Raoul becomes Debussy's pupil

In 1899 Emma's son Raoul was eighteen years old. This was the year of Debussy's first official contact with the Bardac family, for Raoul dated his first lessons with Debussy to 1899, proud to emphasise his close relationship with the composer despite his youth. It may well be that this course of events came about indirectly via Emma, who had discovered Debussy's Proses lyriques and the Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire when she had sung them accompanied by Fauré's pupil, Charles Koechlin. Emma seems always to have had an indelible effect on her accompanists, for writing to her to express his condolences after Debussy's death in 1918, Koechlin recalled the time when he had done what he felt was his inadequate best to accompany her in these songs, saying ‘I have never forgotten and will never ever forget those hours of music-making’.

According to Raoul's school friend at the Lycée Condorcet, Roger Martin du Gard, Raoul had first become familiar with the name Debussy and the poetry of Maeterlinck several years before the première of Pelléas et Mélisande: ‘Young Bardac took inspiration from them to make up rhymes for “legendary” poems for which he composed musical accompaniments which Debussy then corrected.’ If so, Debussy and Emma would have been aware of each other during Raoul's schooldays, even if they had not become well acquainted.

Raoul was one of a very small number of Debussy's personal pupils. There was no correspondence between them at this stage, but there must have been a certain compatibility from the start. Raoul claimed that their relationship was not that of teacher–pupil, but of Master and disciple. They would have conversations about music in general and perform pieces both old and contemporary. In particular Raoul remembered his teacher's advice, ‘above all, no music which is “not worth the effort”, a maxim he had borrowed from Chabrier’. Raoul was clearly rather detached from the group of young composers who surrounded Fauré. Following the success of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande he did not join the Apaches, that group of young men who harboured deep admiration for Debussy's work. As noted previously, Ravel was eventually to use the word ‘distant’ to describe him.