The barline is a ubiquitous feature of musical notation. It appears throughout Debussy’s music, just as it does in the music of Mozart and Stravinsky. The barline has myriad functions and can produce diverse responses. It may be an audible component of musical notation or rather the trigger for an audible event or performers may go out of their way to render it inaudible. Debussy’s arabesque-like melodic lines and flowing parallel chords seem to invite the interpreter to overlook the barline and seek cues for agogic stress or accent elsewhere in the notation. However, a tendency on the part of some performers to delay the arrival of the first beat after a barline produces its own form of stress, which may not be supported by duration or accent. This chapter explores changing performance styles, drawing evidence from the earliest recordings of Debussy to the most recent.

Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

With Debussy’s adoption of a markedly nationalist position at the onset of World War I, in appending the epithet ‘musicien français’ to his name, it was by no means evident during the years immediately following his death that he would, in time, become one of the most influential figures for later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century composers in France and elsewhere. While his music endured in the interwar years, his musical and aesthetic concerns were largely rejected or eclipsed. In 1956 Boulez identified Debussy as forming part of a peculiarly French axis of aesthetic modernists – Debussy-Cézanne-Mallarmé, ‘a solitary church spire’ and ‘an excellent ancestor’. This chapter investigates ways in which Debussy’s music and ideas implicated themselves within the work of composers active after 1945 from Messiaen, Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana through the work of Boulez and Barraqué to his continued influence on various branches of contemporary French composition, not least the Spectralists.

Debussy Studies 2 follows on from the first volume under that title a little over a quarter of a century later (1997) and enters a field of extraordinarily rich recent research activity devoted to Claude Debussy. The co-edited OUP collection Rethinking Debussy (2011)1 appeared just before several international conferences for Debussy’s birth sesquicentenary in 2012. Indeed, the commemoration of Debussy in 2012 and then in 2018, to mark the centenary of his death, gave rise to a number of events in France, Belgium, Canada and the UK, providing multiple opportunities to reflect on Debussy over the century, and to stimulate new research by well-established scholars and by a whole new generation of researchers. Jann Pasler carried out the clearest reflective survey of the state of Debussy research in 2012 in an article published in Notes entitled ‘Debussy the Man, his Music and his Legacy: an overview of current research’.2 She used it as an opportunity to take stock on Debussy scholarship and how it had changed since the composer’s centenary in 1962, focusing in particular on the last ten years.

This chapter reappraises Debussy’s Piano Trio of 1880 and his two substantial cello pieces of 1882, in the light of having edited them for the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy. Surviving documentation suggests that Debussy, while working for Nadezhda von Meck in summer 1880, aimed at producing a Trio in Russian character, one that may even have played a part in prompting Tchaikovsky’s Trio of two years later. The structural cohesion and character of the work are also reassessed, including the editorial challenge of completing a passage for which only a cello part survives. Similar reappraisal is applied to Debussy’s two cello pieces of 1882, and clarification offered of the titling of one of the pieces, which has long been labelled Nocturne et Scherzo (despite being neither): that title appears to have been mistakenly carried over from a pair of entirely different violin pieces now lost.

Early twentieth-century French critics often characterised Debussy’s music as ‘natural’. A seemingly banal descriptor of a radically novel musical language, the attribution of ‘naturalness’ drew from a broad range of ideas in the burgeoning human sciences of the time, from post-Helmholtzian acoustics and the physiology of hearing to theories of emotion in the emerging nouvelle psychologie. At the same time, the supposed ‘naturalness’ of Debussy’s music stood in tension with a recognition among some Debussyist critics that ‘natural’ music remained, at bottom, a contradiction in terms. Surveying accounts of music and naturalness in the writings of three critics active in Debussyist conversations – Paul Landormy, Lionel de la Laurencie, and Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi – this essay explores both the intellectual borrowings and influences that informed their accounts of Debussy’s music and, more broadly, the ways in which these specific conversations contributed to changing ideas about the elusive category of ‘music’ itself.

Why study music manuscripts? Historical musicologists are often interested in ascertaining accurate details within a musical score and in investigating the composer’s creative process. Collectors, on the other hand, may view manuscripts in wide-eyed wonder of the genius behind their creation and as beautiful works of art in themselves. Yet another reason to examine composers’ autographs – because they offer a potent wellspring for informed musical performance – prompts the present study.

Accordingly, we scrutinise some of the thorniest passages in Debussy’s Recueil Vasnier manuscript and illustrate various ways in which the insights gleaned from such an inquiry can illuminate musical performance. The editorial process – involving the establishment of an authentic musical text, with pitches whose clefs and accidentals reflect Debussy’s compositional intent, an understanding of rhythmic nuances and deciphering of idiosyncratic rhythmic notation and tempo indications, and the parsing of poetic text – raises questions and suggests solutions that directly impact interpretive choices.

The music of J. S. Bach clearly had a powerful impact on Claude Debussy. As a student, Debussy studied figured bass and fugue, and even performed several pieces by Bach, such as the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and Toccata and Fugue in G minor. Later in his career, he signed a contract with Durand in April 1915 to edit several chamber works by Bach, completing one for the six sonatas for violin and keyboard (BWV 1014–1019) in April 1917 around the same time as his own Sonata for Violin and Piano. Although Debussy did not explicitly quote any material from Bach’s music in his Violin Sonata, this chapter examines some of the ways in which the former inspired him when composing the latter. These include favouring highly decorated melodic lines, creating complex contrapuntal textures, especially those involving parallel voice leading, and disguising the movement’s formal structure.