Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy was nearly 40 years old before the world knew his name. Then, on the 30th of April 1902, his opera Pelléas et Mélisande opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and everything changed. The first-night audience split between admirers and sceptics. But the work quickly became a success, and The Times reported that it had provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting those of Richard Strauss.
That kind of lightning-rod moment rarely arrives on schedule. Debussy had spent decades developing a musical language that no one around him quite understood. The conservative faculty at the Conservatoire de Paris called his early submissions bizarre, incomprehensible, and unperformable. He won France's most prestigious musical award and then spent years chafing against the institution that gave it to him. He fell in love recklessly and repeatedly, scandalized polite society, and composed in poverty.
Born on the 22nd of August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the north-west fringes of Paris, he grew up in a family with no cultural connections and modest means. His father ran a china shop that failed. His mother was a seamstress. Yet somehow this child became one of the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. How? What did he hear that everyone else missed? And why did it take so long for the world to catch up to him?
Jean Cerutti, an Italian musician in Cannes, gave seven-year-old Debussy his first piano lessons during the summer of 1870. The family had fled Paris to escape the siege during the Franco-Prussian War. Debussy's father Manuel remained behind and joined the forces of the Commune; after its defeat he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, serving one year. Among his fellow prisoners was the musician Charles de Sivry, whose mother, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, would become the young Debussy's next teacher at Sivry's recommendation.
By the age of ten, in 1872, Debussy was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he would remain a student for eleven years. His first piano teacher there, Antoine François Marmontel, described him as a charming child with a truly artistic temperament. A harmony teacher, Émile Durand, was less generous: he called Debussy desperately careless. Both assessments would prove accurate. Debussy was gifted enough to win prizes at the Conservatoire's annual competitions, advancing through successive levels, but erratic enough to fail the piano competitions in 1878 and 1879, which barred him from the piano classes entirely. He stayed on to study harmony, solfège, and composition.
A summer job in 1879 proved more formative than any classroom. With Marmontel's help, Debussy secured a position as resident pianist at the Château de Chenonceau, where, as his biographers note, he rapidly acquired a taste for luxury that stayed with him for the rest of his life. His first compositions date from this period: two settings of poems by Alfred de Musset.
L'enfant prodigue, a cantata Debussy submitted in 1884, won him the Prix de Rome, France's most prestigious musical award, despite the disapproval of his composition teacher Guiraud and the faculty at large. His friend Georges Jean-Aubry later noted that the cantata admirably imitated Massenet's melodic turns of phrase, which was precisely what the Conservatoire expected. Debussy knew how to write what the judges wanted; he simply preferred not to.
The Prix carried residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. Debussy was there from January 1885 to March 1887, with several absences when he returned to France chiefly to see Marie Vasnier, a singer he had met in a class at the Conservatoire and who had become his lover and muse. He wrote 27 songs dedicated to her during their seven-year relationship. At the Villa Medici he found the atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the accommodation abominable. He was not won over by Italian opera, finding Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. What impressed him instead was the polyphony of the 16th-century composers Palestrina and Lassus, heard at Santa Maria dell'Anima, which he called the only church music he would accept.
In June 1885, he wrote from Rome declaring his independence: "I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!" The Academy responded by calling his submitted works bizarre, incomprehensible, and unperformable. Franz Liszt, who visited and played for the students, provided more useful inspiration than any formal critique. Debussy nonetheless composed most of his Verlaine song cycle Ariettes oubliées during those Roman years; it made little impact at the time but was republished successfully in 1903 after he had become well known.
A week after Debussy returned to Paris in 1887, he heard the first act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Concerts Lamoureux and called it decidedly the finest thing he knew. He went to the Bayreuth festivals in 1888 and 1889. He was drawn to Wagner's sensuous mastery of form and striking harmonies, but he concluded, unlike many French composers of his generation, that there was no future in trying to adopt and develop Wagner's style. By 1903 he had reframed his admiration with the observation that Wagner was a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music. The gamelan's scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him immediately; echoes of them surface in "Pagodes" in his piano suite Estampes and in the pizzicatos and cross-rhythms of his 1893 String Quartet. He also attended concerts of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, conducted by the composer, whose harmonic freedom and non-Teutonic tone colours left their mark.
Back in Paris, Debussy met Erik Satie in 1890, who proved a kindred spirit. Debussy's orchestration in 1896 of Satie's Gymnopédies helped put Satie's name before the public. An informal group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians began gathering around Debussy from around 1900; they called themselves Les Apaches, roughly The Hooligans, to describe their status as artistic outcasts. At various times their number included Maurice Ravel, Ricardo Viñes, Igor Stravinsky, and Manuel de Falla.
In May 1893, Debussy attended the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande and immediately determined to turn it into an opera. He travelled to Maeterlinck's home in Ghent in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation. By February 1894 he had completed the first draft of Act I, and he spent most of that year working to complete it.
Private entanglements complicated the years of composition. While living with Gabrielle Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux, he announced an engagement to the singer Thérèse Roger in 1894. Anonymous letters circulated condemning his treatment of both women and his financial irresponsibility. The engagement was broken off and several of his supporters disowned him, including Ernest Chausson. He married Dupont's friend Marie-Rosalie Texier, known as Lilly, in October 1899. The marriage lasted barely five years.
When rehearsals for Pelléas et Mélisande began at the Opéra-Comique in January 1902, Debussy attended practically every day for three months. A dispute erupted in February when Maeterlinck insisted his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, sing the role of Mélisande; she was passed over in favour of the Scottish soprano Mary Garden, and Maeterlinck was incensed. The Apaches, led by Ravel, who attended every one of the 14 performances in the first run, were loud in their support. The conservative faculty at the Conservatoire tried in vain to stop their students from seeing the opera.
