The Piano Works of Claude Debussy

Baschet

1.

General Commentary

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Achille-Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His ancestry being solely made up of shopkeepers, peasants, and employees of the Paris suburbs and the Côte-d’Or, he received but a slight and general early education with a few piano lessons by Cerutti. Madame Mauté, Verlaine’s mother-in-law and a pupil of Chopin, took him in hand and in 1873 he was admitted to Lavignac’s solfège class at the Conservatory, there to win the medal for solfège and to follow up in Marmontel’s piano class. In the year 1874, he received his second accessit (honorable mention), then the second prize in piano (1877), and first prize for accompaniment in 1880. Nothing was awarded him in Durand’s harmony class because of his persistent unwillingness to accept the established rules!

Thanks to Marmontel, and having become the pianist for Madame Nadiejda von Meck, Tchaïkovsky’s famous Egeria, he is able to visit Switzerland, Italy, and Russia. Following his studies in composition with Ernest Guiraud, he obtains a second grand prize at Rome in 1883 and the first grand prize for his cantata L’Enfant prodigue in 1884.

From the Villa Medici, where he remains for two dull years (1885 to 1887) he sends his Damoiselle élue, which is accepted with reserve, and, upon his return to Paris, composes the Suite Bergamasque for piano in 1888. Two pilgrimages to Bayreuth in 1889 and 1890 take him from delirious enthusiasm to the most hopeless disappointment. It is then that he chances upon the authentic score of Moussorgsky’s Boris Godounov and befriends, as his natural allies, a small group of writers and artists who are in some way or another connected with symbolism.

A memorable date in the musician’s evolution is the year 1892 when he finishes his first symphonic work which is no less than his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and when, having discovered Maeterlinck’s theater, he decides to put Pelléas and Mélisande to music. This composition will take him ten years to accomplish.

Meanwhile, in 1893, he offers the Quatuor à cordes, and his Nocturnes for orchestra are favorably received at the Concerts Lamoureux on December 9, 1900. Suite pour le piano follows in 1901.

As a result of the controversial feud over his Pelléas and Mélisande, Debussy who had kept away from the conflicts which he had occasioned, retires into a haughty solitude and, from then on, his life and works become as one. The year 1903 is that of the Estampes for the piano.

After six years of marriage, he separates from Mademoiselle Texier in 1905 to marry Madame Emma Moyse, publishes the second book of Fêtes galantes; a real symphony, La Mer, wrongly named symphonic sketches; and two selections of Images for the piano, closely followed by Images for orchestra.

In 1910, the year of the first book of the Préludes, he conducts his works in Vienna and Budapest. Ida Rubinstein then requests a rapid writing of an important score for a mystère by d’Annunzio, Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, which had its premiere on May 22, 1911. Immediately after this, the Ballet Russe asks for the music of Jeux of which the theme and choreography are by Nijinsky. By 1913 the second book of Préludes is completed.

A triumphal tour of Russia in 1914 precedes the advent of the war, by which Debussy is so affected as to be unable to write, but, despite the appearance of the first symptoms of an incurable illness, he reacts and composes the twelve monumental Études for the piano and plans to write six sonatas for various instruments, by Claude Debussy, French musician. He composes three of these before entering into a long and painful agony which ends on March 26, 1918.

CHARACTERISTICS OF DEBUSSY’S PERSONALITY

To those who enjoy an infinite number of choicely and beautifully expressed details, I suggest reading the works of Maurice Boucher, Charles Koechlin, Leon Oleggini, and Oscar Thompson on the subject of Debussy.

This is only a résumé of personal recollections, and the quotations of a few paragraphs that we found particularly adequate to outline briefly the most salient characteristics of Debussy. Of course, more details will be brought out in the chapters that follow.

Independence is the dominant factor in his character. The joy of being free induces him, from his Conservatory days, to liberate himself as much as possible from all laws and restraint, if so compelled by his musical instinct.

At first, one must disobey, said Maeterlinck (Ariane et Barbe-Bleue). It is the primary duty when order is menacing and cannot be explained. This phrase sums up Debussy’s view that logic is first and pre-established order last.

