ClaudeDebussy

Debussy was born above his parents’ china shop in Saint-⁠Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, on 22 August 1862. His parents were not musicians. His father fought for the Paris Commune in 1871 and was imprisoned for it. In prison he met Charles de Sivry, whose mother, Antoinette Mauté, taught the piano and said she had been a pupil of Chopin. She took the boy on as a pupil. In 1872, aged ten, he entered the Paris Conservatoire.

Antoine Marmontel, his piano professor, described him in January 1874 as “a charming child, a truly artistic temperament”; the harmony teacher Émile Durand reported in June 1879 that he was “very gifted in harmony, but hopelessly unfocused”. Around 1890, discussing chords at the piano with his old composition teacher Ernest Guiraud, he said: “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

1889The gamelan

That summer the Exposition universelle, the fair for which the Eiffel Tower was built, brought a Javanese gamelan to Paris. It was an orchestra of gongs and tuned bronze instruments whose layers moved through long rhythmic cycles. Six years later he wrote to Pierre Louÿs about it: “Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades, which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts?” In 1913 he wrote in the Revue musicale S.I.M. that its counterpoint “makes Palestrina seem like child’s play”.

In Pagodes (1903), low fifths are struck and left to ring like gongs; a pentatonic tune moves through the middle of the keyboard; quick figures turn over above it, each layer at its own speed, all sustained by the pedal.

1893–⁠94Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

By the early 1890s he was a regular at Stéphane Mallarmé’s Tuesday evenings in the rue de Rome. In December 1893 the Ysaÿe Quartet played his String Quartet, in which one theme runs through all four movements and the scherzo is plucked for much of its length. A year later came the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, after Mallarmé’s poem of a faun waking on a hot afternoon, unsure whether the nymphs he remembers were real. It begins with a flute alone, unaccompanied, sliding from C♯ down to G and back. On 22 December 1894 the audience made the orchestra play the whole piece again. Mallarmé attended the next day’s concert and wrote to Debussy straight afterwards: “The marvel!” Half a century later Boulez dated modern music from that flute.

1893–⁠1902Pelléas

In May 1893 he saw Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande and spent the next nine years setting it, nearly word for word. Golaud finds Mélisande weeping by a spring in a forest; she cannot say where she has come from; he marries her, and his questions grow more violent. Debussy gave nearly every syllable a single note, at the pace of speech, and gave the orchestra the rest. Maeterlinck had wanted the part of Mélisande for his companion, Georgette Leblanc; when the Opéra-⁠Comique cast the Scottish soprano Mary Garden instead, he told the readers of Le Figaro that he hoped the opera would fail, quickly and loudly. It opened on 30 April 1902, conducted by André Messager, and made Debussy famous.

1903–⁠05La Mer

“You perhaps do not know,” he wrote to Messager in September 1903, “that I was destined for the fine life of a sailor and that I was only led away from it by chance.” He was writing from his in-laws’ house at Bichain in Burgundy, far from the sea, and he had begun La Mer. In 1904 he left his wife, Lilly Texier, for Emma Bardac, a singer married to a banker. Lilly shot herself in the chest and survived. Friends took sides, and several broke with him. He finished the score on 5 March 1905, corrected the proofs at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne and chose Hokusai’s wave for the cover. Writing to Jacques Durand from Eastbourne in July 1905, he described a place where “the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness”. Pierre Lalo reviewed the première in Le Temps on 24 October 1905: “I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea.”

1903–⁠13Pictures for the piano

Between Estampes (1903) and the second book of Préludes (1913) he rebuilt the piano. Friends recalled that he wanted it to sound like an instrument without hammers. In the Préludes he printed each title at the end, in brackets after three dots: (…Voiles), which can mean sails or veils (he never said which), and (…La cathédrale engloutie), in which the drowned church of Ys rises out of the sea at dawn in slow parallel chords, like bells. In Golliwogg’s Cake-walk, written for Chouchou, the opening of Tristan appears, marked “with great emotion”, alongside banjo chords.

Jeux, a ballet about a lost tennis ball, two girls and a young man at dusk, was danced by Nijinsky on 15 May 1913 at the new Théâtre des Champs-⁠Élysées. Two weeks later, on the same stage, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring started a riot. Jeux was staged again in 1920 and 1923 and remained on the edge of the repertory.

1914–⁠18War, the late works and death

The war and his cancer came at the same time. In the summer of 1915, at Pourville on the Normandy coast, he wrote twelve Études dedicated to Chopin’s memory, the first of them “for the five fingers, after Monsieur Czerny”, and two of a planned set of six sonatas, signing their title pages “Claude Debussy, musicien français”. He played the piano at the première of the third, the Violin Sonata, in May 1917. He died at home on 25 March 1918, aged fifty-five, while German long-range guns were shelling Paris. The funeral procession went to Père Lachaise through empty streets.