things. One, from the Deutsche
Grammophon label, is decorated with Jacques-Émile Blanche’s
portrait of the composer, in which he assumes an aristocratic,
lapel-grasping pose. The other, from Warner Classics, displays
Hokusai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” which,
at Debussy’s request, was reproduced on the cover of one of his
most celebrated scores, “La Mer.” Physical recordings are no
longer a fashionable way of listening to music, but you will probably
get closer to Debussy if you shut down the Internet and give yourself
wholly to his world. The D.G. set has the libretto of his only
finished opera, “Pelléas et Mélisande,” and the texts of his
large output of songs—necessary resources in approaching an acutely
literary composer whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Proust
recognized as an equal.
It is
best to start where Pierre Boulez said modern music was born: with
the ethereal first notes of the orchestral tone poem “Prelude to
‘The Afternoon of a Faun.’” Debussy wrote it between 1892 and
1894, in response to the famous poem by Mallarmé. The score begins
with what looks like an uncertain doodle on the part of the composer.
A solo flute slithers down from C-sharp to G-natural, then slithers
back up; the same figure recurs; then there is a songful turn around
the notes of the E-major triad. Yet, in the fourth bar, when more
instruments enter—two oboes, two clarinets, a horn, and a rippling
harp—they ignore the flute’s offering of E. Instead, they recline
into a lovely chord of nowhere, a half-diminished seventh of the type
that Wagner placed at the outset of “Tristan und Isolde.” This
leads to a lush dominant seventh on B-flat, which ought to resolve to
E-flat, but doesn’t. Harmonies distant from one another intermingle
in an open space. Most striking is the presence of silence. The
B-flat harmonies are framed by bar-long voids. This is sound in
repose, listening to its own echo.
Debussy
accomplished something that happens very rarely, and not in every
lifetime: he brought a new kind of beauty into the world. In 1894,
when “Faun” was first performed, its language was startling but
not shocking: it caused no scandal, and was accepted by the public
almost at once. Debussy engineered a velvet revolution, overturning
the extant order without upheaval. His influence proved to be vast,
not only for successive waves of twentieth-century modernists but
also in jazz, in popular song, and in Hollywood. When both the severe
Boulez and the suave Duke Ellington cite you as a precursor, you have
done something singular.
The
music is easy to love but hard to explain. The shelf of books about
Debussy is not large, and every scholar who addresses him faces the
challenge of analyzing an artist to whom analysis was abhorrent. The
latest addition to that shelf is Stephen Walsh’s “Debussy: A
Painter in Sound” (Knopf), which places proper emphasis on
Debussy’s myriad links to other art forms. The composer may have
been the first in history to become a fully modern-minded artist,
joining a community of writers and painters, borrowing ideas and
lending them in turn. Admittedly, before Debussy there was Wagner,
whose impact was sufficiently seismic that the term “Wagnerism”
had to be coined to describe it. With Wagner, though, the influence
tended to go in one direction: outward. Debussy was receptive. He
saw, he read, he pondered, and he transformed the ineffable into
sound.
“He
was a very, very strange man,” the soprano Mary Garden said. With
his piercing eyes and jutting forehead, he could make a rough first
impression—like “a proud Calabrian bandit,” according to the
pianist Ricardo Viñes. François Lesure, the author of the
definitive French-language biography of Debussy, portrays him as
“withdrawn, unsociable, taciturn, skittish, susceptible, distant,
shy.” He was said to be “catlike and solitary.” He “lived in
a kind of haughty misanthropy, behind a rampart of irony.” He had a
tendency toward mendacity in his professional and personal
relationships. He was conscious enough of his limitations: “Those
around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to
live in a real world of people and things.”
Debussy
was born in the Paris suburbs in 1862, to an impoverished family. His
father, Manuel, held a string of jobs, including china-shop owner,
travelling salesman, and print worker. His mother, Victorine, was a
seamstress. In the period of the Paris Commune, in 1871, Manuel
served in the revolutionary forces, as a captain, and when the
Commune was defeated he spent more than a year in prison.
Fortuitously, when Manuel told Charles de Sivry, another inmate,
about his son’s musical interests, Sivry mentioned that his mother,
Antoinette Mauté, was a pianist. Mauté, a well-connected woman who
was said to have studied with Chopin, began teaching the boy, and
helped to arrange his admission to the Paris Conservatory, in 1872.