His tastes were those of a refined artist, sophisticated and exacting. They were multiple, too. He hated vulgarity in any form, and his epicurean or sybaritic impulses often deprived him of the sheer material necessities, yet they were essential to his heart and soul. An esthete with a taste for the rare, the exotic, and the perfect, for order in fantasy, he was also inquisitive, yet discreet.

Habitually silent, and what might have seemed distracted, he needed peace to better hear his soul’s song; solitary, taciturn, and tormented, a sudden and compelling need to see or hear a friend would incite him to leave his work in order to share a joy or the emotion of a propitious creation; then his verve, colorful but always in good taste, as was his music, would relieve him of the almost constant worries that were generally his habitual climate.

For truly he was often anxious and possessed by a curious sense of guilt, probably due to the lack of balance between the material necessities of his daily life and his refusal or inability to create speedily, or publish works he did not find satisfying; he would write to J. Durand, his publisher, as in 1907:

It is nice of you to think of the nervousness of your poor friend who now imagines the worst catastrophes with regard to a mere forgotten flat; think of what can come of it when it concerns things which affect one directly. Excuse me if my nerves are in ‘triplets’ today. Excuse this outburst of spleen. Unfortunately, they are so frequent in my life….

Or in another letter of the same year: Please forgive me for the delay; I work like a factory and I am progressing in spite of terrible and tiresome jumps backwards.

Debussy, as we see, worked slowly and was rarely completely contented with his creation. No one knows as yet how much music he wrote which he destroyed. He often announced the completion of a work, then, after playing it over, he would suppress it and say: I have started all over.

It took him from 1893 to 1902 to conceive and finish Pelléas and Mélisande; and many of the acknowledged stimuli of his piano works were perceived years before the moment when the work was actually finished and ready for the publishers. In contrast to these rather serious aspects of his character was his great à-propos in humor.

When music expresses a feeling of joy, it is important to come out of the mist and let the sun burst forth, to be incisive without being brutal, to dance, play, laugh. As a person Debussy could be witty and he adored paradoxes. His humor was not exactly irony or fantasy, nor sensitiveness, nor bitterness; it was all fashioned in a peculiar tone which added new elements and affected the subjects as a sharp or a flat affects the tone. (Maurice Castelain in the Revue Anglo-Américaine, 1927.)

His mocking sensitivity, his ironic languor, the unusual twist of his humor, were elegies that pirouetted into epigrams, all blended into a subtle alchemy.

What is humor? It is a password, a sign of complicity, a complicity which involves all the players of the game, invites the witness to partake of the jeering. The victim is mocked and the mocker himself becomes linked to the trial, both as judge and defendant. Humor appears thus as an ironical confession of the blunders and bunglings in a universe, of which one is not too confident of being the least offender. With a secret delight, the humorist is apt at turning the derisive mirror toward himself, at the cost of its blurring as it discloses the reflection of his own grimace. This is an extract from Thérèse Lavauden’s Humor in Debussy, an excellent article which should be quoted in its entirety.

Humor is the arrow that man uses to bluff God! In his music, Debussy reaches humor through the irony of entrechats, the recall of an old melody, colored by our astonishment, hustling seconds, unexpected stops, jostling of rhythms, and splashes of arpeggi.

Thus, in Hommage à S. Pickwick, the grandiloquence of the phrase completes the buffoonery of the sudden intrusion of the English national anthem.

In General Lavine-eccentric, Minstrels, or Golliwog’s cake-walk, the stubborn hammering of an out-of-tune and badly played cornet, drum tattoos, or a dirty joke followed by a burst of laughter; these are the simple suggestions of Debussy’s fun. Likewise, in La sérénade interrompue, we witness the lilliputian drama of the lover interrupted by everything, including the night-watchman with the crippled rhythm of his wooden leg. The instillation of the smothered sound of rockets and of fragments of a sleepy Marseillaise in among the firecrackers of Feux d’Artifice is another example.

It is humor tinted with tenderness which makes semi-quavers sprout as bristles on the mean Gradus of Children’s Corner. It is humor again in the amusing takeoffs on Tristan, embodying that impertinence which children cherish so much.

But also, this humor is an expression of Debussy’s all-embracing love and pity, of his understanding of children and adults alike, and of his putting himself so often in others’ shoes. A sympathy which is full of grace and of deep tenderness, gives him a perception which is childlike, and at the same time paternal, and initiates him to the juvenile universe of his beloved little Chouchou. Is it the memories of his own childhood which permit this spontaneous transposition which he shares with the adored child, of reality into the world of fantasy?

