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Claude Debussy 1862–1918

The death of this distinguished composer has occasioned widespread and profound regret. He made his own world and language, and whatever niche posterity may assign to him at least it must be a tribute to his independence and originality. In our issue for February, 1908, we gave a sketch of his career from the pen of M.-D. Calvocoressi, accompanied with a portrait of the composer, reproduced from the oil-painting by Jacques Blanche. We now recapitulate briefly the leading incidents of his career.

Claude Achille Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, on August 22, 1862. At the Paris Conservatoire he studied the pianoforte under Marmontel, harmony with Lavignac, counterpoint and composition with Massenet and Guiraud.

In 1884 he was awarded the ‘Prix de Rome’ for his cantata ‘L’Enfant Prodigue.’ Amongst the works he sent from Rome to the Paris Institut was the setting for soprano solo and female chorus of the French translation of Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel,’ but he refused to consent to the customary performance, which would have been given, because the Institut had previously declined to allow his symphonic suite ‘Printemps’ to be performed on the ground that the music was ‘erratic and infected with modernism.’ In 1893 the first performance of his now well-known Quartet in G minor (Op. 10) was given in Paris by the Ysaye Quartet. The celebrated orchestral Prelude ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ was first performed at a concert given in Paris by the Société Nationale on December 23, 1894. The opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ was produced at the Paris Opéra-Comique on April 30, 1902. It was first performed in this country on May 21, 1909, at Covent Garden. Debussy visited London in 1908, and conducted the ‘Prelude’ and ‘La Mer’ on February 1, the Queen’s Hall Symphony Orchestra being the performers. He came again to London on February 27, 1909, when the orchestral ‘Nocturnes’ and the ‘Prelude’ were performed by the same orchestra under his direction.

We are glad to give an instalment of a critical estimate of Debussy’s music contributed by Ernest Newman, and a more personal tribute to the composer’s memory by his friend Jean-Aubry. As very few copies of the portrait given in 1908 are available, we provide with our present issue another portrait reproduced from a photograph taken by Otto, of Paris. [not reproduced here]

Musical Times, May 1918

The development of Debussy

by Ernest Newman.

I.

Few people, I imagine, who are not blinded by partisanship will deny that the Debussy of the last years has been a great disappointment. From one of the most original composers in Europe he degenerated into one of the least original. One charm of his earlier work was its incalculability; the great defect of his later work was that it rarely held a great surprise for us. The man who set out with the resolve to be beholden to nobody became the slave of his own mannerisms. The apostle of a new naturalness in music settled down into the dandy and the poseur, and a rather faded dandy at that, trying to impress his older contemporaries with the costumes and the tricks of manner of a musical generation that we had almost forgotten. The circle of his intellectual and emotional interests, never a very wide one, became more and more restricted in his middle-age. With all sympathy and with all respect, we can only say that works of his last few years showed many signs of something like collapse: I can recall no case in musical history in which a composer of unquestionable genius has so grievously failed to grow with the years, to distil from them a new beauty, a new wisdom, a new humanity. Even in the matter of style there was a lamentable restriction of resource, instead of the expansion we are familiar with in the later styles of the men of genius.

One touches with regret upon this aspect of his work in the hour of his death, for one does not yet know to what extent the comparative failure of the last few years may have been due to bodily suffering. I have always held that a probable explanation of the commonplace with which Strauss’s later music is so plentifully strewn is the simple one that for years Strauss has been physically and mentally overworked: the remarkable brain can still function with something like its old energy, but the energy is largely mechanical. The indefinable something that makes the difference between energetic talent and infallible genius, if it has not quite disappeared, now makes its appearance at relatively rare moments. Physical exhaustion will often give this lack-lustre quality to the work of an artist: the tree produces what seems to be, so far as size and texture are concerned, the same fruit as of old; but the fruit has neither its old bloom nor its old sweetness or subtlety of savour. Mr. George Moore hit off all differences of this kind in an immortal phrase when he described Siegfried Wagner’s head as ‘a deserted shrine.’ One seems to be looking at the real Wagner, and yet the thing that made the real Wagner is not there. The altar stands, but the god no longer visits it. It is possible that something of the same sort may have happened in Debussy’s case; his gradual settling into a small rut may been in part due to a mere failure of physical energy as a result of his long illness. But no one can survey his work as a whole without suspecting that the withdrawal of his mind upon itself, the obstinate exploitation of ideas and effects that had long since served their turn and outstayed their welcome, were in part deliberate. He was not only, like every man of genius, something apart and distinct from the crowd. He consciously specialised in aloofness. In two or three little ways, apart from his music, we detect the fastidious aristocrat – I will not say Pharisee – anxious to show that he is not as other men are. The rule has always been to put the title of a work at the head of it. He, Debussy, not being as other men are, will put the title at the end, as in the two books of Preludes. The rule has always been to show a change of time in the course of a piece by placing the new time-signature at the front of the bar; so he, Debussy, will show his originality by placing it over the bar. He has been told, and believes it, that he is especially French; so he has to emphasise publicly not only his Debussyism but his Gallicism. Thus we get the charming little affectation of the title-pages of what he intended to be a series of six sonatas, – the make-believe engraving in place of printing, the imitation of the type of the old French title-pages, and the pseudo-archaic wording. (See the photographic reproduction on back of separate portrait.)

Isolated little affectations of this sort would mean next to nothing in the case of another composer. But in Debussy they are obviously part of the same self-centred mentality that we find in his music; they throw a small but at the same time significant light on certain obstinate affectations in the music, – affectations of Debussyism, affectations of Gallicism. They are a very tiny key to his mind, but they certainly help us to unlock one or two of the smaller doors of it. We who had not the honour of being of his personal circle cannot as yet see all the interactions of the man and the musician; and candour compels us to say that in this point French criticism, for all its acuteness, has two striking defects. It runs too much either to the personal sentimentality of friendship, or to national sentimentality. It is too propagandist to be thoroughly critical. Some day no doubt we shall know Debussy, through his correspondence and the reminiscences of his friends, as intimately as we know Beethoven or Wagner. It will then be possible to discover precisely how much of conscious self-centredness, of personal and national vanity, went to the making of the singularly restricted artistic personality he showed us all his life, indeed, but especially in his later years.