Another notable thing about Mauté is that her daughter Mathilde had
the misfortune of being married to Paul Verlaine. At the time, that
ill-fated couple was living with Mauté, and Arthur Rimbaud, soon to
become Verlaine’s lover, was an increasing source of tension.
Although Debussy never spoke of meeting either Verlaine or Rimbaud,
he must have been at least vaguely aware of the chaos in the
household.
At the
conservatory, Debussy was a restless student, exasperating his
teachers and fascinating his schoolmates. When confronted with the
fundamentals of harmony and form, he asked why any systems were
needed. He had little trouble mastering academic exercises, and,
after two attempts, he won the Prix de Rome, a traditional stepping
stone to a successful compositional career. But in his early vocal
pieces, and in his legendarily mesmerizing improvisations at the
piano, he jettisoned rules that had been in place for hundreds of
years. Familiar chords appeared in unfamiliar sequences. Melodies
followed the contours of ancient or exotic scales. Forms dissolved
into textures and moods. An academic evaluation accused him of
indulging in Impressionism—a label that stuck.
Perhaps
Debussy’s central insight was about the constricting effect of the
standard major and minor scales. Why not use the old modes of
medieval church music? Or the differently arrayed and tuned scales
found in non-Western traditions? Or the whole-tone scale, which
divided the octave into equal intervals? Debussy had a particular
fondness for the natural harmonic series—the spectrum of
overtones that arise from a vibrating string. If you pinch a taut
string in the middle, its pitch goes up an octave. If you pinch it at
successively smaller fractions, the basic intervals of conventional
Western harmony emerge. So far, so good: but what about the notes
further out in the series? These are more difficult to assimilate. In
the chain of intervals derived from a C, you encounter a tone
somewhere near B-flat and another in the vicinity of F-sharp. Debussy
favored a mode that has become known as the acoustic scale, which
mimics the overtone series by raising the fourth degree (F-sharp) and
lowering the seventh (B-flat). That those notes correspond to blue
notes helps to explain Debussy’s appeal to jazz musicians.
Debussy
had the prejudices typical of his time, and never thought too deeply
about the cultures that he sampled. Nevertheless, he knew to look
outside the classical sphere for nourishment. At the Paris Exposition
of 1889, he heard a gamelan ensemble, which made Western harmonies
sound to him like “empty phantoms of use to clever little
children.” Those first measures of “Afternoon of a Faun”
capture Debussy’s breadth of vision: first the call of the faun,
which feels primal and uncomposed, and then that sumptuous chord on
B-flat, which has no need to resolve, because it is complete in
itself, a chord of overtones resting on its fundamental.
Debussy’s
rejection of the musical status quo was fuelled by his jealous love
of poetry and painting. The most revelatory experience I’ve had
with the composer in recent years was not in the concert hall but in
a museum: an exhibition entitled “Debussy, Music, and the Arts,”
which was mounted at the Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, in 2012.
To turn from the manuscript of “Faun” to a copy of Mallarmé’s
poem, and then to see on the walls a Whistler seascape and Hokusai’s
“Great Wave,” was to feel Debussy’s synesthetic kick. For him,
music had fallen behind: it had nothing that rivalled free verse in
poetry, the drift toward abstraction in painting, and the
investigation of mystical spheres that was happening across the arts.
Poetry
spurred Debussy’s earliest breakthroughs. His individual voice
materializes in settings of Paul Bourget, Théodore de Banville,
Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé—poets who ranged from
Parnassian classicism to Symbolist esotericism. Like a hunter chasing
an elusive quarry, Debussy repeatedly tried to capture the eerie
stillness of Verlaine’s “En Sourdine”: “Calm in the
half-light/ Made by the tall branches,/ Let our love be imbued/ With
deep silence.” As Walsh observes, Debussy’s first attempts, from
1882, are thick with Wagnerian harmony. A version from a decade later
is spare and piercing, all excess expunged. Debussy is ready to
compose “Afternoon of a Faun,” which arose when Mallarmé asked
him to contribute to a theatrical version of his poem. (No production
resulted.) “Inert, all burns in this savage hour,” the poem
reads, making oblique mention of “him who searches for the la”—the
note A. This is the atmosphere of Debussy’s opening, with its
charged stasis and its chords of resonance.
