Debussy occupies a place apart from his contemporaries in the history of music. He is a composer who has, though the sheer quality and originality of his work, plus a character far removed from the average, ‘run-of-the-mill’ composer of the period, placed himself in a hallowed position in the richly coloured years around the end of the nineteenth century. I say this not because I find his music highly attractive – I do, of course – but because intellectual circumstances have conspired in Debussy's favour in a quite unusual way.

Before the Second World War, and even for a few years after it, one could legitimately find fault with Debussy. As far back as 1924, Cecil Gray, a cantankerous, erratic but often illuminating writer, acknowledged that Debussy was a Symbolist not an Impressionist, for Debussy's purpose was ‘not to evoke a definite picture, but to suggest the mood or emotion which the particular image in question aroused in the artist's mind’. All of which bodes well, but on the music itself he is less likeable: ‘in his harmony, Debussy is as curiously limited, monotonous and restricted as in his melody. His rhythms too are singularly lifeless and torpid.’ Gerald Abraham fell into a trap Debussy set for musicologists when he wrote that ‘Debussy's work was still for the most part far too closely linked with literature and painting and nature impressions to be absolute music. [It was] a half-way house between romanticism and a new classicism.’

The works to be discussed in this chapter include three of Debussy's greatest pieces for orchestra, all of them explicitly evocative: the Nocturnes, La mer and ‘Ibéria’ from the orchestral Images. In addition, the three piano pieces composed at about the same time as Lamer–Masques, D'un cahier d'esquisses and L'isle joyeuse – will be considered from the point of view of Debussy's expressive intentions. Among his orchestral works, the score of ‘Ibéria’, in particular, is teeming with expression marks which give important clues to the atmospheric evocation he sought to achieve – an innovative practice at the time and one which has sometimes been misunderstood as the quest for a rather generalised kind of poetic or naturalistic allusiveness in music, or simply a vaguely defined effect. But the very precision of Debussy's performance instructions in this instance suggests an entirely different interpretation: that as he refined his command of music's expressive potential, so his intentions were not only to give indications of tempo, dynamics and articulation, but also to specify the emotional and expressive content of a note, a phrase, a section or even a whole piece. For other works the scores themselves contain many fewer clues, but valuable evidence of Debussy's expressive and musical thought processes can be found in his letters and writings – both rich seams of self-revelation.

As the conventional distinction between recitative and aria weakened in late-nineteenth-century opera under the Wagnerian assault, it was only natural that other ready-made forms should be more closely scrutinised, among them the use of metrical verse and rhyme for musical settings. France proved to be particularly fertile soil for such debate. As Hugh Macdonald has pointed out:

Macdonald quotes Gounod's eloquent preface to his unpublished opera George Dandin in which the composer claims that ‘The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity.’

Whether the young Debussy ever read Gounod's words we do not know. What is certain is that among his café acquaintances was the poet and full-time aesthete Catulle Mendès, who had his own solution to the facture of librettos:

Certainly I'm not hostile to the idea of prose in opera. It may well lead to curious effects. But don't you think that what's wrong with some contemporary operas is the uniformity in the structure of the libretto? Poetry has a considerable number of different rhythms at its disposal. Need I remind you how many there are in Banville? Why, when it comes to opera, should we not use these rhythms to lend the libretto variety, picturesqueness, colour and originality? But more often than not, people use the alexandrine or lines of eight or ten syllables which, in bulk, give the spectator an impression of fatigue and monotony.

Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony was mocked for conjuring up a ‘wooden nightingale’ and a ‘Swiss cuckoo’, Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel resembled ‘an hour of new music written for lunatics’; Wagner's Wotan was ‘majestic, empty and insipid’; Gluck's music was ‘almost uniformly pompous’; and modern composers, in catering to the tastes of their public, were reduced to ‘something midway between the monkey and the servant’. Debussy was certainly not afraid to speak his mind and his published articles will always make entertaining reading. In contrast to the musical reviews of his peers his comments were hard-hitting, uncompromising and, on occasion, deliberately inflammatory. What prompted him to publish such savage remarks and what he hoped to achieve by them are no less fascinating; an examination of the issues concerned provides insight into the concerns of Debussy the musician.