II.

It would be hardly too much to say that Debussy spent a third of his life in the discovery of himself, a third in the free and happy realisation of himself, and the final third in the partial, painful loss of himself.

We are so accustomed to think of him in terms of some half-dozen great works, and as a composer of the very latest day, that it is with a little shock that we realise that ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ was written as long ago as 1894; that is to say, he had produced his most perfect orchestral work – or, if we admit the ‘Fêtes’ of the ‘Trois Nocturnes’ to share that title with ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ – an orchestral work of a quality that he never afterwards surpassed, in the same year that Strauss began his great orchestral career with ‘Till Eulenspiegel.’ Juxtaposing the two records in this way, we see how limited was Debussy’s growth after he had once found himself. Born in 1862, he begins his real work with the cantata ‘L’Enfant Prodigue’ (1884). In 1886-87[1] came ‘Le Printemps,’ in 1887 ‘La Damoiselle Elue,’ in 1888 the ‘Deux Arabesques’ and the ‘Ariettes Oubliées,’ in 1890 the ‘Valse Romantique’ and the ‘Suite Bergamasque,’ the five Baudelaire songs and some other small works, and in 1892 the first collection of ‘Fêtes Galantes.’ In 1892 he began work upon ‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’ the composition of which occupied him until 1902. Within that period and a couple of added years came the other great works of his artistic prime – the Quartet (1893), ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ (1894), the ‘Trois Nocturnes’ (1899), ‘Pour le Piano’ (1890), the ‘Estampes’ (1903), the ‘Masques’ (1904), ‘L’Isle Joyeuse,’ the first book of the pianoforte ‘Images’ (1904-5), and ‘La Mer’ (1903-5). The third period is one of mixed achievement; it includes the second set of ‘Images’ (1907), ‘Children’s Corner’ (1908), the ‘Images’ for orchestra that include the ‘Iberia’ (1909), the first book of ‘Preludes’ (1910), ‘Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien’ (1911), the second book of ‘Preludes’ (1913), the ‘Jeux’ (1913), ‘La Boîte à Joujoux’ (1913), the ‘Berçeuse héroïque’ (1914), the ‘Douze Etudes’ (1915), the Violoncello Sonata (1915), the Sonata for flute, viola, and harp (1916), and the Violin Sonata (1917).

It is not too fanciful, perhaps, to see in his very earliest work a foreshadowing of that dubiety of style that was to hamper him all his life. In ‘L’Enfant Prodigue’ there are suggestions of three styles. The bulk of the cantata is in the current French idiom of its day. Lia’s aria represents the youthful genius’s improvement upon this; and the attempts at Orientalism in the prelude and elsewhere are probably reminiscences of the gipsy and other music that Debussy had heard in Russia a few years earlier; they are an exotic that he has not been able to assimilate with his style in general. In ‘La Damoiselle Elue’ of three years later we see him submitting to the first of those external influences that were to play so large a part in shaping him. In England, Pre-Raphaelitism owing in part to the feebleness of our music at that time, had come and gone without leaving any trace on it. In France, where the relationship between literary culture and musical culture has for some time been much closer than it has ever been in England, the Pre-Raphaelite ideals filtered through from the men of letters to Debussy. Rossetti’s poem evokes new moods in the musician, and to some extent a new style, but still without taking such complete possession of him as to endow him with a consistent style. Parts of the score, such as the 12-8 melody in the prelude immediately before the voices begin, throw back to ‘L’Enfant Prodigue.’ There is a good deal of Wagner, especially of ‘Tristan,’ in the idiom. But the work as a whole is distinctive, and the first in which we get a hint of the Debussy we were to know later – the lover of vague outlines, of half-lights, of mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour, the apostle of languor, the exclusivist in thought and in style. Twice there occurs in the harmony a chordal sequence in which he seems to be on the verge of the discovery of his famous ‘whole-tone’ system; but he is as yet unconscious of its possibilities.

The work of the next three or four years shows Debussy developing freely and naturally. The independence of his thinking is unmistakable; but as yet it does not run to wilfulness. The style of the ‘Arabesques’ and the more successful of the ‘Ariettes oubliées’ is perfect. There is no violent break with the past, but simply the quickening of certain delightful French qualities by the infusion of a new personality. It looks as if a new and charming miniaturist is appearing, who will do, both in the pianoforte piece and in the song, something that has never been done before. The music is at once imprévue and logical. Even in the songs there is at yet on the whole no sign of the theorist dragging the practician at his chariot wheels, though he is obviously not quite at home in such an idiom as that of ‘Spleen,’ where the music is voulue rather than sentie. Out of the languors and gentlenesses of his own soul and of a certain type of French poetry he makes some charming little pictures, in a style that grows naturally out of the poetic moods and is fully equal to expressing them. It is noticeable that in his gayer and quicker music – the song ‘Chevaux de bois,’ for example – he has to adopt a much simpler harmonic idiom than in the slower and more reflective songs; to the end of his days he never quite succeeded in bringing the more emotional side of him and the childlike, heart-free side into the same focus of style. All this time the harmony is original without singularity, unprecise without weakness. Here and there the whole-tone chord (not the scale) seems to poke its hand out at us, but not obtrusively, only for a moment, and apparently unperceived by the composer. The ‘Valse romantique’ has to this day a touch of strangeness about it, but there is nothing wilful or angular in the strangeness. The harmony, melody, and rhythm are perfectly mated, which is more than can be said of them in some of the later works. The peculiar colour of the harmony comes largely from the lavish use of chords of the seventh and ninth, but these are not as yet an obsession with the composer; and always the common-chord arpeggios come in to keep the tonality steady. There is a faint hint at one point of that mixing of tonalities in separate registers that Debussy was so often to put to remarkable use in later years; but, as with the whole-tone chord, it remains no more than a hint. The style of the ‘Suite Bergamasque,’ again, is perfect; the freshness of the ideas is not more welcome than the easy mastery in the ordering of them. There is no sign of the whole-tone system, but the harmony derives a peculiar colour from its use of seconds and the sudden juxtaposition of remote keys. A liberator seems indeed to have come into music, to take up, half-a-century later, the work of Chopin, – the work of redeeming the art from the excessive subjectivity of German thought, of endowing it with not only a new soul but a new body, swift and lithe and graceful. And that this exquisite, pellucid style could be made to carry not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort is proved in the lovely ‘Clair de Lune.’