The
visual arts proved an equally important fund of inspiration, although
the Impressionist label has perpetuated the erroneous notion that
Debussy tried to do in music what Monet, Renoir, and Degas did in
painting. Those artists were in his field of vision, but the rush of
brushwork that defines Impressionist painting—the erasure of the
clean line in pursuit of a hazier reality—is alien to Debussy’s
crystalline technique. Elusive but never vague, he is closer in
spirit to the Symbolist movement, with its vivid evocations of unreal
realms, and to the fable-bright world of Les Nabis. He also looked to
the Pre-Raphaelites—“La Damoiselle Élue,” a pivotal early
cantata, is based on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed
Damozel”—and to the semi-abstract seascapes of J. M. W. Turner,
which forecast the tumult of “La Mer.”
The
culmination of this first phase of Debussy’s revolution is “Pelléas
et Mélisande,” an opera so unlike its predecessors that it
effectively inaugurated a new genre of modernist music theatre. A
tale of two half-brothers who fall in love with the same mysterious
maiden, it is based on the eponymous play by the Belgian Symbolist
Maurice Maeterlinck, who had a fin-de-siècle vogue before largely
falling out of sight. Maeterlinck is worth revisiting—his
elliptical dialogue looks ahead to the work of Samuel Beckett.
Debussy, facing the gnomic text of “Pelléas,” made the radical
decision to set it line by line, without recourse to a versifying
librettist. This had been done before, notably in Russian opera, but
Debussy achieved an unprecedented merger of music with an advanced
literary aesthetic. In the wake of “Pelléas” came Strauss’s
“Salome” and “Elektra,” Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu,”
and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten.”
“Pelléas”
engenders its own world on the first page of the score. In an essay
in the new scholarly anthology “Debussy’s Resonance”
(University of Rochester Press), Katherine Bergeron indicates how
this happens. In the first four bars, bassoons, cellos, and double
basses make a stark, columnar sound that conjures the forest in which
the drama begins. It is, Bergeron writes, an evocation of “dim
antiquity, carving out a fragment of plainsong in stolid half notes.”
She continues, “The figure suggests an immense murmur, or an
ancient cosmic sigh, whose sheer weight draws it to the bottom of the
orchestra. Then it vanishes. A different music takes its place,
sounding high in the winds, its bass voice a tritone away. With its
more articulate rhythm and brighter timbre, the melody sounds a sort
of anxious trill: indecisive, edgy, almost dissonant.” This second
motif is associated with Golaud, who ends up killing his
half-brother, Pelléas. Golaud, Bergeron observes, seems strikingly
disconnected from the forest around him. We hear not only two
distinct textures but the gap between them. This defining gesture is
painterly at heart: a single stroke of the brush turns the remainder
of the canvas into resonant space.
The
première of “Pelléas,” in 1902, established Debussy as the
dominant French composer of his time. He became a trend, a “school”:
critics spoke of “Debussystes” and “Debussysme.” For a man
accustomed to thinking of himself as a loner, the fame was
disconcerting. His life was further complicated by personal chaos,
largely of his own making. His first marriage, to the fashion model
Lilly Texier, fell apart when he began an affair with the singer Emma
Bardac. In 1904, Texier attempted suicide; the affair became public,
and Debussy lost many friends. He subsequently married Bardac. That
relationship, too, was troubled, although it lasted until his death.
“An artist is, all in all, a detestable, inward-facing man,”
Debussy wrote to Texier in 1904, as if brutal candor somehow excused
his behavior.
In
this period, Debussy took up a second career, as a music critic,
delivering a stream of prickly, contrarian opinions that seemed
almost designed to increase his isolation. Beethoven wrote badly for
the piano, he proclaimed: “With a few exceptions, his works should
have been allowed to rest.” Wagner was a literary genius but no
musician. Gluck was pompous and artificial. There was a method to
this crankiness: Debussy was attacking the tendency to worship the
past at the expense of the present. In a later interview, he said
that he actually admired Beethoven and Wagner, but refused to “admire
them uncritically, just because people have told me that they are
masters.”