Love, tenderness, and pity are at the depth of Debussy’s soul. Pity, which can be of a pagan nature when Debussy contemplates the sea or the reflection of the water, or dreams of the motion of clouds. Human pity, with which he imbues the mysterious figures of Mélisande and La Damoiselle élue. Human pity, when, with a few poignant notes, he transmutes into sounds the words of old Arkel: If I were God, I would take pity on the hearts of men.

Debussy’s synthesis of love was double-edged. In one aspect it was deliberately accepted as sinless, as almost divine, as an ultimate fusion into ambient poetry, a dream inviting the heart’s tenderness and exaltations in the beholding of the charm of things and of beings.

It was also that all-embracing love of which Charles Koechlin speaks: Debussy does not spiritualize matter; he does not deny its existence nor does he suppress it; but he endows it with the adoration of the heart, like the love of life … the gratitude of him who has known voluptuousness.

Through the widely differentiated sensualities of Debussy’s perception, voluptuousness had an unlimited scope—voluptuousness of a look, of hair, of perfume, or of music.

PERCEPTIVISM

What are the mysterious component elements that transform a human being into a creative genius?

Further in the book we will deal with Debussy’s characteristics, and the analysis of the form, structure, melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, and modality that he used. But now, with the help given us by the science of psychology, we would like to examine what the resources of the human mind are and how they may function:

"The activities of the total range which make up the life of an individual, whether normal or abnormal, may conveniently be divided into six groups each represented by a typical sort of activity; these activities have conventionally been termed: sensing, perceiving, thinking, feeling, willing and doing….

"Sensing is exemplified in the acts of seeing the color of a rose, tasting the flavor of a fruit, or smelling the odor of a perfume; there are other sensings for which we have no specific verbs; for example, the sensing of cold, heat, tickle, and pain; we sense also contraction and relaxation of muscles and sense many other conditions and occurrences within our bodies.

"Perceiving may be initially described as sensing and something more…. Under Thinking we include imagining, remembering and anticipating; you imagine, for example, the sound of a violin or of a bell; the blaze of a fire—at moments in which none of these are actually sensed or perceived. You remember the meeting with a friend yesterday … the cold wind of last week, etc…. Under Feeling we have no subordinate terms. At various times you feel pleasure, depression, hunger, anger, elation, pain. Willing occurs when you hesitate as to whether you will do a certain thing or not. Doing or dynamic acting includes all cases in which action on your part modifies or changes your environment or changes your relation to it." *

From the quotation above, we may deduct that the creation of art presupposes: to sense, to perceive, to think, to feel, to will or to do, and/or any combination of such…. Plus….

At the time of perception, the mind takes possession of a concrete matter as perceived by the senses (some form of vibration) and reforms a mental synthesis of it, an idea which then becomes its own. Sensory perception, as an impression made on us by that which is outside of us, then disappears as such, along with its cause, and the resulting feeling in the mind remains in the memory. The depth (or value) of the intuition of things in space and the intensity of the perception of concrete things are the result of the quality of each personal and particular sensitivity, also of the individual knowledge acquired through studies, and most probably of the many hereditary factors.

Looking back on some of the ideas of Mr. Dunlap, whose admirable book could be quoted at length, one can conclude that … if sight governs space and perceptions, touch helps in measuring the forms, resistances, and densities, and the body as it approaches the object can appraise what the eye has seen, what the nose has smelled, and what the ear has heard, thus grasping the three dimensions: breadth, height, and depth.

Through special training, the eye will perceive the color gradations, the dispersions of light; the educated ear will discern noise from those sounds which are music. Thus accumulated in the memory, these recollections will be the mines from which the stimulated mind will draw its creative material. These very memories will be infinitely varied, as illuminated by the colors of the days, seasons, years, the revolutions of the outside world, and the evolutions or revolutions of the inner life of the individual. In brief, the senses manifest through the mind the synthesis of objects, forms, savors, perfumes, light, and vibrations of all kinds in time and space.