When Debussy's first articles appeared in La revue blanche between April and December 1901, they met with a mixed response that ranged from laughing indulgence to downright hostility. That any young composer, as yet relatively unknown, should have the presumption to challenge the supremacy of composers like Beethoven and the current idol, Wagner, was beyond the comprehension of most. However, it was not unexpected by those who had been unpleasantly surprised at the recent premiere of the first two Nocturnes at the Concerts Lamoureux on 9 December 1900. Debussy's music was also a marked departure from what one was accustomed to hearing, and the scorn for the musical past and criticism of the musical establishment in his articles was just what one would expect from such an ‘original’ composer, a term that quickly acquired negative as well as positive connotations in relation to Debussy's music.

How did Debussy and the musicians in his circle perform his works? What did he listen for when he coached performers? Were his performance expectations similar for pianists, singers and conductors? Through a rich array of contemporary recordings, memoirs, letters and reviews Debussy is the first composer for whom we can answer such questions in a definitive way. This chapter begins with a consideration of Debussy's own piano playing and the advice he gave to various pianists, some of whom later recorded his works. Subsequent sections are devoted to the singers and conductors who came in contact with him, and to their recordings.

‘I have never heard more beautiful pianoforte playing’

So thought Louise Liebich, Debussy's first biographer, when she heard him play ‘Danseuses de Delphes’. Certainly his piano playing was very different from the dry, highly articulated style of many of his French contemporaries. It is likely that his tone-sensible approach was fostered by his early teacher Mme Mauté de Fleurville, who claimed to have studied with Chopin. It was she who prepared him for admission to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Antoine Marmontel, a highly regarded teacher. Marmontel's comments on Debussy's performances at the Conservatoire's year-end competitions ranged from ‘charming musical nature’ (1874, for a piece by Moscheles) and ‘true artistic temperament’ (1875, for Chopin's Rondo, Op. 16) to ‘careless and inaccurate, could do much better’ (1876, for the scherzo from Heller's Sonata, Op. 88). Other repertoire that Debussy studied during his seven years with Marmontel included Bach's Toccata in G minor, Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111, Weber's Piano Sonata in A♭, Thalberg's Sonata in C minor, Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Fantaisie, Ballade No. 1 in G minor and Allegro de concert.

The word erotic does not rest quietly on the page. It is a word that tempts and eludes us. It hides behind its dictionary definition – ‘of, devoted to, or tending to arouse sexual desire’ – which cannot begin to touch the numerous spheres that it encompasses. For this term is heavily laden with ideological baggage. It darts through our minds, drawing out questions; we want details. And always there is a tinge of excitement as we tread into a secret, forbidden land. Eroticism mingles with anticipation and imagination; it dangles possibilities before us. The evasive nature of eroticism makes writing about it a challenging task. For the scholar's goal is to attempt to explicate, to reveal, to clarify, and this contradicts eroticism's most basic end, which is ‘to take knowledge and render it uncertain, ambiguous’. John L. Connolly, Jr claims, for example, that the paintings of Ingres ‘generate erotic power precisely because they elude the imagination's hot embrace’. And eroticism, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. As Robert Stoller concisely states, ‘Eroticism is a matter of taste.’ So how is it possible to speak objectively about a concept that is so intensely personal? Marcia Allentuck's description of eroticism as ‘an area in which the public and private perennially converge, with varying degrees of conflict, diversity, enigma, absurdity and even, occasionally, fulfillment’ suggests an exploration of the nature of the erotic as understood within the context of fin-de-siècle Paris.

For the aspiring young French composer of the nineteenth century, the Prix de Rome represented the capstone of musical study, and winning it signalled the start of a promising career. Claude Debussy, winner of the 1884 competition, later remarked on this popular perception: ‘[A]mong certain people the Prix de Rome has become something of a superstition: to have won it, or not to have won it, answers the question of whether one has any talent or not. Even if it is not infallible, at least it is a useful standard by which the general public can easily judge.’ Characteristically, Debussy was ambivalent about the honour, proud to be among its recipients but sceptical of the competence of state-sponsored institutions to recognise, assess or inspire great art. He later recalled the moment he learned that he had won the prize: ‘[M]y heart sank! I had a sudden vision of boredom, and of all the worries that inevitably go together with any form of official recognition. I felt I was no longer free.’

