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Prelude

He rejects all heritages and is repelled by those construction kits that so often turn the composer into a make-believe architect; for him, form is never given; he was constantly in search of the unanalysable, of a development in the course of which surprise and imagination retained their rights; he had nothing but mistrust for architectural monuments, preferring structures in which rigour and free will intermingle: with him words, keys, all the paraphernalia of scholarship, lose their sense and relevance; the usual categories of an outworn tradition are inapplicable to his work, even if we extend their meaning.
-Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez’s image of Debussy as a composer in constant rebellion against musical tradition has to be understood in the light of his own rejection of the past. But it’s by no means a distorted picture. The one thing it lacks, perhaps inevitably, is any clear sense of what Debussy took from the musical environment in which he grew up: what he accepted as well as what he rejected.

I spent the first dozen years of my money-earning life as a freelance music critic, an activity that positively forbids specialisation but forces you to confront and find words to describe whatever the repertoire and your editor is pleased to throw your way. There was already a great deal of Debussy about in those days, the 1960s and 1970s; but there was plenty of other French music as well, the music of the world into which Debussy was born and against which, in his student years especially, he fought. Of course there was Pelléas et Mélisande, but you could also catch a production at the St Pancras Festival without the extended interludes (the form in which it was composed, but never played in Debussy’s lifetime). There were operas by Gounod (not only Faust) and Bizet (not only Carmen and Les Pêcheurs de perles); there was Massenet (not just Werther and Manon) and Chabrier (Le Roi malgré lui, L’Étoile), and Lalo (Le Roi d’Ys), and Dukas (Ariane et Barbe-bleue), Chausson, Fauré (especially his chamber music and songs), wall-to-wall Berlioz after his centenary in 1969, but also Alkan and Franck, Saint-Saëns, even d’Indy, and plenty of the earlier French music – Rameau, François Couperin, Destouches – that Debussy complained was neglected in the Paris of his youth.

It was easy even then to identify all these composers as in one way or another French (with due allowance for the Belgian Franck), much harder to put one’s finger on what it was that they had in common. In the introduction to his book on French music, Martin Cooper had provided a lucid explanation of the differences between the French and, for example, German views of art. After quoting a remark of the critic W. J. Turner that ‘it is the sublimity of the soul that makes the music of Beethoven and Bach so immeasurably greater than that of Wagner and Debussy’, he pointed out that ‘to seek in French music primarily for a revelation of the composer’s soul or for marks of the sublime is to look for something which the French consider a by-product . . . The French composer is consciously concerned with the two data which no one can question – his intelligence and his senses.’ And Cooper added, ‘The regarding of a piece of music as an artefact – a thing of planned shape, dimensions, colour and consistency – rather than as an expression of an emotion whose end is in itself, brings the French composer nearer than any other to the plastic artist.’

This strikes me as a perfect description of the attitude of Debussy to his work, and indeed of the work itself. But it doesn’t exactly fit the other composers listed above. Or rather it fits them only in part, and it is precisely this hybrid character of so much nineteenth-century French music – its partial fulfilment of the aspirations that, in Cooper’s analysis, would make it truly French – that explains the context against which Debussy, first as a student, then as a composer and music critic, found himself rebelling. The problem, in two words, was German music. From Gluck to Wagner, the German influence on French composers had been irresistible and, in Debussy’s view, profoundly damaging. ‘The influence of Gluck on French music,’ he wrote in Gil Blas after a performance of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, ‘is well known, an influence that could only have manifested itself thanks to the intervention of the Dauphine Marie-Antoinette (an Austrian)’. Rameau’s music, he goes on, is

compounded of a delicate and charming tenderness, precise accentuation, strict declamation in recitative, without that German affectation of profundity or the need to double underline everything or explain everything with a breathless ‘you’re a collection of particular idiots who understand nothing unless forced to have the wool pulled over your eyes’.

Gluck had famously pontificated about the nature of opera, and aspired to turn what, in Lully and Rameau, had been an essentially artificial, hybrid spectacle into an integrated, high-minded moral allegory of life and death. And Gluck had been one of the favourite composers of Berlioz, whom Debussy, in turn, called ‘the favourite musician of those who knew little about music’. In an early letter he called him ‘a prodigious fraud who came to believe in his own hoaxes’, and he later accused him of ‘aiming madly at effects, which is what makes a lot of his music so intolerable’. Berlioz, he remarked in Gil Blas, is ‘so in love with romantic colour that he sometimes forgets the music’.

So it turns out that, from the start, French music of the nineteenth century had been deflected from its true path by the influence of German grandiloquence and the Germanic soul. Berlioz had in fact been a cul-de-sac, at least as far as French music was concerned. But something far worse had befallen French music, and that was Wagner. In some ways, the extent of Wagner’s influence on French music is curious, not least because it reached its height in the decades after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, when one might have expected there to be a serious reaction in France against anything remotely Germanic. It was almost as if there was some conscious self-abasement before the master race.

The Wagnerian origins of French Symbolist literature had preceded the war in the person of Baudelaire, and were in any case highly selective, a matter of philosophy and aesthetic atmosphere, and without specific technical consequences. But for composers it was something altogether wider-ranging and, in Debussy’s view, correspondingly damaging. French musicians flocked to Bayreuth for the first festival in 1876 and the several festivals of the 1880s. In Paris the short-lived Revue wagnérienne started up in 1885, with predominantly literary contributors; but the influence of Wagner was everywhere apparent in French music in the 1880s, especially, though not exclusively, in opera, which in France had always been the touchstone of musical excellence. Composers struggled to absorb Wagner’s technical prescriptions without being able to match his control of scale and continuity or his orchestral brilliance. Devices such as the leitmotif, the long-breathed chromatic harmony, the heavy mythical, quasi-symbolic subject matter, were adopted like costumes out of a dressing-up cupboard, without ever working their way into the essence of the musical or dramatic thinking.

