Claude Debussy
1862-1918
The
music of Claude Debussy had a monumental impact on Western music,
in that it revolutionized how musicians approached harmony,
tonality and rhythm. Composers as diverse as Ravel, Stravinsky
and Satie owe him acknowledgement, and rafts of writers who were
to come after Debussy's all-too-brief career could not help but
be influenced by his unique musical style. In a time when
European music was rife with change - from the earth-shaking
music of Richard Wagner to the harmonic adventures of many late
Romantics - and literary movements vied for intellectual
hegemony, Debussy represented one of the most potent marriages of
programmatic elements and musical innovation. The only true
musical Impressionist, he was as influenced by literary Symbolism
and Impressionism as much as he was by the greatest Romantic
composers, particularly Chopin, Liszt and Mussorgsky.
Debussy was born in Paris in 1862, and received his formal
musical education at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was
trained in traditional Romantic techniques and sonorities. A
facile and talented composer, he was early on enough of a
traditionalist to win First Prize at the 1884 Prix de Rome
competition - the same contest that Debussy's brilliant
contemporary, Ravel, would enter several times but never win, in
part due to Ravel's revolutionary sense of harmony and rhythm.
Soon after this triumph, however, Debussy started to reject many
of the precepts of his training, including the importance of the
Germanic musical tradition, of which Wagner was the most
oft-cited example.
As Debussy set off to write his own style of music, he found
himself in the heady cultural hotbed of late-19th century
Parisian society, a climate enriched by Russian music,
non-western idioms demonstrated at the Paris Exposition of 1889,
and Symbolist poetry, as well as a revolution in visual arts.
Paris was a remarkable melting pot of cultural diversity and
artistic influence, and the young Debussy began to make these
influences heard in his music, which placed an emphasis on aural
images, clusters and metaphors rather than on traditional musical
devices. His early, pre-Impressionist compositions for piano are
remarkable in their craft, especially the Suite bergamasque
(1893). The same year, he premiered the seminal Quartet in G
minor for Strings, and people started to scratch their heads in
confusion, so novel was Debussy's sound. Critics complained that
the composer was a self-indulgent non-conformist. The next year
brought the brilliant Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
(Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), Debussy's first orchestral
work and a masterpiece of novel ensemble texture and harmonic
innovation. The work was inspired by a Stephane Mallermé poem of
the same name, and the music roughly evokes each scene in the
poem.
Later works exhibited a more fully-developed
"Impressionistic" style - notably Estampes, Images, and
La Mer. Another seminal work was his one opera, Pelléas et Mélisande
(1902), wherein he used musical imagery and dramatic devices that
flew in the face of Wagner's dominant style. Later pieces ushered
in such radical tonal juxtapositions that Debussy is often cited
as the father of atonality - which at that time was new and
unchartered territory.
Perhaps Debussy's greatest achievement as a composer - and there
were many - is his development of timbre. Although the tonal
relationships and harmonic content of music were of the utmost
importance to him - and his contributions in this area were
original and profound - he also created a revolution in the area
of pure sound. He combined different instruments in ways that
produced radical new textures; his sense of register (what range
an instrument plays in) was utterly original; and his
free-associating, uninhibited tonal colors influenced virtually
every composer who followed him. For this and many other trends
in 20th century music, we owe Debussy our gratitude. His works
sound today as fresh and new as they did 100 years ago, a
remarkable testament to a unique and original musical
imagination.