Debussy
struggled to come up with a successor to “Pelléas.” His list of
contemplated operas included a setting of Pierre Louÿs’s
“Aphrodite”; an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”;
and works on topics as various as Siddhartha, Orpheus, the Oresteia,
Don Juan, Romeo and Juliet, and Tristan and Yseult (“a subject
which has not as yet been treated,” Debussy said, impishly). Not
all these ideas were serious; Debussy had a bad habit of seeking
advances for projects that he had little intention of completing. He
did, however, expend considerable energy on a pair of operas inspired
by Edgar Allan Poe: a comedy, based on “The Devil in the Belfry,”
and a tragedy, based on “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Enough
sketches for the latter exist that the scholar Robert Orledge has
been able to make a stylish and often convincing reconstruction,
which the Pan Classics label recorded in 2016, alongside a less
persuasive version of the “Belfry” material.
If
Debussy’s operatic path remained largely blocked, he found new
fluency in the production of instrumental scores: the three sets of
“Images” for piano and for orchestra, the two books of Preludes
for solo piano, “La Mer,” and the dance score “Jeux.” In this
pervasively dazzling body of music, Symbolist gloom gives way to
glowing new colors and a fresh rhythmic punch. Popular influences
come to the fore: vaudeville tunes, circus marches, cabaret, Iberian
dances, ragtime.
While
exploring the D.G. Debussy box, the richer of the two collections, I
found myself fixated on Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s casually
immaculate rendering of “Reflets dans l’Eau,” from the first
book of “Images.” Michelangeli’s recording of “Images,”
made in 1971, is rightly regarded as one of the greatest piano
records ever made. “Reflets” begins with eight bars confined to
the key of D-flat major, or, more precisely, to the scale associated
with that key. Chords drawn from those seven notes lounge indolently
across the keyboard. In the ninth bar, though, the work goes
gorgeously haywire. Extraneous notes invade the inner voices, even as
a D-flattish upper line is maintained. Pinprick dissonances disrupt
the sense of a tonal center, and the music collapses into harmonic
limbo, in the form of a rolled chord of fourths. This is Debussyan
atonality, which predates Schoenberg’s and is very different in
spirit: not a lunge into the unknown but a walk on the wild side. We
stroll back home with a descending string of chords that defy brief
description: sevenths of various kinds, diminished sevenths, dominant
sevenths, and what, in jazz, is called the minor major seventh.
Michelangeli, who admired the jazz pianist Bill Evans and was admired
by Evans in turn, plays this whole stretch of music as if he were
hunched over a piano in a smoke-filled club, at one in the morning,
sometime during the Eisenhower Administration. Two bars later, we are
back in D-flat—an even more restricted version of it, on the
ancient pentatonic scale. Some kind of bending of the musical
space-time continuum has occurred, and we are only sixteen bars in.
Debussy
is often stereotyped as an artist of motionless atmospheres, but he
was a radical in rhythm as well as in harmony. I’ve also become
mildly obsessed by a few bars in the propulsive final movement of “La
Mer,” entitled “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea,” which is
structured around successive iterations of a simple theme of narrow
falling intervals: A to G-sharp, A-sharp to G-sharp. As in “Afternoon
of a Faun,” an idea remains largely fixed while the context around
it undergoes kaleidoscopic changes. First the theme sounds in the
winds, over rapidly pulsing lower strings; then it hovers in an
ambience of luminous calm; then it takes on an impassioned,
quasi-Romantic character in the violins.
The fourth
iteration never fails to make me want to leap from my chair. The
downward-sighing theme is back in the winds, but it floats above a
multilayered texture in which rhythms and accents are landing every
which way: scurrying triplets in the strings, horns sounding on the
fourth beat of the bar, piercing grace notes in the piccolo, and a
curious oompah section comprised of timpani, cymbals, and bass drum.
Most of the instruments are dancing to the side of the beat. The net
result of all this layering is an irresistible sense of buoyancy.
Particularly striking is a galloping pattern in the strings—four
rapid hoofbeats endlessly recurring. Debussy liked the work of the
British painter and illustrator Walter Crane, and I wonder whether
“La Mer” might have something to do with Crane’s 1892 painting
“Neptune’s Horses,” in which phantom beasts materialize from a
cresting wave.