A contemporary would have felt justified in building the highest hopes upon the young genius who could manipulate thus easily and certainly the beautiful new shapes his imagination conjured up. The composer was plainly a stylist of the first water; he had the two sure marks of style, infallibility of touch combined with simplicity of means. The question might have suggested itself, ‘How far can this economy of material and soft transparency of substance be made to go in the expression of profounder feelings?’ That is the question that Debussy seems to have put to himself in the five Baudelaire songs which are the weightiest products of his first period. We cannot turn these pages over to-day without a new respect for the young composer. He seems to have had an instinct that both his thought and his style were in need of expansion; and he made a brave attempt to achieve that expansion by assimilating what could be of service to him in German music. Not only do the Baudelaire songs touch depths of expression beyond anything that Debussy had reached before; not only is their harmony of a new richness and variety; they have a melodic freedom and interest that is too often lacking in his later music, and above all they reveal a rather remarkable faculty for continuous, spacious design. One would put them, as regards form, in the same category as the greater songs of Strauss – the ‘Hymnus’ and the ‘Pilgers Morgenlied’ – were one not afraid of wrongly suggesting a Straussian influence. As a matter of fact, these songs of Debussy anticipated those of Strauss by about seven years. The provenance, however, is the same in each case; it is the Beethoven-Wagner system of continuous symphonic development applied to the song. One can only vaguely speculate as to what might have happened had Debussy continued to develop along this line. But the system as a whole soon proved to be alien to him. His revulsion against Wagner about this time was no doubt only the outward visible sign of an inward change in him that had a wider and deeper significance than merely Wagnerism or anti-Wagnerism. M. Louis Laloy tells us that up to 1889 Debussy was still a perfect Wagnerite. He had been to Bayreuth in that year, and had been ‘moved to tears’ by ‘Parsifal,’ ‘Tristan,’ and the ‘Meistersinger.’ If he did not actually make the acquaintance of ‘Boris Godounov’ just after this, it was apparently then that he became penetrated by Moussorgsky’s new and drastically economical style. ‘In comparison with Moussorgsky,’ says M. Laloy, ‘Wagner seemed to him sophisticated: he returned in the following year, however, to the holy city, came back disabused, and undertook to demonstrate to his old friend[2] that one could not like at the same time two forms of art so opposed to each other. The friend, a fervent Wagnerian, would not hear of this; and the two men parted company.

It was about this time that Debussy became intimate with Mallarmé and his circle. He had already shown his affinities with the insubstantial mental world – so remote from the heroic world of Wagner and the German myths – of the vaguer Pre-Raphaelites and of Verlaine; and he may have already known something of Maeterlinck, whose ‘La Princesse Maleine’ had been published in 1889, and ‘L’Intruse’ and ‘Les Aveugles’ in 1890. Mallarmé’s theories did not make a wholly new Debussy; but they led him to attach more importance to the elements in himself that were unconsciously making for the same ideals in music as the Mallarmé circle were trying to realise in poetry, – the revolt against Romanticism, the avoidance of rhetoric, over-emphasis, and false eloquence, and the need for the evocation of emotion by suggestion rather than direct statement. The whole ideal could not be more succinctly phrased than in Mallarmé’s remark that what the poet should give us is ‘the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the leaves; not the intrinsic dense wood of the trees.’[3] That, of course, is an ideal of another kind than Wagner’s, whose genius always ran to over-copiousness. Debussy exhausted his interest in the German ideal in the Baudelaire songs, where, to fill the big canvas, he is obviously energising more laboriously than was his wont; and the theories of Mallarmé and the symbolists harmonized so perfectly with the real bent of his own genius that it is not surprising that his mind now took a new orientation. The harmonic texture of the songs is unusually full and compact. Once more, though now with increasing frequency, we see him reaching out semi-consciously to the whole-tone system. Though it is still far from being anything like an obsession with him, he is obviously becoming alive to the more extended possibilities of it. Again the harmonies of the seventh and ninth tempt him by their richness and melting sweetness. Whether it be really so, or whether it only seems so in comparison with the works that preceded and followed these songs, the style of them strikes us as rather overloaded. Debussy is trying to carry a heavier pack than he is really built for. That, apparently, was the conclusion he himself came to; for in the next collection of songs, the first set of ‘Fêtes galantes,’ the texture again becomes one of exquisite simplicity and transparency.