First awarded in 1803, the Prix de Rome in musical composition was administered initially by the Institut de France and later by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a division of the Institut. Although details of the award varied over time, the winner of the Prix received a stipend to subsidise two years of residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, a third year of travel, preferably to Germany or Austria, and a fourth year spent either back in Rome or in France. Each year the laureates were required to submit musical compositions, called envois,as evidence of their progress.

Everyone who knows Debussy's music recognises a distinctive ‘Debussy sound’ that is not a single quality but many; the sound of Debussy's style in most of his works is harmony, instrumentation, texture, timbre, all to a greater or lesser extent.

Even such wide-ranging elements as melody, rhythm, and microform affect Debussy's quality of sound. The composer Jean Barraqué, an astute analyst, spoke of Debussy's habit of repeating phrases and phrase fragments in immediate succession as ‘the sole weakness that one might find in Debussy's scores’, without suggesting that this kind of repetition is a fundamental aspect of Debussy's sense of form; paired repetition, like breathing (which as a marker of time it somewhat resembles), is a trait of many composers from Vivaldi to Mozart to Rossini to Debussy; but in combination with others that we think of as characteristically sonorous, it is a trait that makes Debussy's style instantly recognisable even on first hearing.

Here we will discuss the sonorous rather than the temporal aspects of Debussy's music, focusing particularly on orchestral and piano style, texture, and colour, recognising that these aspects often penetrate each other as much as they are components of overall form.

Debussy's earliest instrumental style

Debussy's earliest piano pieces and songs include a variety of different piano styles and textures, but nothing that is markedly different from those of his French contemporaries or from his Parisian predecessor Chopin, for whose music he always had a special understanding and regard. Accompanimental textures in Debussy's songs of his Conservatoire years are more economical than in Fauré's of the same time, and for that reason they are often more effective. The Piano Trio of 1880, which Debussy did not publish, is the first of his works in which we can glimpse an instrumental style in addition to that already developing for the piano, but even though the ensemble always works well, again there is no notably original pianism.

Creating a balanced picture of such a deliberately enigmatic character as Claude Debussy is no easy task. But so great is the fascination that his life and music have exerted that ‘performers, writers and analysts have been peeling away the layers of the onion that is Debussy’ ever since Louise Liebich first approached the chopping board way back in 1907. And as Roger Nichols aptly continues: ‘I think it is some measure of his greatness that the more we peel, the more we find.’ Coincidentally, both Liebich and Nichols ninety years on begin by quoting Debussy's veiled warning to future biographers that ‘Another man's soul is a thick forest in which one must walk with circumspection’, and I make no excuse for reusing this ideal quotation here, or for assuming that readers will refer to the accompanying chronology on pp. xiv–xviii above for the well-known landmarks in Debussy's career.

Debussy very rarely bared his own secretive soul, and if he was hardly a model of circumspection himself, he disliked its absence in others. The thick forest in which his shadowy operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande begins can be seen to have parallels with his own life, for it surrounded a dream-world controlled by destiny in which happiness was rare, and from which there was no escape except in death. If Maeterlinck's Symbolist play provided Debussy with a musical way forward in 1893 and eventually brought him the fame he had dreamed of when it was staged in 1902, it nevertheless did not satisfy the cravings of the ‘happiness addict’ who, for a variety of reasons, became increasingly reclusive and miserable during his final years.

Debussy as a tonal composer: reception and stylistic evolution

There are many possible ways to approach the question of Debussy's tonality, which over the last fifty years has inspired an unusually diverse range of critical and analytical viewpoints. The focus here will be on tonality's relationship with other aspects of formal process (especially thematic):how the nature of this relationship serves both to connect Debussy's music with earlier traditions of tonal composition and to set it apart from such traditions. First, though, we must consider the more fundamental issue of the music's status as tonal music: how Debussy adapted his inheritance of late Romantic chromatic tonality to the service of a modernist musical outlook and how the music expresses tonal function in an idiomatically Debussyan way.