When the several direct sensory reactions have become amalgamated into a single perception, the details of this perception will be determined, not by the characteristic sense stimulation of the object alone, but by it in conjunction with the various other stimulations playing upon the receptors of other senses and by the reactions (whether perceptual or ideational) which have preceded. *

As an illustration of this quotation one can take any very ordinary object, in its visual perception (for example); confronted by this sensory stimulus, each person will have a different reaction, depending on association and past experience toward the set object. (A clock may suggest … schooldays, waiting in hospital corridors, first date, zero hour, childbirth, mechanical precision, abstract design, the approaching of old age, tension of deadlines, taking a train, mathematical division, duty, a Harold Lloyd film, tick-tock music, late for the concert, etc.)

The acuteness with which the senses perceive, the acquired education, and the various comparisons that foster the grasping of relations of things to one another, allow for a sublimation of the sensations which, in a true process of alchemy, induces the sum total of the thus accumulated experiences into creative principles. From the historical point of view, we find in the development of mankind, an interesting parallel evolution between the sense of sight and the sense of musical hearing.

The German Hugo Magnus tells us of the historic evolution of the sense of color: At first the rainbow was thought to be all one color; Homer saw it purple; later Xenophon saw it as a purple cloud, red and yellow-green; two centuries later Aristotle sees three colors, red, green, blue; three hundred years later … and Ovid sees a thousand dazzling colors which he cannot distinguish separately; red, being the lowest of color vibrations, was perceived first.

So has it been in music as its overtones were perceived: the unison was first; then the organum with consecutive fifths; then gradually we perceived the triad; then the seventh; and, at the apex of contemporary experience, Debussy perceived the complete harmony of the ninth, eleventh, thirteenth, as the true expression of nature which they are.

Now comes the very question that was one of the many incentives which led to the writing of this book:

Is the subject-matter of music to be accounted for solely in terms of the tonal structure itself or is it necessary, for a complete account of music to recognize the existence of a subject which although symbolized by the music is itself beyond the limits of tonal form and material? *

By what precedes and what will follow, I feel that our answer is: Music should not be accounted for solely in terms of the tonal structure.

In this book one will find note of a number of points of interest relating to the extraordinary innovations used by Debussy in his compositions and relating to musical technique per se, but paralleling these will be considerations of the stimuli of creation as they bear and clarify the intents. For we have realized how the content of a certain object creates a chain of thought-reactions both in the creator and in the auditor or interpreter, and we have admitted that they soon separate the direct from the indirect content and set the symbol over the meaning.

It is then of importance to try to decipher, however hard the task, how this transmutation occurs in the creative process of Debussy, in order to duplicate it, as nearly as possible, in the approach to his works— the end products of this procedure—either as listeners or performers.

It was earlier brought out that education and heredity may be strong factors in this process, but when we consider the type of school experience that Debussy received in his youth, we are bewildered by the acuity of his perception and the universal scope of his cultural acquisitions in later years. His classical studies were of short duration, busy as he was with his music. Heredity and surroundings were unpretentious, his ancestry denoting storekeepers, small merchants, and the like. But, come the adolescent and matured years, Debussy, a student at heart, and an ardent seeker of knowledge born from beauty, adds to his amazingly acute sense of perception the understanding of all arts: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, mythology, Greek and medieval chants, primitive scales of the Orient which number in the thousands. To these artistic endeavors, Debussy adds the cult of all that vibrates in Nature: clouds, moonlight, passing breezes—either carrying the upper partials of bells of nearby or faraway churches, or the fading notes of military bugles, the wind at sea or in the plains, sun rays on a golden roof, or the shimmering lacquer of a Japanese panel.

In Nature, music is revealed to him by the perfumes of warm evenings, trees stretching their branches, the silvery leaves trembling in the emotion from the dirge of All Soul’s Day, or by a laughing sun glancing ironically through the rainbow, and the everlasting beauty of sunsets, the sea, angry or frolicking. To Debussy, Nature was a Cathedral in which his mystic intensity paid homage to God in the infinite beauty of its creation, possessed as he was by what I shall call a religion of the beauties of Nature.