This brings us to the critical year (1892) of Debussy’s career. It was in that year that he discovered and was fascinated with Maeterlinck’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’ and set himself to make that drama the evoker of his real personality and the generator or what he felt to be his real style. He worked in quiet seclusion at the opera for ten years. That fact is in itself, I think, significant. He did not so much work at it, as M. Laloy says, as ‘dream upon it during these ten years, interrupting his meditations to write when he felt that the moment had come for fixing his thought. It was a process of slow condensation of dreams, a capturing of mystery, a revelation of hidden feelings, a long and marvellous exploration of the darknesses of consciousness.’ The style of the opera fully bears this out; it is a style that has been discovered by search rather than one that came unbidden. It is a mistake, it is true, to speak of its style as if that were one. ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ shows not one but several styles. Much of it is of no higher order than recitative, supported by an occasional chord. A good deal of it consists of vocal recitative over an orchestral figure or two that is sometimes reiterated with extraordinary effect. And there are pages of admirably sustained flow, in a style at once lyrical and dramatic. Now that the novelty of the work has passed off, it is seen that long stretches of it consist only of tricks that any ordinary capable musician could perform equally well. It is doubtful, too, whether the style can profitably be put to any further use. The opera owes some of its success to various coincidences that are hardly likely to occur again. In most operas, the genius of the musician has to make up for what the ‘book’ lacks in force and style. But Maeterlinck’s drama is a striking piece of literary work apart from the music; and it can quite well bear the main burden of the stage action on its own shoulders in the episodes where Debussy’s music amounts to next to nothing. For all its mysticism, again, it is a first-rate melodrama, full of the kind of ‘thrills’ that orchestral music can so easily underline. In the third place, there was the luckiest, rarest coincidence between the general mental world of the poet and that of the composer. The delicate tenuous, mournful musical style that Debussy had been developing in his vocal works was the predestined counterpart of Maeterlinck’s style and of no other. The musical method was suited to none but shadowy characters, all of them – even Golaud – rather under life-size, and all carrying about with them a sort of aura of plaintive melancholy. It is significant that Debussy produced no other opera after this. He is said to have been engaged for some years on a ‘Tristan.’ If that should ever appear, we shall be interested to see whether he had found a new dramatic style for the new subject, or whether, relying on the ‘Pelléas’ style, he had been able – which one would à priori be strongly inclined to doubt – to make it cover quite another field of psychology and to draw characters of quite another stature.

‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’ I need hardly say, is a wonder-work. It is extraordinary that a composer should have aimed at something so entirely different from anything that anyone had thought of writing before: it is still more extraordinary that he should have succeeded as he has done in the more distinguished portions of the score, for the sake of which we gladly forgive him the less distinguished and more mechanical portions. The purpose of this article, however, is not a detailed exposition of the beauties even of Debussy’s greater works, but a study of the broad development of his thought and style. As regards thought, ‘Pelléas’ obviously makes no attempt to cover much wider ground than that of the earlier vocal works. And as regards style, while the composer has now attained a remarkable mastery of one or two implements, on the whole he is beginning to show a failure of general resource. His harmony is by now decidedly manneristic. Devices that were once his servants have overgrown into formulae that are now his masters. He repeats himself again and again. His music often becomes unrhythmically stiff; it is like a garment of heavy brocade that makes the wearer of it seem ungraceful because as he walks it does not ‘give’ with the body, and cannot fall into the infinity of changeful little folds that ‘rhythm’ means in tissues as in music. And the style has become disjointed: the music lives from hand to mouth, from bar to bar: there is no steady organic flow of blood through the body of it. Everything in the way of logic that music had painfully conquered in two or three hundred years is put aside as of no account. The miracle is that with so many glaring weaknesses the opera should be the striking fascinating thing it is.

The twelve years or so that ran from the commencement of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ saw the production of most of the other works that give Debussy his place as one of the masters of our time. ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ and the ‘Fêtes’ of the ‘Nocturnes’ are the two outstanding masterpieces of this period, completely original in idea, absolutely personal in style, and logical and coherent from first to last, without a superfluous bar or even a superfluous note. In the Quartet, free as is the general style, and exquisite as it mostly is in idea, we cannot resist the impression that small as the form is it is too large for him. Mere repetition sometimes takes the place of development; which of us does not feel that the Andantino would have been all the better if the entrancing conception of the opening could have been maintained to the end, and that the Finale is little more than German academicism masquerading in a French professorial robe?

His harmony, too, shows some signs of that stiffening into solid blocks that was later to become a mannerism with him that often broke the wing of his rhythm. Elsewhere, too, we see the theorist over-riding the artist, the manufacturer and vendor of a new article placing it in front of his window under any pretext, or without any pretext at all. The ‘Danse sacrée’ and ‘Danse profane’ are in large part merely cheap and clumsy exploitations of a few harmonic oddities. How well one knows some of the more wooden of them – this, for instance:

(examples 1 and 2 not reproduced here)

He is like a child playing with a new toy that he persists not only in playing with in the nursery but in dragging into the drawing-room and out on the lawn and into the street.

The novel resonances fascinate him for their own sake: he does not know how to make music of them, how to build them up into living constituents of a continuous idea. To vary the simile, he is a child with a tube of paint the colour of which delights him and which he dabs upon the drawing-paper with painful, irrelevant iteration. But in the work of this period there are also the admirable ‘Masques,’ ‘L’Isle Joyeuse,’ ‘Pour le Piano,’ ‘Estampes’ (‘Pagodes,’ ‘La Soirée dans Grenade,’ ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’), and the first set of ‘Images’ (‘Reflets dans l’eau,’ ‘Hommage à Rameau,’ ‘Mouvement’). In all of these, except the ‘Hommage à Rameau,’ where he lapses into the unrhythmic stiffness of the ‘Danse Sacrée,’ he is at his very best, moving with perfect ease and freedom along the most unaccustomed ways, drawing new resonances from the pianoforte, capturing all sorts of phases of light and water and aerial vibration that had never been recorded in music before. The ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ are a new and curiously successful experiment in song-writing. If the second set of ‘Fêtes Galantes’ is not quite so successful, that is because the calculation is a little more obvious at times; Debussy is too plainly bent on showing that he is Debussy. The songs of this period, indeed, are on the whole more sophisticated than the pianoforte pieces and the orchestral works, because here he is more intent on realising the Mallarmé ideal. An interesting sidelight on his mind is thrown by the ‘Proses Lyriques,’ the words of which are his own. We see him manipulating the stock formulae of the symbolists with a sad lack of humour. Some of the phrases are the usual facile French clichés, such as the description of ladies, ‘les Frêles, les Folles,’ who have in times gone by wandered among the trees of the scene, ‘semant leur rire au gazon grêle, aux brises frôleuses la caresse charmeuse des hanches fleurissantes.’ That may pass: but we cannot repress a smile to-day as we read of a ‘white shiver,’ of the waves ‘chattering like mad little girls coming out of school, amid the frou-frous of their dresses,’ of the ‘naughty shower of rain’ that has the effect on the little waves of creating ‘frou-frous of flying skirts,’ of the ‘white kiss’ of the moon, of the Sunday in the country, when everyone in his best makes for the outskirts of the town, and the ‘trains go fast, devoured by insatiable tunnels,’ and ‘the good signals along the line exchange mechanical expressions with their solitary eye’! It is hardly to be wondered at that these facile falsities of poetry should generate, at times, a musical style equally facile and equally false.