The
D.G. box includes two performances of “La Mer”: one with the
Santa Cecilia Orchestra, under Leonard Bernstein, and one with the
Berlin Philharmonic, under Herbert von Karajan. Both make an
impressive noise at the climaxes, although they fall prey to an
aggrandizing tendency noted by the scholar Simon Trezise, in a
book-length study of “La Mer.” Since Toscanini, Trezise argues,
conductors have made “La Mer” an “orchestral showpiece of the
first order,” rather than a complexly layered conception in which
foreground and background merge. Trezise rightly draws attention to
pioneering recordings by the Italian conductor Piero Coppola, in
which the strings are restrained in favor of pungent winds. That
leanness and a vibrancy of color re-emerge in a 2012 rendition of “La
Mer” by Jos van Immerseel and the ensemble Anima Eterna Brugge,
which uses instruments from Debussy’s era.
Still,
I cherish most the various recordings made by Boulez, who dedicated
himself to banishing all sentimental mists from Debussy’s music,
thereby exposing its modernity. Regrettably, Boulez’s 1995 reading
with the Cleveland Orchestra is missing from the D.G. box, but the
set does include his staggeringly precise account of “Jeux.” In
the finale of “La Mer,” Boulez’s meticulous attention to
rhythmic subtleties redoubles the music’s kinetic energy. When
he led the New York Philharmonic in “La Mer” in
1992—his final appearance with that ensemble—the waves broke on
the ears with cold, lashing force.
In
1913, Debussy arrived at the inevitable moment when he no longer
occupied the vanguard. That year, the Ballets Russes
unleashed Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Debussy
marveled at Stravinsky’s invention, but felt uneasy about his
younger colleague’s ruthless brilliance. “Primitive music with
all modern conveniences” was his wry comment on the “Rite.” The
advent of full-on atonality in the music of Schoenberg and his pupils
left Debussy cold. He loved the strange but not the harsh.
As
Europe devolved into barbarism in the early years of the First World
War, Debussy adopted a decorous, formally controlled style that
looked back to the aristocratic poise of the French Baroque. With
this unexpected swerve, he was following the advice he gave to his
stepson, to “distrust the path that your ideas make you take.” As
Walsh points out, Debussy’s self-distrust considerably slowed his
productivity, as he tested “every chord and chord sequence, every
rhythm, every color for their precise effect.”
In the
summer of 1915, Debussy embarked on a cycle of six sonatas for
different groups of instruments—a telling gesture, since up to this
point he had largely ignored the received forms of classical
tradition. In a burst of creativity, he completed two of them in a
matter of weeks: the Cello Sonata and the Sonata for Flute,
Viola, and Harp. A Violin Sonata followed. He considered these works
a “secret homage” to French soldiers fallen in battle. In a
patriotic mood, he signed them “Claude Debussy, French musician.”
They forecast the West’s turn toward neoclassicism in the postwar
period, not least in Stravinsky’s ever-evolving, fashion-setting
œuvre. Yet Debussy avoided intellectual irony or self-consciousness.
He saw himself as restoring the beauty that had been destroyed in the
war.
The
Harmonia Mundi label has added to the welcome flood of Debussy on
disk with its own Centenary Edition, and one of its finest offerings
is a survey of those three sonatas. Isabelle Faust and Alexander
Melnikov play the Violin Sonata; Jean-Guihen Queyras and Javier
Perianes undertake the Cello Sonata; and the flutist Magali Mosnier,
the violist Antoine Tamestit, and the harpist Xavier de Maistre give
a pristine performance of the sonata dedicated to their instruments.
That piece is sometimes so sparing in its application of notes to the
page that it hardly seems to exist. The score contains such
indications as “dying away” and “as delicately as possible.”
This is music suffused with pale light; each terse, tender phrase
seems aware of its own impermanence.
Debussy
had found a new path—beyond Symbolism, beyond modernism. One can
only wonder what might have followed, for his life came to a grim
end. In 1915, he was given a diagnosis of rectal cancer and underwent
an operation that had limited success. His final years were horrible.
He suffered from incontinence and stopped leaving the house. He died
as German forces were shelling Paris. Afterward, his twelve-year-old
daughter, called Chouchou, wrote a heartbreaking letter to her
half-brother: “I saw him again one last time in that horrible
box—He looked happy, oh so happy.” Chouchou died the following
year, of diphtheria—a fate of which Debussy, blessedly, had no
inkling. She may have been the only person he ever loved without
reserve.
by
Alex Ross in the print edition of The New Yorker Magazine on October
29, 2018
