introduction

'I do not myself think very well of what I have said on ethics', wrote Russell in extreme old age (Dear Bertrand Russell, p. 132). And most subsequent philosophers have agreed with him. Either they do not think very well of what he said or they do not think of it at all. Until very recently, Russell hardly rated a mention in most books and bibliographies on twentieth-century ethics. His most anthologised paper on the subject is 'The Elements of Ethics' (1910) in which he expounds, not his own ideas, but the ideas of his colleague and sometime friend, G.E. Moore. Even dedicated Russell fans such as John Slater (Bertrand Russell (1994)) and Anthony Grayling (Russell 1996) are a bit lukewarmabout his theoretical ethics, whilst R.M. Sainsbury in his 'Arguments of the Philosophers' book Russell (1979), is positively dismissive: 'I have left aside his work on moral philosophy, on the grounds that in both its main phases, it is too derivative to justify a discussion of it'. In the first phase, represented by 'The Elements of Ethics' (1910), Sainsbury suggests that Russell's ideas were derived from G.E. Moore, and in the second, represented by Human Society in Ethics and Politics, they were 'close to Hume's, with a dash of emotivism' (Sainsbury 1979, p. x).

introduction

In his 1893 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik Frege sought to demonstrate a thesis which has come to be called Logicism. Frege maintained that there are no uniquely arithmetic intuitions that ground mathematical induction and the foundational principles of arithmetic. Couched within a proper conceptual analysis of cardinal number, arithmetic truths will be seen to be truths of the science of logic. Frege set out a formal system - a characteristica universalis - after Leibniz, whose formation rules and transformation (inference) rules were explicit and, he thought, clearly within the domain of the science of logic. Confident that no nonlogical intuitions could seep into such a tightly articulated system, Frege endeavored to demonstrate logicism by deducing the principle of mathematical induction and foundational theorems for arithmetic.

In his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, Russell set out a doctrine of Logicism according to which there are no special intuitions unique to the branches of non-applied mathematics. All the truths of non-applied mathematics are truths of the science of logic. Russell embraced this more encompassing form of logicism because, unlike Frege, he accepted the arithmetization of all of non-applied mathematics, including Geometry and Rational Dynamics.

Both Frege and Russell regarded logic as itself a science. Frege refrained from calling it a synthetic a priori science so as to mark his departure from the notion of pure empirical intuition (anschauung) set forth in Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. In Frege’s view, Kant’s transcendental argument for a form of pure empirical (aesthetic) intuition that grounds the synthetic a priori truths of arithmetic is unwarranted. Russell concurred, but spoke unabashedly of a purely logical intuition grounding our knowledge of logical truths. Russell wrote that Kant “never doubted for a moment that the propositions of logic are analytic, whereas he rightly perceived that those of mathematics are synthetic . . . It has since appeared that logic is just as synthetic . . .” (POM, p. 457).

It is difficult to over-estimate the extent to which Russell's thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually every strand in its development either originated with him or was transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher. He was not, of course, its only originator (Frege and Moore, must be acknowledged as well), but he contributed more across its central areas (logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics) than any other single philosopher, and he was certainly its most energetic propagandist. Moreover, as Pigden forcefully argues in his essay in this volume, even in areas such as ethics, where Russell's work has often been thought to be shallow and derivative, Russell has been the source of a number of innovations which might have made the reputation of a lesser philosopher. With Frege and Peano, Russell created modern formal logic and, much more than they, was responsible for bringing it to the attention of philosophers and demonstrating its usefulness in philosophical applications. His work had a profound influence on Carnap and the logical positivists, on Quine, on A.J. Ayer, and in diverse ways on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1922] was an attempt (ultimately unsustainable) to push to the limit an approach to language which had been suggested, though not actually embraced, by Russell. Wittgenstein's later philosophy was an attempt to make good the defects of the Tractatus by pushing equally far in the opposite direction. The ordinary language philosophers of the middle of the century also reacted strongly against Russell; by the same token, their work would have been inconceivable without him.

introduction

Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege are the two giants on whose shoulders analytic philosophy rests. Whilst G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein also played a significant role in the emergence of analytic philosophy, it was Russell's and Frege's work on the foundations of mathematics and their development of new techniques of logical analysis that set the agenda, and without both Russell and Frege, Wittgenstein's own philosophy would simply not have evolved.

There are many similarities between Russell and Frege. Both were trained as mathematicians, and although they also studied philosophy, were both drawn seriously into philosophy through concern with the foundations of mathematics. Both wrote early works on geometry, but became increasingly interested in the nature of number. In the works that represent the highpoint of their intellectual achievements, both set out to demonstrate that arithmetic was reducible to logic, a project that required the development of logical theory itself. Both exerted a powerful influence on the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ushered in the second phase of analytic philosophy when the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ was taken. But despite these fundamental similarities in their mathematical background, achievements, and influence, their personal lives, characters, and careers were very different. Frege spent his entire working career (from 1874 to 1918) lecturing in mathematics at the University of Jena, remained a relative recluse, and grew increasingly embittered as he failed to receive the recognition he deserved.

When Russell and Moore entered Trinity College, Cambridge (in 1890 and 1892, respectively), the prevailing philosophies there, and elsewhere in Britain, were forms of idealism: Kant and Hegel were the heroes of the past, and F. H. Bradley of the present. It was chiefly through association with J.M.E. McTaggart, as both a teacher and a friend, that Moore and Russell absorbed idealism and, as Moore was later to put it, became for a time “enthusiastic admirers” of Bradley. But only for a time. It has been said that the beginning of Russell's break with Idealism can be discerned in a paper read to the Apostles on 11 December 1897, in which he argued that “for all purposes which are not purely intellectual, the world of Appearance is the real world - agin McTaggart's notion of getting religion out of philosophy”. Russell himself describes the revolt this way:

The opening sentence of Russell’s three-part article on Meinong, written probably in the first half of 1903, contains a succinct statement of certain elements of the “new philosophy”:

The process of interpreting any great composer from the past whose music remains a vital force on the contemporary scene is, inevitably, multivalent: performers, scholars and composers all make their contributions to preserving that vitality, that presence. Moreover, the activities of scholars and composers, the prime concern of this essay, proliferate to offer further, diverse levels of discourse and response. In the case of scholarship – informed writing about music – there is a whole range of distinct though interacting theories and techniques, from matters of performance practice and the ‘genetic’ studies basic to historical musicology to various, often radically contrasted, types of technical analysis and hermeneutic commentary. The focus of my discussion here is the current state of Debussy interpretation from the formal and hermeneutic perspectives of theory and analysis as well as of composition, for, as will soon be evident, these points on the interpretative chain cannot easily be separated, especially when the thorny topics of Debussy's influence on, or affinity with, other composers become involved.

This is not the place for an account of the thinking and terminology that informed the analytical interpretation of Debussy during the first half of the twentieth century. But it is clear that the issues present-day musicology often addresses – how ‘tonal’ was Debussy's musical language, given its use of whole-tone, pentatonic and octatonic modal elements? how traditional, or organicist, was his attitude to form? How innovative was the expressive ‘tone’ of his music? – can all be found, however informally defined, in earlier years: for example, in Constant Lambert's Music Ho!, first published in 1934.

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.