The Debussy Edition

All in all, the 1860s must be reckoned as a low point in French musical life. Tannh¤user had been whistled off the Op©ra 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 fatal 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 Soci©t© Nationale de Musique, which, under its banner ars gallica, aimed 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 Po¨mes 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 Pr©lude   l'apr¨s-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'Apr¨s-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 opposed 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, C©sar 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 Degas's ballet dancers (Debussy greatly admired this painter, whom he always referred to respectfully as "Monsieur" Degas).

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 Pell©as et M©lisande 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 M©lisande, 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 Soir©e 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 Pr©ludes 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 Pell©as 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 Th©odore 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 Pell©as and the accolade of the L©gion 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 father'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 "Ib©ria", 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 ‰tudes he looked both back to Chopin and Schumann and forward to Bart³k 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 flesh 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 Lou¿s 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 fran§ais"!

Roger Nichols
2/2012