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Some recollections of Debussy

by G. Jean-Aubry

Leaving Paris for London a few months ago, I visited Claude Debussy on the morning of my departure. His health at that time was much improved; so much so that he was projecting plans for the future. I was able, without any effort, to make him believe that I thought their realisation possible; but for almost a year I had known him to be doomed, and had never entered his door in the Bois de Boulogne without a feeling of deep sadness, which had to be concealed. One day I had found him after a long and painful attack of his illness, spent and scarcely recognisable, without his usually keen perception, and smiling weakly and pitiably. I tried to resign myself to the thought of never seeing him again; but then there came one of those deceptive improvements that mocked fears and revealed him again so alive, so restored in verve and quickness of intellect, that I cherished a hope that he would live, and that the doctors had been wrong.

The last time I was to see Debussy we spoke at great length of his coming to England. I undertook negotiations for his conducting and playing the pianoforte parts in his two Sonatas. On his saying that he did not yet feel well enough to take up composition again, but that he would gladly write an article, I begged him to send me one for publication in England. I did my best that day to awaken in him the sense of renewed life – that life which I had already believed lost, but for which, as I have said, I began to hope again. As he accompanied me to his door, and shook hands, he said (and these were the last words I heard from his lips): ‘How I should like to go back to England with you.’ And that day, indeed, he had spoken of the time when we had come here together in 1908. He ardently desired to revisit London, for he had many charming recollections of his first visit. But now I shall never hear that voice again, except in the tender remembrances I hold of him – that voice, mordant and passive by turns – and I shall no longer see those piercing eyes gazing so ironically and, at the same time, seemingly under the spell of an indefinite dreaminess.

His death is an irretrievable loss to French music; and for me, personally, is the loss of a friend whom I deeply admired, one who during more than ten years had given me many proofs of affectionate interest. To-morrow no doubt many of those who never did anything for him of his work will assert that they had been his ardent friends; yet of friends he had but few, for he was scarcely sociable and seldom communicative. I myself had indeed for a long time avoided his acquaintance, having been warned against his misanthropy. Yet from the day I knew him I felt that I had found an admirable man of balanced outlook, able to weigh the great and the little, jealously guarding his solitude, despising gossip and impulsiveness, avoiding the inquisitive journalist who is one of the drawbacks to fame, but full of confidence in – and even intimacy with – a chosen few.

To have found and held his friendship I consider one of the most memorable incidents of my career. To me it had been given to know and appreciate his work long ere the public acclaimed it. Debussy seemed to feel how my admiration for his individual art ignored circumstance, and was independent even of our common friendship. I remember his strange satisfaction when once I declared that there was one of his works I did not like, although it was one for which he had a certain attachment. He loved liberty as much for others as for himself. There is abundant proof of his extreme dislike of, or at least indifference to, a certain uncritical admiration without judgement, a kind of fashion dictated by the ‘Debussy snobs’ which was entirely foreign to his nature, and perhaps more repugnant to those who admired the composer than the indifference once shown to his work by the greater public.

In a letter dated March 25, 1910, referring to a certain remembrance very precious to me, he said, in a significant postscript: ‘In any case, my dear friend, one of my best recollections of that time when I was not yet pestered with "Debussyism." ‘

I met Claude Debussy for the first time in 1906. Living in a provincial town, I had for several years known and greatly admired the ‘Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire,’ the ‘Chansons de Bilitis,’ and ‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’ and I made each of my short visits to Paris a welcome opportunity of improving my acquaintance with these works. I made friends with artists like Ricardo Viñes and Madame Jane Bathori-Engel, who, almost alone at that time, interpreted his pianoforte music and his songs. The young composer André Caplet, with whom I had long been on terms of intimacy, proposed to introduce me to Debussy; but the rumours I had heard concerning the composer’s seclusion, and at the same time the feeling that I would have no interest for him, always made me refuse, not withstanding my great desire to know him. Permeated as I was by the marvellous qualities of his work and by the moving and fascinating originality of his inspiration, I began to feel a desire to express the feelings awakened in me and to communicate to others, by means of articles and lectures, my admiration for and my belief in the composer. The result was that one day, in 1906, Debussy let me know through a friend that he would like to see me. I relate this occurrence because it shows the artist in a different light from that in which he has usually been viewed. At that time I was simply a young man with but few intimate friends, a unit in the population of a large commercial town; my literary beginnings as yet contained hardly anything of note, and were rich only in enthusiasm and artistic zeal. Claude Debussy, on the other hand, had already known the adverse criticisms and the dawn of glory which ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ brought to him, and had already won the twofold distinction of a remarkable composer and an unsociable man. And yet he showed uncommon interest in an unknown young man who had a predilection for his work. Afterwards I had several opportunities – rare enough, for I did not wish to importune him – to introduce or commend friends to him, and he invariably showed them great kindness and cordiality. I can call to mind here, in London, my friend Frank Liebich.

