Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Claude Debussy is one of the most important french composers,  and in his time one of the most innovative composers for piano since Chopin and Liszt.

He lived around the turn of the last century in Paris, which at the time was obsessed by putting together different artforms with each other. Artists and writers were talking about poetry as music, sound as colors, and paintings as symphonies. In the music of Debussy one can definitely hear that he was a man of his time. His music awakens all the senses and the imagination, and reaches occasionally such colorfulness that it almost turns visible. Suddenly one starts to experience how notes and sounds recreate masterpieces by the great painters of impressionism, Monet, Degas, van Gogh and Gauguin. Or one feels how the music moulds into an illustration of french poetry, and one can hear sensual verses by Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Sometimes he takes the listener to the circus, to the orient or to the world of the child, wich was inspired by his little daughter Chou-Chou.

He used the piano as a tool to create illusions and atmospheres, wich gave birth to music of rare originality and depth, and pushed the development of piano music many steps forward.

Like most great geniuses, his road to success was anything but straight.

Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was born close to Paris in the town St. Germain-en-Laye, where his parents owned a china shop. Debussy´s musical gift was first discovered by his first piano teacher, Madame Maut de Fleurville, who had been a pupil of Chopin. Mme. Maut sent the young Claude to the Paris Conservatoire where he was to remain for ten years. Debussy´s father started to have dreams about his son making a lot of money as a famous piano virtuoso, but these dreams collapsed since he due to ignorance had put too much pressure on his son. When the young Debussy enrolled at the conservatory he was considered one of the most talented young pianists, but just a few years later he had turned into one of the worst. But the love of music that burned inside the heart of young Claude did not permit him to abandon his music studies, and he turned to composition.

In 1880 he was accepted to the composing class under Ernest Guiraud, who later would prove to be a crucial person in Debussys life. Having a talented pupil is not always easy, and since Claude´s originality alredy started to shine through Guiraud was often forced to save his student from being expelled from the conservatory. Guiraud insisted that Debussy was a genius, and on his teachers advice Debussy decided in 1883 to participate in a composing competition where the first prize was a three-year stay at Villa Medici in Rome with all expences paid. This competition provided Debussy with a second prize, and this was a personal disaster for him. He thought that if you don´t win anything you´re original, and if you win you are a master, but if you recieve second prize you are mediocre without talent. He was so depressed he decided to stop writing music completely. Once again it was Guiraud who came to the rescue and he managed to persuade Debussy to give it another try the following year. This time it went better; with the cantata ”L’Enfant Prodigue” Debussy won the prestigious ”Prix de Rome” and for three years he would be able to forget about outer circumstances and focus on composing. ”Prix de Rome” was also awarded to outstanding young artists in other fields, and Debussy enjoyed the company of the foremost young writers, painters and architects of his time.

In spite of the fact that the stay in Rome meant a great opportunity for Debussy to concentrate on composing, he felt misplaced. ”Here I am in this abominous Villa and I can ensure you that my first impression is not a good one.” he wrote to a friend in Paris. ”Everybody here is such an out-and-out egoist, every man for himself…I´ve been so lonely I´ve cried.” He decided to leave Rome long before his stay would have been over, fully aware that he then lost the possibility of a debut concert in Paris consisting only his works. ”I´ve tried everything, but I cannot stay here…the end result has only been the realization that I could never live and work here.”

Besides the awkwardness  Debussy felt in Rome, he still got an experience that would be of great importance for his future composing. He got to meet Franz Liszt and hear him play. Debussy was particularly fascinated by his use of the damper pedal. ”The piano sounded as if it was breathing.” he wrote many years later. In his piano music Debussy shows that he was really a master when it comes to the use of pedal.

Back in Paris, poor and unsure of his future, Debussy tried to find a publisher for his works, but without result. This period of his life turned out to be very unproductive, but he made many new friends who would last until the end of his life. Socially his friends were not musicians; he much rather surrounded himself with the leading impressionist poets and painters of the day.

