Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918); FRA

Read biography at allmusic.com.

###

Achille-Claude Debussy was perhaps the most original musical mind at the turn of the century. While Schoënberg's serial innovations were essentially a search to replace what he considered the used up resources of tonality in order to save the great German tradition, Debussy's quiet revolution was a deeper one that questioned the very essence of western forms and thematic organization. In Debussy we have the first true elevation of sound, color, and even silence to primary compositional status. In this, he was a profound influence on composers as diverse as Bartok, Webern, and Varese. As Stravinsky stated, "The musicians of my generation and I myself, owe the most to Debussy."

Debussy is inextricably tied in the public mind with Impressionism, but like many of the painters, he disliked the term and would be more accurately described as a Symbolist. He was more drawn to the atmospheric canvasses of Turner and Whistler than those of Monet and his circle, and in literature his affinities were Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Edgar Allen Poe.

Nonetheless, some analogies to artistic impressionism have validity. In their desire to render the delicate sensation of the particularities of weather and the specific time of day, the impressionist painters used light, feathery brush strokes that often blurred the outlines of objects. Debussy loved chords such as the ninth that make ambiguous the traditional functionality of the root harmony so that the chords float with no obvious direction. Thus the clear outlines of harmony and harmonic progression are muted and softened. And in the same way the impressionist painters tried to capture the essence of a fleeting moment or mood, so did Debussy, in music that is most often suggestively titled, but in no way interested in programmatic story telling.

The impressionist and post impressionist painters were highly influenced by eastern art, particularly the flat color fields and abrupt angles and croppings of Japanese prints. The flattening of traditional perspective may be likened to Debussy's much looser use of tonality. In traditional Western practice, the gravitational pull of the tonic acts as the horizon line that organizes and prioritizes all the elements in a painting. Much as the painters did, Debussy used traditional elements such as triads, but juxtaposed them in ways that negated their traditional functions. They serve more as independent colors and are liberated from their subservience to chord progressions.

In his desire to move beyond the all pervasive Wagnerisms of the day, Debussy used a new vocabulary including whole tone, modal, and pentatonic scales that were in part influenced by his exposure to the Balinese gamelan orchestra that he heard at the World Exposition in 1889. Debussy found sonata procedures and German linear thinking meaningless to him. There is in mature Debussy less a reliance on thematic logic than on intuitive associations and connections. He wrote in 1902, "I wanted from music a freedom which it possesses perhaps to a greater degree than any other art, not being tied to a more or less exact reproduction of Nature but to the mysterious correspondences between Nature and Imagination."

Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, at St. Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris; at the time his parents were running a china shop. His father was later imprisoned for revolutionary activities in 1871 during the Commune. Debussy was meanwhile receiving piano lessons from Mme. Maute, the mother-in law of Verlaine. In 1872 he was accepted in the piano and theory classes at the Paris Conservatoire. At one point he had studies with Franck, whom he derisively referred to as a "modulating machine."

Although a promising pianist, Debussy failed to win awards at the piano competitions of 1878 and 79 and turned fully to composition studies. By 1883, he had won the second Prix de Rome and the following year he won the first Prix with his cantata "L'enfant prodigue." Debussy had already been to Italy as a pianist in the trio of Mme. Nadja von Meck (Tchaikovsky's patron), but his stay at the Villa Medici in Rome was anathema to him and he left as soon as the minimum two years were up without writing the customary overture associated with his prize.

Debussy was described by his associates as a difficult and reserved man, with an independence that bordered on disdain for convention. From about this time, he began a liaison with Gabrielle Dupont (profession unknown) with whom he lived in near poverty for the next nine years.

In 1892, Debussy became friendly with composer, Ernest Chausson after writing "Fêtes Galantes" on poems by Verlaine. He began the epochal "Prelude a l'après-midi d'un faune" and a first version of the "Nocturnes," but it was the April 1893 performance of "La damoiselle élue" that first brought him public attention. The next month he attended Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande" and at once began to sketch an opera. In December of the same year, the Ysaye Quartet gave the first performance of the the "String Quartet in g." The Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune was performed in December 1894. The languid and sexually suggestive solo flute that opens the piece traversing a tonally ambiguous tritone, begins the twentieth century for many musicians. A comparison of this solo with the solo bassoon opening of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is provocative.

In 1897, Gabrielle attempted suicide and thus began a difficult period in Debussy's life. In October 1899, Debussy married Rosalie Texier, a model and friend of Dupont. In December the "Nocturnes" for orchestra (2.Fêtes) were completed. During the rehearsal of the now completed "Pelleas and Melisande" in April 1902, Debussy was being prosecuted for non-payment of debts. The opera was quickly recognized as a landmark in French music.

The next years were particularly productive. Works of 1904-5 include "La Mer" for orchestra (1.De l'aube à midi sur la mer) and the first set of "Images" for piano. The new confidence in his work has been ascribed by some to a change in Debussy's domestic life. In the autumn of 1903, he met Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker and an amateur singer (11 years earlier, Fauré had dedicated a song cycle to her). In June, Debussy left his wife and in autumn moved with Bardac into an apartment rented with her money. In October, his wife attempted suicide and a number of Debussy's friends broke off relations with him in disgust. In October 1905 a daughter nicknamed Chou-Chou was born to the new couple. They married in January 1908.

After Bardac's financier uncle disinherited her, Debussy's hopes of prosperity were dashed. For the next seven years he had to make ten trips abroad, conducting his own works and playing the piano, neither of which activity was pleasurable for him. In 1909, he was appointed to the board of the Paris Conservatoire and began his first book of "Preludes" (8.La fille aux cheveux de lin) for the piano. He also had the first signs of the rectal cancer that would eventually kill him.

In 1915, Debussy was commissioned to produce an edition of Chopin. This labor of love inspired the 12 "Etudes" for piano and is symbolic in that Debussy's piano music is the first since Chopin to truly explore new sounds and approaches to the instrument. Taking Chopin's style a step further, he insisted that the piano should sound as though it were "an instrument without hammers."

Debussy's last works were three sonatas that were to be part of a cycle of six, and perhaps a new reconciliation with classical forms. He completed the "Sonata for Cello and Piano (1.Prologue; 2.Serenade & 3.Finale)," "Sonata for Violin," and the "Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp" by May 1917, when he gave his last performance playing in the violin sonata. After a colostomy in December, he was confined to bed. Debussy died March 25, 1918.

Debussy referred to himself as a "musicien francais" and he is certainly one of the greatest of all French composers. In his sensuous love of sound and in his ability to capture the poetic essence of an idea, mood or scene (i.e. The Snow is Dancing, from "A Children's Corner," Fireworks, from the second book of "Preludes," or Nuages from "Nocturnes," etc.), Debussy reinvents and continues the great French tradition of Couperin and Rameau into the twentieth century at the time when Paris was the center of all art.