Turner To Cezanne IV: Claude Debussy

“However real one’s sufferings are, they look rather quaint and dramatic on paper. Anyway the best thing is not to take all these hardships too seriously. They support what I might call the Cult of Desire. And when all’s said and done, desire is what counts.

The composer whose music is associated with ‘Impressionism’, a term borrowed from the visual arts, was a man who preferred the Symbolist style of painting. Also confounding our expectations, though we now find sublime beauty in his compositions, Debussy strove for modernism, for a new way in music.
Achille Claude Debussy (1852-1918) was one of five children, born in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to a family that lived upstairs over the family china shop. At one point, financial difficulties led to three of the siblings being parceled out to relatives, creating a distance that was never entirely bridged in later life.
Achille, as the boy was then called, began piano lessons by accident but displayed sufficient talent that he enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris at age ten. He would back into the prestigious Prix de Rome the same way at eighteen. By then, the young man was wrapped up in his first love affair with a wealthy married woman, fourteen years his senior, and he had no desire to leave Paris for two years study in Rome. “Here there is no tomorrow; everything falls asleep” Franz Liszt had opined a few decades earlier, and Claude agreed.
The resulting prize composition, La Damoiselle elue (text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) with its innovative harmonies appealed to a large audience but the young composer chose to turn his back on professional success, living in poverty and relying on the kindness of his friends.
Now Debussy perfected his literary style, frequently and compellingly quoted by Roberts, using letters to wring financial support from the well-to-do. To his Roman benefactor, he wrote: “First of all please forgive me for taking so long to send news of your poor little musician. The first reason is a cold, an Italian one which became French, but whichever, the mother of all colds.” And to his friend Rene Peter (1893): “When you come on Sunday try to be extremely rich, because if I don’t pay my rent, people (or something resembling them) will hang furiously on my doorbell!”
Given Debussy’s love of words, it is understandable that his early works include exquisite songs, setting the works of several of France’s finest poets including Pierre Louys (Chansons de Bilitis) and Paul Verlaine (Fetes galantes). However the 1890s were a time devoted to perfecting his opera Pelleas et Melisande, not performed until 1902, when it received a lukewarm reception from critics and a public not yet ready for vocal lines that soared independently of the melodies.
In contrast, his tone poem La Mer (1905) was an immediate and immense success. “The sea has been very good to me, and has shown me all of her moods, “he exulted. At the same time, Debussy’s ill-conceived marriage to the naïve and gentle young Lily Texier disintegrated under the combined weight of his moods, his infidelities, and the couple’s financial struggles. It is then, perhaps to be expected that the most stable liaison of Debussy’s life was with Emma Bardac, a woman of means with whom he became parent to his adored daughter Claude-Emma (nicknamed Chouchou), born in 1905, before her parents were freed from their other entanglements. It was typical of Debussy’s self-justifying way that he broke the news of their separation to Lily in a letter, telling her he wanted to be alone when he was already with Emma. “An artist is in the main a detestable interior kind of man, and perhaps also a deplorable husband,” he wrote.
A taciturn man who could be extremely charming when he extended himself, his irony was hard to miss. A sensualist who often lacked the material means to gratification, he used words to manipulate others to get what he wanted. Debussy’s letters are sui generis and while Roberts includes lengthy excerpts, their literary quality and interest does nothing to impede the narrative flow. The book is a model of musical biography, blending the life and the music without making unwarranted connections between the two. And at a mannerly two hundred and some pages, there is no resemblance between a biography and a doorstop.
Debussy died of cancer at fifty-six, only months before the Great War ended. He was spared what might have been the greatest blow: Claude-Emma died in a diphtheria epidemic the next year, at fourteen.

Paul Roberts is a British pianist who has made several recordings of Debussy’s piano music and is also author of the book Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy

CLAUDE DEBUSSY by Paul Roberts London, Phaidon Press: 2008 BIO DEB

And listen to the music:

Nancy Allen, harp, et al: Music of Ravel and Debussy, Angel EMI Classics, GS ALL MRD A78 CD
Dawn Upshaw, vocal, et al: Music of Light, Nonesuch D UPSH VL U12 CD
Veronique Gens, vocal, etal: Chansons de Bilitis, Virgin Classics V GENS NE G21 CD

Georg Solti, conductor, Chicago Symphony: Prelude A L'Apres-midi d"un Faune, La Mer, Trois Nocturnes, London Records EA DEBU NOC S82 CD

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre symphonic de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records,

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre de symphonie de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records, B DEBU PM A22 CD