Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy: The Flute That Broke the Century

On 22 December 1894, in a Paris concert hall, Georges Barrere raised a flute and played an unaccompanied line that slid downward through a tritone into nothing in particular. Gustave Doret was conducting. The piece lasted ten minutes and the audience demanded it again immediately. Pierre Boulez would later say of that opening that "the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music," and call the score the beginning of modern music. Nothing in it is loud. It simply refuses, from the first bar, to do what music had been doing for two hundred years.

The Conservatoire's Difficult Prodigy

Achille Claude Debussy was ten years old when the Conservatoire de Paris admitted him, an extraordinarily early entry for a boy from Saint-Germain-en-Laye with no musical dynasty behind him. He studied piano, solfege, harmony and composition, and among his teachers was Cesar Franck. The reports on him were consistent and would remain so for a decade: enormous talent, no discipline. He was the kind of student who could solve a harmony exercise beautifully and then explain, at length, why the exercise itself was stupid.

His official vindication came in 1884, when he won the Prix de Rome with the cantata L'enfant prodigue. The prize carried a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, where he spent 1885 to 1887. He was miserable there. The establishment had certified him, and the certification bored him.

What He Listened To Instead

What actually formed Debussy happened outside institutions. He absorbed the Russian composers, whose modal writing sidestepped German rules. He confronted Wagner's harmonic innovations, which had already loosened tonality without abandoning it. And in 1889 he went to the Paris Exposition Universelle and heard East Asian music, above all the gamelan, an ensemble organised around layered cycles and scales that owed nothing to European tonic and dominant.

The fourth influence was literary. Symbolist poetry, which worked by suggestion rather than statement, gave him a model for what music might do: evoke, hint, dissolve, rather than argue and resolve. From these materials he built a technique that was genuinely new: parallel chords moving in blocks, whole-tone scales, pentatonic writing, and harmonies that did not function, that is, chords that no longer pulled toward a resolution. In the nineteenth century, a chord was a force with a destination. Debussy turned it into a colour.

The Faun

Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, written in 1894, is where the technique becomes a masterpiece. It takes its subject from Stephane Mallarme's Symbolist poem, and Mallarme had objected in advance, holding that it was "a veritable crime as far as poetry was concerned to juxtapose poetry and music." He attended the premiere and recanted in writing: "Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun goes much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness."

Debussy described the work modestly as "a very free illustration of Mallarme's beautiful poem," a sequence of "successive scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun." The craft beneath the modesty is severe. The orchestra has three flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, two crotales and strings, and no trumpets or trombones at all: he removed the loudest instruments in the nineteenth-century orchestra because he did not need them. The metre slides between 9/8, 6/8 and 12/8, so the pulse never quite hardens. The piece runs to 110 bars, matching the length of Mallarme's poem line for line, which tells you that the dreaminess is engineered.

In 1912, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed and danced it for the Ballets Russes with sets and costumes by Leon Bakst, in a production whose angular movement and openly sexual closing gesture caused a scandal. The score had by then outgrown its poem twice.

An Opera Against Opera

Between 1893 and 1902 Debussy wrote Pelleas et Melisande, and it is arguably the more radical achievement. At a moment when opera meant Wagnerian mass or Italian melody, he wrote a work in which almost nobody sings a tune; the vocal line follows the natural inflection of spoken French, and the drama is carried by the orchestra beneath it. It has no arias to applaud. It was an opera constructed as a rebuke to opera.

The orchestral works followed the same instinct in different weather. La mer, written between 1903 and 1905, is not a description of the sea but an attempt to compose the sea's behaviour, motifs that swell, fragment and reassemble without ever settling. In the piano suites, Estampes and Children's Corner among them, he rebuilt the instrument's vocabulary, writing music that depends on pedal, resonance and overtone rather than on line.

He rejected, vigorously, the label attached to all of it. Being called an Impressionist irritated him for the rest of his life.

A Difficult Life

The private record is unhappy and often unattractive. There were long relationships with Marie Vasnier and Gaby Dupont. He married Lilly Texier in 1899 and left her in 1904 for Emma Bardac; Texier attempted suicide, and the resulting scandal cost him friends and money. With Bardac he had his only child, Claude-Emma, called Chouchou, for whom Children's Corner was written.

In 1909 he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He underwent a colostomy in 1915, then among the earliest such operations, and continued to compose through increasing pain. He died in Paris on 25 March 1918, aged 55, while German shells were falling on the city. There was no possibility of a public funeral.

Why Claude Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is this: Debussy heard harmony as colour before anyone else did, and then built a complete working grammar out of that hearing. Plenty of nineteenth-century composers stretched tonality; Wagner stretched it further than anybody. But they stretched it while still believing that a chord was a vector with a destination. Debussy stopped believing that. A whole-tone scale has no leading note and therefore no home; a chain of parallel chords goes nowhere by design. Once he had made those materials structurally viable, over ten minutes in the Faun, over three hours in Pelleas, the entire tonal system stopped being the only available option. That is not refinement of an existing language. It is the invention of an alternative one.

The testimony is unusually concrete. Boulez, no sentimentalist, located the beginning of modern music in the Faun's opening flute. Mallarme, who had publicly opposed the project, admitted in writing that the music went further than his poem. And the influence is traceable rather than asserted: Bartok, Stravinsky, Messiaen and Boulez himself all built on him, and the harmonic vocabulary of modern jazz, audible in a pianist like Bill Evans, is substantially his.

The honest counter-case is a matter of scale, not quality. His output is small beside Bach's or Mozart's, and much of it is miniature. He wrote one opera. He was an erratic student who never fully mastered, or wanted to master, large-scale structural argument in the German sense, and admirers of that architecture find his music beautiful but slack. He was also, by most accounts, difficult, evasive and unkind in his private dealings. None of that touches the central claim. He changed what a chord was for, and no one who came after could unhear it.

Legacy

A little over a century later, the Faun is among the most performed orchestral works in the world, Pelleas is in the repertory of every major opera house, and the piano preludes are the ground on which pianists are judged. His real monument is less visible: the assumption, now universal, that a composer may treat sound as a material to be shaped rather than a language to be obeyed. Every film score that establishes mood through colour instead of theme, every jazz voicing that hangs unresolved, descends from a flute line played in Paris in December 1894.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1903
• Notable work: Pelléas et Mélisande
• Notable work: Préludes
• Notable work: Children's Corner
• Notable work: La Damoiselle élue
• Educated at Conservatoire de Paris
• Worked as composer, pianist and music critic