The scandal that followed the opera's success had nothing to do with music. In 1904, Debussy left Lilly for one of his pupils' mother, Emma Bardac, taking her away to Jersey and Normandy without mentioning Bardac to his wife. He wrote to Lilly from Dieppe on the 11th of August telling her the marriage was over. On the 14th of October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly shot herself in the chest with a revolver. She survived, though the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused Bardac's family to disown her. Debussy lost Paul Dukas and André Messager among others. His already strained relations with Ravel worsened when Ravel joined former friends in contributing to a fund for the deserted Lilly.
The Bardacs divorced in May 1905. Debussy and the pregnant Emma went to England, staying at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne in July and August, where he corrected the proofs of La mer. He celebrated his divorce on the 2nd of August that summer. The couple returned to Paris in September, buying a house off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne that would be Debussy's home for the rest of his life.
La mer, his most substantial orchestral work, was premiered in Paris in October 1905 by the Orchestre Lamoureux under Camille Chevillard. Reception was sharply divided. Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps and previously an admirer, wrote that he did not hear, did not see, and did not smell the sea. Others praised its power, its verve, and its brilliant fantasy. In the same month, Emma gave birth to their only child, Claude-Emma, affectionately called Chouchou, who became the dedicatee of the Children's Corner suite. Mary Garden later remarked that she honestly did not know if Debussy ever loved anybody really, but biographers agree that whatever his relations with lovers and friends, he was devoted to his daughter. Chouchou outlived her father by scarcely a year, dying in the diphtheria epidemic of 1919.
In 1912, Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the ballet score Jeux. Its premiere was followed just two weeks later in March 1913 by Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which monopolised musical discussion and effectively sidelined Jeux. In 1914, Debussy began work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments; his fatal illness prevented him from completing the set. Those for cello and piano, for flute, viola and harp (both 1915), and for violin and piano (1917) were finished; the violin sonata was his last completed work.
In 1909 Debussy had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations in 1915, achieving only a temporary respite. He gave his final concert on the 14th of September 1917 and became bedridden in early 1918. When he died on the 25th of March 1918 at his home in Paris, the First World War was still raging. German guns bombarded the city as the funeral procession passed through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery. His body was later reinterred at the small Passy Cemetery behind the Trocadéro, fulfilling his wish to rest among the trees and the birds.
Impressionism is the label that has followed Debussy's name since the assessors at the Conservatoire first applied it, opprobriously, to his early work Printemps. Debussy strongly objected, saying that anyone using the term was an imbecile. In a 1911 interview with Henry Malherbe he spoke instead of his debt to nature: "I have made mysterious Nature my religion. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvellous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me."
The critic Rudolph Reti, writing in 1958, identified six technical features that defined Debussy's musical idiom: lengthy pedal points held in any voice; glittering figurations that distract from occasional absences of tonality; parallel chords functioning as enriched unisons rather than harmonic progressions; bitonality; use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales; and unprepared modulations without harmonic preparation. During a conversation with his former teacher Guiraud in 1889, Debussy played through chord sequences at the piano and declared, "There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law!"
Early influences on his developing style included Chopin, whom Debussy called the greatest of them all for discovering through the piano everything there was to discover; the Russian composers Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky; and the gamelan music he encountered at the 1889 Exposition. In 1983, the pianist and scholar Roy Howat published a book arguing that certain Debussy works are proportioned using the golden ratio, approximated by the Fibonacci sequence. Simon Trezise, in his 1994 study of La mer, found the evidence remarkable while noting that no written or reported evidence confirms Debussy deliberately sought such proportions.
Pierre Boulez observed that modern music was awakened by Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Béla Bartók first encountered Debussy's music in 1907 and credited him with reawakening musicians' awareness of harmony and its possibilities. Olivier Messiaen received a score of Pelléas et Mélisande as a boy and called it a revelation and probably the most decisive influence he ever experienced. The reach extended even further: the pianist Stephen Hough has suggested that Reflets dans l'eau can be heard in the harmonies of the jazz pianist Bill Evans.
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Common questions
What was Claude Debussy's first major success?
Debussy's first major international success was the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on the 30th of April 1902 when he was nearly 40 years old. The Times reported that it had provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting those of Richard Strauss.
Where was Claude Debussy born and when?
Claude Debussy was born on the 22nd of August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise, on the north-west fringes of Paris. He was the eldest of five children; his father ran a china shop and his mother was a seamstress.
Why did Debussy reject the label Impressionist?
Debussy strongly objected to the term Impressionist as applied to his music, stating that anyone who used it was an imbecile. He described his artistic inspiration not in painterly terms but in relation to nature, and in a 1911 interview he declared that he had made mysterious nature his religion.
What composers did Claude Debussy influence?
Debussy's influence extended to Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin, and the jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans, among many others. Roger Nichols wrote that a list of 20th-century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th-century composers altogether.
What is Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and why is it significant?
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is an orchestral work Debussy completed in 1894, based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have regarded it as his first orchestral masterpiece, and Pierre Boulez stated that it was the work that awakened modern music.
How did gamelan music influence Claude Debussy?
Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889. The gamelan's scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him and can be heard in his piano suite Estampes, particularly in "Pagodes", and in the pizzicatos and cross-rhythms of his 1893 String Quartet.
When and how did Claude Debussy die?
Debussy died of colon cancer on the 25th of March 1918 at his home in Paris, aged 55. Paris was under German aerial and artillery bombardment at the time; the funeral procession passed through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery. He was later reinterred at the Passy Cemetery, fulfilling his wish to rest among the trees and the birds.
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