As a preliminary observation we could note a striking divergence of perception Between musical scholars (especially analysts) on the one hand and the listening public on the other, regarding Debussy's harmonic language or tonal practice in a general sense. While analysts have usually considered this aspect of Debussy's art to be rather problematic in the sense of abstruse, elusive or otherwise difficult to grasp (and hence to explain through analysis), it would be fair to say that this perception has not been shared by concert audiences; on the contrary, Debussy remains one of the most enduringly popular composers of the post-Romantic era. Although there are many reasons for his music's evident accessibility, not least among them is surely its instantly identifiable tonal idiom or ‘accent’. Debussy’s tonality, while perennially new and exotic-sounding, yet retains powerful and familiar resonances from the tonal language of his predecessors; it exhibits a strong sense of tonal centre, expressed through vividly projected attributes of tonal function both melodically and harmonically.

Introduction

The evocative title for this essay refers to the sense that in performance music moves – and we with it – in complex and ever-changing ways. The word ‘form’ generally connotes morphological paradigms: familiar tonal schemes such as ‘binary’, or ‘ternary’, or ‘sonata’, or their refashioned derivatives in the twentieth-century post-tonal epoch. However, for Syrinx, the Première rapsodie and ‘Sirènes’ I will discuss only briefly their morphological forms. Instead, this study focuses upon the fluid nature of musical materials and relations, a dynamic and rhythmic aspect of musical form that is more often remarked than examined, and for which static morphological form merely provides a framework.

Among the assumptions that direct the analyses herein, two in particular warrant mention: first, that compositions consist of congeries of diverse musical events, whose concatenations over time convey impressions of vitality to us as listeners and performers; and second, that these impressions are a crucial aspect of musical experience – hence the frequent recourse in conversation about music (albeit less often in its literature) to animate metaphors in paired oppositions such as ‘ebb and flow’, ‘rise and fall’, ‘intensification and relaxation’, ‘approaching towards and receding from’, ‘climax and release’. Sources for this sense of vitality include the pacing over time of changes in musical materials, which imparts a sense of quickening or of slowing, and the varying complexity of musical events over time, which imparts a sense of intensification versus subsidence. Both affective domains convey impressions of tension versus repose and of motion.

Introduction

We love Debussy's music intimately and yet detailed knowledge of it often seems remote and elusive. Doubtless Debussy would have been delighted, for the realisation that he had denied analysts and theorists their quarry and encouraged some writers to assert, metaphorically at least, the unknowable intangibility of his music would have suited him very well, as we know from his dismissive comments about harmonic analysis and so on. One can imagine his pleasure growing at the recognition that one of the most successful pieces of Debussy scholarship – in the analysis of his music – to come in the post-war years is Roy Howat's Debussy in Proportion, a brilliant study that, in revealing a crucial aspect of Debussy's compositional process, raises an inescapable question of what it means for our perception of the music: he takes us into a mysterious domain. Debussy in Proportion proves beyond doubt that Debussy used Golden Section and other ancient proportional devices in his music, for the examples Howat adduces, and others that have come to light since, are too compelling to be coincidence or the result of dark, subcutaneous forces. For example, in ‘Reflets dans l'eau’ the music reaches its loudest level in bar 58; bar 58 out of 94 bars is 0.62 of the piece, which is very close to Golden Section (the golden proportion is 1 : 1.618). Having established this, however, we then have to ask, as Howat and many others have done, how we listen to proportion in music.

Debussy liked to give the impression that he was a reluctant reviewer of concerts. Often, prior to giving his assessment of a particular performance, he writes of the beauty of the day on which the concert took place, unfavourably comparing his delight in nature with his unfortunate obligation to attend the concert. In an article written for La revue blanche in 1901, Debussy wrote of being in the countryside, far from artistic debates, the first performances of new works and everything else associated with the Parisian musical world. He wrote:

Debussy often said that he disliked analytical approaches to music (in common with many composers), and he was quite naturally irritated by uninformed discussion about music. Moreover, his love of nature was coupled with a misanthropic streak. I suspect that he preferred the open spaces and silence of the countryside (a silence broken only by the sounds of wind, water and other natural phenomena) to the company of his fellow human beings.

Later in this article Debussy stresses that he believes the Prix de Rome competition is ridiculous, implying that this competitive approach to composition is unnatural. Music, for him, should be a part of nature, or something sharing its characteristics; on many occasions he expressed his distaste for academic forms and harmonic formulae.