In 1907, when Mr. T. J. Guéritte founded the Sociéte des Concerts Français and gave his first concerts in London, Newcastle, Sheffield, and Leeds, I told Debussy of our intentions, for I had some share in the making of those programmes. Guéritte and I share the honour of giving the first performance in England of the String Quartet, in December, 1907. But the following translation of an extract from the letter Debussy wrote to me some little time before, on October 26, 1907, may be of more particular interest to English readers:

Please forgive my not having replied sooner to your kind letter and thanked you for your activity. If my name can be of use to you, do not hesitate to avail yourself of it, and may England deal kindly with you. By the way, it always seemed to me that English people have a merely ‘official’ taste for music, the exigencies of which have, so far, been quite sufficiently met by Handel and Sullivan. I do not see Cardiff on the list of towns you are going to visit. Surely that town is an important musical centre where French music would be cordially received?

To tell the truth, this allusion to Cardiff is attributable to the fact that his brother lived there at that time. But already he had shown a desire to know how the British public would judge his music, and to come to England himself to ascertain how his works would be received.

I might perhaps quote here the following passages from another letter written at the same period (December 11, 1907), to show the interest he took in the first efforts to make his works, and particularly his chamber music, known in this country:

I received the programme of your concerts in England; it is perfect, and I have no doubt that English people will appreciate its elegant concision. Very often, through absence of care or taste in the making of programmes, the result resembles a badly-framed picture. It is a pity! And is it not preferable to cater for the good taste of a few, even at the risk of not pleasing the bad taste of the many?

This is indeed admirable propaganda, above any kind of personality, a thing for which one must be grateful to you. I rely upon seeing you in London. Your presence will be encouraging among so many strangers, whether hostile or friendly.

It was, in fact, at that moment that Debussy was invited to appear at one of the Queen’s Hall Symphony Concerts, on Saturday, February 1, 1908. The works to be conducted by him were the ‘Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune’ and ‘La Mer’ (first performance in England).

I was most anxious to see Debussy conduct, and particularly before an English audience. His cordial wish that I should accompany him to London, or that we should at least find each other there, would have conquered any possible resistance. However, I feared for a moment that the sate of my health might not permit the journey which I desired with all my heart to make. He wrote to me on January 22, 1908:

MY DEAR FRIEND, – I assure you that I heard with the greatest regret that you have been ill. I thought of you on Sunday, and hoped that I might see you. The London concert is fixed for February 1, and I shall stay at the Grosvenor Hotel (Victoria Station).

I trust that you have had time to recover sufficiently to embark on a journey which I fear will be strenuous, considering you will have to cross the sea to hear ‘The Sea’ and then to return by the sea.

Believe me, My dear friend,

Yours affectionately,

CLAUDE DEBUSSY.

I was present at that concert. We lunched together – the composer, Madame Debussy, T. J. Guéritte, and myself – and I must say that in spite of the fact that he was greatly pleased with the orchestra after that morning’s rehearsal, yet he was extremely nervous and uncomfortable. We did our best to reassure him, and told him that he was no stranger to the London public, that he would be sure of the warmest reception, and that there was no cause for any apprehension. But, sensitive and nervous as he was, this first encounter made him restless.

The ovation he received from the English public at that concert was like nothing else I can remember. I can still see him in the lobby of Queen’s Hall (where I went to shake hands with him immediately after the performance), trying to hide his emotion, and saying repeatedly, ‘How nice they are, how nice they are!’

And the Daily Telegraph, on February 4, 1908, was quite right in making the following report, due I think to Mr. Robin H. Legge:

Musical London has always a goodly welcome to offer the distinguished strangers within its gates, and probably no one present at Queen’s Hall on Saturday afternoon was more surprised at the warmth of the greeting extended to M. Claude Debussy on his first professional visit to this country than the French composer himself.

The London papers – I kept the cuttings, and they lie before me as I write – were unanimous in emphasising two facts, neither of which displeased Debussy: the enthusiasm of the public and the physical resemblance of the composer to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, which some of the papers went so far as to designate as ‘striking.’

At the door of Queen’s Hall, and even to the door of his carriage, Debussy, fatigued by all his emotions, was the victim of the avidity of autograph-collectors, who thrust threatening fountain-pens at him from every point of vantage. Shrinking into the corner of the carriage to escape a kind of enthusiasm to which he was anything but partial, he yet repeated again with a tired patience, ‘How nice they are!’

I saw him fairly frequently in those years, and he often spoke to me with great satisfaction of the reception accorded to him in London; moreover, the fame of his work began to spread at that period. Musical England awoke, and while in 1906 Debussy was scarcely known (only the ‘Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune’ had been played at a Ballad Concert in 1904), at the beginning of 1909 lectures on Debussy and performances of his works began to multiply in the large provincial towns as well as in London. Before we had any work of that kind in France, a little book on ‘Claude Debussy,’ by Mrs. Liebich, appeared in the series of ‘Living Masters of Music,’ edited by Mrs. Rosa Newmarch. In the course of the same year I was invited to lecture on Debussy at Aeolian Hall, but it had then become almost unnecessary to rouse the enthusiasm of British musical circles for our composer, who had already sufficiently stimulated the interest of certain critics and the imagination of the public.

I kept Debussy informed of all these activities, and of the propaganda work of Edwin Evans in London, W. G. Whittaker and T. J. Clark at Newcastle, and T. J. Guéritte, whenever it was practicable. In a lengthy article I published in ‘S.I.M.’ I endeavoured to appreciate duly the evidences of an awakened English interest in French music, particularly in Debussy, and the early enthusiasm of the British public for his work.

Debussy was himself interested in this subject, and he wrote to me on March 30, 1909, what he felt concerning English criticism and English musical audiences:

What you have called ‘Le Bilan du Debussysme en Angleterre’ is all the more interesting – even leaving Debussy out – on account of the tendency of those young people which is revealed. It is far superior to what is manufactured over here, where people who write bad press-notices imagine themselves to be critics.