For the young Debussy, as a student at the Paris Conservatoire in the late 1870s and early 1880s, there was another crucial aspect of musical life that had effectively been appropriated by the German way of thinking. The teaching of harmony and counterpoint (solfège) and of form was deeply rooted, as it still is, in the music of Bach and the classical Viennese masters. True, the elements of counterpoint were derived from Palestrina, but the author of the system – the Gradus ad Parnassum – was an eighteenth-century Austrian, Johann Joseph Fux. To add insult to injury, the teaching of piano, from the ground up, was dominated by the method of yet another Viennese (admittedly of Czech parentage), the Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny. All this pedagogy was imbued with concepts of system and logic that Debussy made up his mind were alien to French ways of thinking and feeling, though it’s fairly clear that what he actually objected to was the connection between the theoretical apparatus and the great monuments of German music, culminating in the overpowering music dramas of Wagner himself. After all, logic as such was just as much a French (Cartesian) purview as it was German (Kantian-Hegelian). The difference was largely one of atmosphere and, if truth be told, amour propre.

Debussy’s changing attitude to Wagner is bound to be a recurrent topic of a musical biography such as this. Almost alone among French composers, he managed both to love Wagner’s music and to escape the more pernicious aspects of its influence, while pinching from it all sorts of isolated musical images – chords, fragmentary progressions, what one might call musical situations – and recycling them in a way that expressed his personal idea of sensual beauty. Partly for the same kinds of reason, he tended as a young man to avoid the company and conversation of fellow musicians, and to prefer that of poets, writers, cabaret artists and, to some extent, painters. He was one of the few musicians at Mallarmé’s Tuesdays. There was a brief, intense friendship with the composer Ernest Chausson, himself a somewhat detached figure musically, but an artistic connoisseur with a house full of beautiful pictures and strong artistic connections through his painter brother-in-law Henry Lerolle. Chausson had been a keen Wagnerite and an early visitor to Munich and Bayreuth for Wagner performances. But Debussy’s greatest Wagnerian friends were not musicians but writers, notably Pierre Louÿs and the Swiss journalist Robert Godet, one of the founding committee members of the Revue wagnérienne.

In rejecting Wagner, Debussy was thinking a kind of music that prioritised what he saw as the virtues of French art, ‘its clarity of expression, its precision and compactness of form, the particular and specific qualities of French genius’. In fact he achieved a great deal more than that. He might after all simply have followed Nietzsche’s (insincere) injunction to ‘méditerraniser la musique’ in the spirit of Bizet’s Carmen, a masterpiece that breathes freshness and vitality but hardly reinvents the language. Instead he not only discarded the heavy northern gloom of The Ring and Tristan, he threw out most of the grammatical infrastructure that had supported Wagner’s immense narrative frameworks. Suddenly there is a concentration, a focus on particular ideas and images that is, as Cooper implies, somewhat painterly. This is not a question of taking sides in the whole tormented issue of whether Debussy can or cannot be called an Impressionist. It has more to do with the way in which any painter handles the motif within the limits of the picture frame. In much of his music, Debussy seems to work like this with motifs and frames, rather than with the evolving, novelistic discourse, not only of Wagnerian opera, but of the whole symphonic tradition of nineteenth-century music. He was perhaps vaguely aware that, working in this way, he was proposing a significant change in the language that would have consequences in the work of other composers. Or maybe he was simply joking when he told Louis Laloy, ‘I’ve at last got a 75-centimetre table for writing things that have without fail to revolutionise the world.’8 He was in a hotel by the sea near Dieppe in August 1906, trying to work on the second book of Images, pieces such as Cloches à travers les feuilles and Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, which really do, in their quiet way, turn the language of music upside down.

What follows is a biography of sorts, but it is a biography with the difference that it sets out to treat Debussy’s music as the crucial expression of his intellectual life, rather than, as one finds in many Lives of Composers, a slightly annoying series of incidents that hold up the story without adding much of narrative interest. This approach inevitably involves a certain amount of musical talk, though I hope nothing impenetrable to a willing non-specialist. The existing literature on Debussy is rich and extensive; there are straight biographies and there are studies of the music, either in whole or in part. Much of it is on a high level of excellence, and there is work of real brilliance. Obviously I have depended to a considerable extent on much of it, always I hope adequately acknowledged. But I am not aware of any book that adopts a strategy quite like mine. 

Working on Debussy, his life and his music, has been the greatest pleasure imaginable. Few composers ever had so precise an image of the music they wanted to write, and even fewer have been so ruthlessly meticulous in the search for the exact expression of that image. Nineteenth-century composers (to say nothing of their predecessors) had worked with a set of routine procedures that would theoretically have enabled them to produce music by the yard with barely a thought, though needless to say that isn’t a fair description of what they actually did. It is, nevertheless, more or less what conservatory students were taught to do, and it is what Debussy rebelled against. In the end he was having to formulate every detail of his music as he went along, judging sequence and continuity, structural design and balance, more or less afresh for each piece. In the twentieth century this way of working became more and more the norm. But Debussy did it first, and nobody since has done it so skilfully or with such beautiful results.