Debussy wrote all of his early piano music, wich consists mostly of miniatures, in the years 1888-90. His only work for piano and orchestra, Fantasie, written in 1889, was never published or performed. After the general rehearsal of the first performance of the Fantasie, Debussy ran and took all the parts from the orchestra and conductor and disappeared. He was meticulous when it came to the performance of his works, and if he was not certain that a work would be well received, he cancelled the performance. This was also the issue with his composing, where his perfectionism drove him to destroy many of his works. Pelléas and Mélisande, his only completed opera and the work that brought him worldwide fame, took him ten years to write. At one occasion he started writing the opera from the beginning again, and even at the day of the premiere he was correcting the parts of the orchestra players.

With the orchestra piece Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and the String Quartet (1893) Debussy started to establish himself as a composer to reckon with. “The hearbeat of music started to beat with a new rythm” says Pierre Boulez a hundred years later. With the premiere of Pelléas and Mélisande in 1902 Debussy got his major breaktrough as a composer. The opera was criticized for being decadent and lacking in melody, but awoke enough interest among the musical public to create an international success and make Debussy famous.

Debussy surrounded himself with many women, some of which with had a doubtful reputation. His scandals were infamous in Paris. In 1899 he married the dressmaker Rosalie ”Lilly” Texier, but left her and ran away in 1904 together with Emma Bardac, an amateur singer and wife of a rich and respected banker. They went to the island of Jersey and there Debussy wrote the piano piece L´Isle Joyeuse (Island of Joy). The divorce from Texier was a long and painful process, and he could not marry Bardac until 1908. The couple had already had a daughter in 1905,
Claude-Emma or ”Chou-Chou” as Debussy called her. He dedicated the suite for piano, Childrens Corner, to Chou-Chou.

This marked the start of the most productive period of Debussy´s life. A big number of piano- and orchestra pieces were written during the years from 1905 until his death. He also had Jacques Durand as the first publisher of his life. His most important work for orchestra, La Mer (the sea), and the Images I for piano were written during this year. He wrote to his publisher about Images I the 11^th of September 1905 - “Without false vanity, I think these three pieces work well and will take their place in the piano literature…(as Chevillard would say), to the left of Schumann or to the right of Chopin…as you like it.” Debussy had good intuition about his music.

Debussy´s works for orchestra had their parallels in many of his piano pieces, which comprise an important part of the piano literature from the beginning of the 20th century. His finest impressionistic piano works are found in collections written between 1901 and 1915, and includes the two books of Images, the two books of Preludes, the suite Estampes and the two books of Etudes. The features of Debussy´s piano music are unique. The blurring of the pedal against attractive pianistic effects and a delicate poetic propensity is always evident.

Towards the end of his life Debussy traveled around the world as a conductor of his own works, and was working on an edition of the complete works of Chopin for his publisher Durand. During the work with the Chopin edition Debussy wrote his last major work for piano, the 12 Etudes. “I´ve invested a lot of passion and faith in the future of the Etudes…I´m sure you will agree with  me that there´s no need to make technical exercises boring just to appear more serious; and a little charm never spoilt anything…Chopin proved It!” Debussy wrote to Durand in 1915.

World War I struck Debussy very hard. The suffering of his nation and a serious cancer robbed him of all his joy of life and creativity. He died in March 1918 efter nine years of struggle against the illness. During the time of his death Paris was bombarded by the last german offensive, so the circumstances did not allow a public funeral in his honour. The funeral procession went through evacuated streets and to the sounds of german gunfire. But since then french culture has regarded Claude Debussy as one of its finest representatives.

At the time Debussy´s piano music was written, it was the most important works written for the instrument since Chopin. Almost everything he produced has taken a significant place in the piano literature. And today, almost 100 years after his death, people are still trying to catch in words the mystery of his music, but no one can describe the art of Debussy better than himself:

”There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.” 


Julia Mustonen/Henrik Måwe