All that keen interest, and the memory of his visit in 1908, made it an easy matter to persuade him to come to London once more and to conduct the Queen’s Hall Orchestra on Saturday, February 27, 1909, when the ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune’ were presented. On this occasion he was asked to go not only to London, but also to Manchester and Edinburgh, and he wrote to me on February 24, 1909, in jocose vein:

I hope to see you in London and to tell you of the wiles of your friend Guéritte, who is trying to coax me into stopping at Manchester on my return from Edinburgh. That man has no pity.

But the state of the composer’s health prevented him from going anywhere but to London. The ‘Nocturnes’ were received with great warmth, and the public even insisted on a repetition of ‘Fêtes,’ this piece having been slightly compromised by an oversight on the composer’s part. The Society of British Composers, the Playgoers’, and the Concert-goers’ Clubs joined in a reception given to the composer at Aeolian Hall on the night of February 27. On his return to France he told me of the great kindness shown to him, which, owing to the precarious state of his health, he was unable fully to enjoy.

I am able to give further proof of Debussy’s interest not only in the efforts made in England on behalf of French music, but in those made in France for English music. The French public is often accused abroad of showing little interest in foreign art, while the French papers are said to contain every day articles (particularly in war-time) wherein people set themselves up – often in the wrong way – as defenders of French art. Debussy, who was as thoroughly French as it is possible to be, held views infinitely more correct than those ‘jingoists,’ wherever they hail from, and however reluctant he was to lend his name to any enterprise whatever, he wrote the following letter to T. J. Guéritte on September 10, 1909:

[Translation]

My dear Guéritte, – You may be assured of my greatest sympathy with your plan to establish a Society for British Music in Paris, and you may certainly make use of my name in whatever way you please.

In spite of my native indifference to all that resembles an undertaking of any kind, my slight means of assisting you are at your disposal.

Madame Debussy and myself send you our kindest remembrances.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Had any distinguished British composers shown a similar interest in the foundation of the Sociêté des Concerts Français in 1909? This question is merely intended as a reply to certain groundless reproaches which we have occasionally to suffer.

On May 21, 1909, the first Covent Garden performance of ‘Pelléas at Mélisande’ was given. Debussy was to have directed the rehearsals, but I think I remember that he did not do so, though I do not know the reason. I always regretted his inability to be present at that first performance, which the Daily Telegraph called, in the headline to the report published on May 22, 1909, ‘an artistic triumph.’

Since that year, in spite of all my efforts, Debussy never visited England again. Last year I had hoped to realise the plan that was so dear to him, but illness intervened. Never did he fail, however, to hold strongly to his inclination, and by way of gratitude to his English friends, he gave English titles to the little Suite, the ‘Children’s Corner,’ which he wrote for his little daughter. He also devoted a page of his ‘Boîte à joujoux’ to the ‘English Soldier,’ and in his Preludes appear the ‘Minstrels,’ ‘Puck,’ and ‘Pickwick,’ like remembrances of that regard for England of which he often spoke to me. This natural inclination was perhaps enhanced by earlier recollections of the time when he, still unknown and striving after artistic influence, set a poem of Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel.’

I have repeatedly stated elsewhere my opinion of Debussy’s work, and I propose to do so more exhaustively still in a book which I have planned for a long time and for which my articles were merely sketches. Debussy has often teased me in his friendly way about this book, for which he accused me of collecting the smallest details with a patience that he always designated by the one epithet – ‘redoubtable.’

To-day, in the sadness I feel when I remember the past and when I look over those letters, one by one, which a distressing presentiment made me carry with me when I last left France, I can only think of the master and of the friend I have lost, the one who wrote to me, in his touching simplicity:

The fact that you were not present at the performance of ‘Iberia’ made me almost think, at first, that you might be a little vexed with its author. You must never be that. I not only forget nothing, but you know all the reasons you have given me to make it impossible for me to harbour any such ugly feelings for you.

To me he was not only the author of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’ the inimitable interpreter of the musical afterthoughts of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, or Verlaine, and the innovator of contemporary French music; he has been the object of even deeper admiration. I owe him so many joys – those contained in the beauty, the spirit, and the emotion of his works; those I have found in France and elsewhere during the last ten years in the endeavour to make others understand more and more all the messages contained in his music, and the reasons why it is reminiscent of the purest and rarest qualities of our race.

To me he was not merely a great composer: he was a representative figure, a symbol of all that is dearest to me in France. He was a friend with whom I had often discussed, in that bright studio of his, amidst those simple ornaments and the books he loved, questions of French music and literature, and during these last years we spoke about all that the War had awakened in him who had been so deeply national. He had always striven most earnestly to find again our real traditions, and to fight ever against those like Wagner’s, which he admired, but at the same time considered it dangerous to our art to follow.

I think of that singular face which I shall never see again except in closing my eyes and gazing upon the wall, dark and yet shining, which is the past, and I still hear his voice, his last words: ‘How I should like to go back to England with you!’

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The French press and Claude Debussy.

Our Paris correspondent says:

A composer who has occasioned so much controversy in his own country and elsewhere, has died almost unnoticed, since everything unconnected with war has been thrust into the background by the grave events through which we are passing.

A few papers have, nevertheless, rightly judged that the death of one of the greatest artists of our day could not be left to pass without the publication of some articles of adequate length, if not revealing understanding of the place of the composer of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in the musical history of his time. The Courier Musical has seen fit to ask M. Alfred Mortier, a dramatic author, to write on Claude Debussy. In a more than extraordinary article, this author discloses that, in spite of the fact of his acquaintance with Claude Debussy since about 1890, he could make nothing of his music at that time, and scarcely more ever since, and that his intercourse with the composer had been most spasmodic during the last twenty years. One is really impelled to wonder what can induce the editors of reviews to entrust such apparently unqualified persons with the task of writing an obituary notice on a great artist. Surely men like M. Vincent d’Indy, who published a very clever study of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in 1902, or M. Gabriel Fauré, who so sincerely wished to see Claude Debussy at the Institut, or M. Maurice Ravel, who knows the composer’s work most intimately, would have given us more valuable contributions concerning this great musician.

