Magic a la Belle Epoque

                “Tout est nombre. Le nombre es dans tout. L’ivresse est un nombre.”
                           (“Everything is number. Number is in all. Drunkenness is a number.”)
                                                                          Baudelaire

Claire de Lune, Arabesque, La Mer, and the Suite Bergamasque have always echoed in my mind as some of the most magical, esoteric compositions these old ears have ever enjoyed. I am listening to Claire de Lune at this moment, the Bratislava Symphonic version, and so must pause. Its original title, Promenade Sentimentale, has always seemed more fitting to me. The mind of the man behind the piece has every bit as much intrigued me for his lifestyle and methods at la fin-de-siècle in Paris. Claude Debussy was an extremely private man; in his humility he destroyed most of his musical sketches and writings, so it is tough to get inside his head to appreciate the genius behind his work. He left fascinating clues, however, that give us a glimpse into his life during a magical time in Paris after the turn of the century.

In a letter to his publisher he noted that there was a bar missing, purposefully, on page 8 of Jardins sous la pluie. It was necessary, he wrote, to satisfy Euclidean mathematics within the composition: "elle est nécessaire, quant au nombre; le divin nombre". Debussy seemed always to compose with respect to using esoteric­ proportional techniques. The number he was preserving here was no less than the Golden Mean, which divides a single line into an internal harmony or divine ratio of greater and lesser. Once the missing bar is put in, Jardins sous la pluie conforms to the golden section mean proportion. Since the missing bar merely repeats the previous one, the bar’s addition is intended specifically to generate Debussy’s required internal symmetrical consistency. For Debussy this was in due deference to Euclid's precepts, how to cut a given finite line in an extreme and mean ratio. This is how the Divine Proportion is established. Discovered by Pythagoras and his mystical school, concerned with the occult but no less practical properties of numbers.

Renowned rule-breaker that he was, Debussy still wrote his music out in conventional bars using conventional notes. In the simplest application of the golden mean, you may have a piece of music of twenty-one bars. If at the thirteenth bar you climax the first movement, since thirteen is the golden mean division of twenty-one, the piece then conforms dynamically to a “divine” proportion. While this still conforms with traditional rhythms and melodies, it possesses a hidden “occult” form of celestial authority and coherence that is guided by the internal laws of nature. It is very apparent that Debussy was ever mindful of numbers in his work. Intrigued by how painters applied geometrical proportion, including golden mean proportions to pictorial composition, Debussy applied the occult principle to music as a means of giving form to ideas perceptible to him through nature.

The golden mean has always held mystical and magical properties, going back into antiquity. At the turn of the century in a settled and comfortable time referred to in Paris as the Belle Epoque, the so-called "occult sciences" were deemed as a higher science with regard to bringing about spiritual development and advancement of higher consciousness. The golden mean is the point on a given line where the ratio of the shorter part of the length created by the point is in the same proportion, or ratio, to the longer part, as the longer part of the length is to the line as a whole. This is not an arbitrary piece of geometry; nature uses the principle in its growth patterns; the rule is inherent to the universe of all things. It speaks of a transcendent, intelligence present in cosmic formation. The principle demonstrates the Hermetic dictum: “As above, so below.” The harmony of the greater ensures the harmony of the lesser, and the two are proportionately and harmoniously interrelated. And of course, harmony is everything in music.

The golden mean held tremendous meaning for Debussy and his esoterically-minded friends: his magical work is lasting testament to his experimentation with it. There is evidence of this in piece after piece as well as respect for the Fibonacci sequence in his progressive natural timing of pieces. Virtually all of his work shows proportional organization, perhaps the real genius behind his memorable harmonies. Nature seemed ever forward in the mind of Debussy; he saw within nature a deeper, hidden order of subtle intelligence, inherently aesthetic. His discovery of poetry within mathematics was infused throughout his mastery and expression of music. Debussy himself said that he professed “une religion de la mystérieuse nature,” the Hermetic religio mentis, the religion of the mind whose axiom held that mundus imago dei: “the world is the image of God”

Debussy had the essential spark of genius in himself, certainly, and like others so gifted, he sought ways of enhancing his talent and taking it via depths and profundities to magical heights through inspiration, originality, knowledge, and experience. Given what we now know of the genuine Occult Paris, it would be extraordinary, if not incredible, had a man like Debussy not taken advantage of the spiritual movement of Hermetism that was, for an epoch, alive and radiant in France’s capital. That he kept it to himself indicates a depth of understanding, loyalty to its precepts, and innate seriousness about his vocation