From all these perceptions, and in striking musical progressions Debussy synthesizes the essence of landscapes (Bruyères, Collines d’Anacapri); personal moods of the moment (Brouillards, Les sons et les parfums … Mouvement, Feuilles mortes, Cloches à travers les feuilles); Nature’s angriness (La Mer, Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest); loneliness (Reflets dans l’eau, Des pas sur la neige, Canope, Hommage à Rameau); manly, robust, or fierce qualities (Danse, L’Isle joyeuse, the twelve Études.)

It is incredible how close a contact with the vibrant expression of beauty Debussy sought; it is incredible to realize how impressions made by beauty were stored (in some cases for a long time, and often subconsciously) and integrated into the intimate fabric of his being, to be gradually transformed into sounds as the urge arose.

His is indeed that balanced interaction of senses and mind toward creation which embodies the theory of perceptivism. From a multitude of passing and heterogeneous stimuli, Debussy, in the crucible of his imagination and by a genial transmutation, fashions an alloy richer than the purest metal and attains by his modern alchemy one of the most fascinating apexes in the historic evolution of the Art of Sounds.

IMPRESSIONISM

It is perhaps well to turn our attention now to impressionism, and to investigate once and (we hope) for all what this term can infer toward Debussy, what are its drawbacks, its limitations, its possible interest or reality, and its incapacities.

In a letter of March, 1908, to his publishers, Debussy mentions this term ruefully: I am trying to do ‘something different’—in a way, realities—what the imbeciles call ‘impressionism,’ a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics.

As a matter of fact, from its very first usage, it had a rather insulting connotation; used for the first time by Louis Leroy in the French paper Charivari, April 25, 1874, it applied to the painter Monet and his followers with an undertone of derision. It has never since lost its sense of disdain and its subconscious association with inconsistency and degeneracy, with vagueness of intent and of expression, despite the illustrious creative artists it is applied to.

True, impressionism has been from time to time reassessed and redefined, for instance by Oscar Thompson in 1937, as follows: In literature, in painting, in music, the aim of these kindred artists was to suggest rather than to depict; to mirror not the object but the emotional reaction to the object; to interpret a fugitive impression rather than to seize upon and fix the permanent reality. *

Other sources even include in their description the techniques employed by Debussy (such as modality, pedal-points, pentatonism, whole-toned series, bitonality, etc.) as part of the description of the term ‘impressionism.’ But is that not begging the point? Or, rather, trying too late to amend terminology to make it fit in foolproof fashion the entire work of Debussy.

It is a similar evolution to that of the rash of political terms in isms, which were perhaps genial in their first usage, but which in the mouths of thousands of people have come to convey so many sins, to mean so many heterogeneous concepts, to represent such varying political techniques as to have lost any vestige of meaning, any resemblance to scientific terminology.

We feel toward impressionism in music as many students and researchers in political science must feel about other isms. We rue the day the term was invented, and wish for the day when it will disappear, so that it may not continue to befog the study, the assimilation of the style of Debussy to his normal position in the history of music. We have had time enough since he created, and should have perspective enough to have the historian’s long view of his output, and to no longer cite it as a temporary curiosity with a special and unfit terminology—but rather to view it as a genial but normal result of what came before, and what, in the unremitting evolution of the art, was to come after.

In this light we will consider that for a time Debussy, whose close friends included a number of so-called impressionist painters and a number of so-called symbolist poets, may have been passingly influenced by their aesthetics, by their contrast of unmixed colors, by their uses of equivalences rather than realities, by their stippling technique, by their synthesis of the emotion of the stimulus rather than the onomatopoetic reality in description. In a very limited number of works, for instance, Nuages, Brouillards, Debussy gave a most diaphanous and evanescent form to his music, through the choice of subject and the necessary technique to do justice to that subject.

The public, imbued with Wagnerian aesthetics, quickly exchanged study of these works for a rapid and easy label, which, if thoughtfully applied to a limited one percent of Debussy’s works, might have been ingenious, but which, poured on indiscriminately, has resulted for decades in blurred, vague, sloppy, wrongly pedaled, innocuous performances of Debussy’s works.

For the rest, the major portion of his works, Debussy adapted and fashioned his own technique and aesthetics to many varied sources of inspiration, to stamp them indelibly with Debussyism, with that power of sensorial transmutation discussed under perceptivism.

Because he set to music the Dante Rossetti poem The Blessed Damozel do we call Debussy a