It is curious to note how little it is understood in France that Debussy played so important a part not only in the evolution of French music, but also in its dispersion and in the influence exercised by it abroad.

Nevertheless M. Henri Quittard, in the Figaro of March 20, publishes an article worthy of its subject, and containing the following passages:

[Translation.]

The loss is all the more irreparable because of the great originality of Claude Debussy’s art. As his genius developed, it became more and more apparent that all the novelty of his work was for ever personal to him. However exquisite, those works were not, perhaps, of the order of those which may develop into a lasting tradition. They do not appear, in fact, to have engendered any imitators or direct disciples. Among the admirable florescence of French music during the last fifty years, he remains unique and, in a manner isolated . . .

In a very different form, appertaining to him alone, he always retained something of the voluptuous softness and feminine grace of these two masters [Gounod and Massenet]. Chopin, Moussorgsky and Chabrier no doubt bred in him that marvellous extension of harmonic conception which will remain his greatest glory. He was not insensible to the subtle and penetrating art of Gabriel Fauré, not to the moving and smiling grace of our 18th century music, nor perhaps to some hesitating essays of more obscure composers. But it must be understood, above all, that he has succumbed to these various influences only within the limits which even the greatest musician cannot escape. Between what he has received and what he has left us there is an enormous difference, and it marks the extent of his genius . . .

As much of Debussy’s work as remains known, is rich enough to preserve his name for ever. As time goes on, his place among the master-musicians will become clearer, but even now it can be confidently stated that it is side by side with the greatest.

From a long and scarcely deeply appreciative article in the Journal des Débats of March 28, by M. Adolphe Jullien, who is attached to older forms of art than those of Claude Debussy, the following may nevertheless be quoted:

[Translation.]

Among the French composers which the last few years have seen to grow and establish themselves in the favour of the public, M. Debussy was no doubt, together with M. d’Indy, one whose influence and lustre were of the greatest. The latter, by the strength and solidity of his erudition and the masterly power of his works, attracted a number of pupils who came to be formed or transformed by his teaching; the former, without teaching connection, but through his novel charm, the fluidity and even the vagueness of his sonorities, the suave sensibility and vaporous poetry flowing from his highly individual music, had seduced, together with a few refined amateurs, a number of composers, many of whom were not afraid to become his rivals. Debussy was therefore, strictly speaking, not the leader of a school, but he lent to his art a touch of such originality and found such novel musical expression, that he could not help becoming, against his will, a kind of master, surrounded by so many satellites – not pupils, but imitators.

[The difference of this view from that of M. Henri Quittard, quoted above, will be noted. -Ed., M.T.]

The excellent article by M. Paul Landormy in La Victoire (April 2) should be reproduced in its entirety. But it is impossible to refrain from publishing at least the following, which is so true and so rarely understood:

[Translation.]

All the resources acquired by musical art in earlier days are used by Debussy at their proper time. He rejects some of them, and does not break with tradition. He enriches them with new, chiefly harmonic, designs, but he retains all that the centuries have left to his art.

However, he does not deliberately show the traces of his knowledge, and he does not care if he appears to have forgotten the past. He hates the exhibition of any encyclopaedic erudition which makes a work look like the summary of the whole history of musical technique. He makes a choice of his resources, and does not thrust them forcibly on his hearers.

It was in this sense that he said he disliked musical theory, the art of undue development and of extracting more from a theme than it contains, and more than is admissible. But he had his theory, or rather his eloquence. He does not strain it. Nothing in his music is strained. He limits our pleasure in order to make it more complete. He always fears to try one’s patience. He is discreet and concise.

The most curious of all articles published in the French Press on the occasion of Debussy’s death, is perhaps the one written by, not strictly a musical-critic, but that excellent and courageous writer M. Laurent-Tailhade, who says in La Vérité (April 2):

[Translation.]

Claude Debussy is among the greatest musicians of modern times, along with César Franck and Richard Wagner. No doubt Vincent d’Indy and Gabriel Fauré (who was his master) also occupy a place of equality with the composer whose career has now been closed by a premature and cruel death, but neither of them perhaps is equal in freshness, elegance, originality, and supple and robust vigour to the enchanter who gave such appropriate utterance to the ‘Romances sans paroles’ and ‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,’ and who reached the height of Verlaine and surpassed Mallarmé.

And after having rated M. Saint-Saëns, who, in defending French music, never mentioned in his articles either César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, or Claude Debussy, – M. Laurent-Tailhade goes on to say:

Those who have not heard Ricardo Viñes conjure up at the pianoforte, with his profound and melancholy touch, such things as ‘Jardins sous la pluie,’ ‘Arabesques,’ and ‘Nocturnes’ do not know what a subtle, unexpected, and delicious charm there is in the pieces written by Claude Debussy for Chopin’s instrument. The Polish master, the gentle consumptive, has never revealed in all his work greater charm, greater mysticism, and greater strangeness than the author of ‘Pelléas’ has infused into those ‘marginilia’ which he wrote as a pastime between his larger works.

Claude Debussy’s death having occurred at a moment when the monthly reviews are going to press, we are obliged to wait until next month to notice the interesting contributions which will no doubt appear to swell the literature connected with the great musician, who will never be replaced and whose loss will be still more keenly felt as time goes on.

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Notes

1. These dates refer to composition, not performance, and in some cases, of course, can be only approximative. [back]

2. The old gentleman, a professor of music in Paris, who had initiated him into ‘Boris Godounov.’ The score was the original one, not the later version with Rimsky-Korsakov’s retouchings. [back]

3. Mr. Arthur Symons, in his essay on Mallarmé in his book ‘The Symbolist Movement in Literature,’ has given us a sympathetic and penetrating study of this ideal both in theory and in practice. [back]