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6365 results in Music Criticism

Page 107 of 319

  • 9 - Oriental and Iberian Resonances in Early Debussy Songs

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 272-298

  • Summary

    Throughout his life Claude Debussy was attracted by exoticism, which essentially engages the notion of a fascinating, Other world that is tantalizingly different from one's native culture. Some of Debussy's best-loved compositions— works like “Pagodes,” from his Estampes for piano, and “Ibéria,” from the orchestral Images—conjure up faraway landscapes, from the Orient to Spain. As a cosmopolitan and relatively well-traveled Parisian, he was exposed to the traditions, sights, and sounds of other cultures; while his introduction to such influences may have come through a Western lens, later in life he actively sought and was inspired by indigenous ethnic sources. In addition, many of Debussy's closest friends opened his eyes vicariously to the art and aesthetic values of other civilizations. And, as Edward Said has reminded us, Paris was “the capital of the Orientalist world” by the turn of the century, when Debussy was in his prime.

    The goal of this study is to investigate some of Debussy's musical responses to these various influences and—perhaps even more important—to illustrate their seminal role in the process of his own compositional growth. To that end, I will highlight two songs in particular—the Rondel chinois and Séguidille—exotic treasures that were never published during Debussy's lifetime. The Rondel chinois became publicly available only in 2013, in a private edition by Nigel Foster for the London Song Festival, and Séguidille was released in August 2014 by Durand, Debussy's own publisher, in a score edited by the present author.

    Debussy composed both of these songs while still a student at the Conservatoire. Although he had not yet directly experienced Eastern musics, he could not have escaped the craze in Paris at that time for art of the Orient. Following the opening of trade channels between the East and West in the mid-nineteenth century, the European market was flooded with articles such as prints, ceramics, furniture, ivories, silks, and bronze works from China and Japan. Art dealers such as Siegfried Bing—a German who moved to France in 1854, where he promoted Japanese art and played a seminal role in the promulgation of the Art Nouveau style—began to import oriental objects in the 1870s. Others such as Enrico Cernuschi—an Italian patriot who fled after the 1848 Revolution and relocated to Paris, where he would become a wealthy banker—also collected oriental art on a massive scale.

  • 3 - The Kunkelmann Manuscripts: New Sources for Early Mélodies by Claude Debussy

  • from Part One - Historiographical and Editorial Issues
    • By Denis Herlin, Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (2017–19).
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 57-104

  • Summary

    In the highly imaginative issue of La revue musicale of May 1926 dedicated to “La jeunesse de Claude Debussy” we find not only an article by Charles Koechlin entitled “Some Early Mélodies by Claude Debussy,” but also a musical supplement with four (at the time) unpublished mélodies selected by Henry Prunières from the manuscripts Debussy dedicated to Madame Vasnier: Pantomime, Clair de lune, Pierrot, and Apparition. Their publication marked the first time that works were made available from the period during which the composer was still calling himself Achille, as he did as a boy, and not yet “Claude.” Koechlin began his article by revealing that he had always been fond of the “youthful works of the great composers.” “[T]hey exhibit ideas that are fresh,” he continued, “and tender, naïve, and charming—qualities that the master [Debussy] was not always able to recapture in his later works.” A well-known critic of the day, Constantin Photiadès (1883–1949), commented on Prunières's discovery in an article for the Revue de Paris:

    Some small ineptitudes here and there take away from the four charming mélodies that we read last May in the issue of La revue musicale devoted to Debussy's youth, because these modest songs, on texts by Banville and Verlaine, do obviously reveal the hand of the student-composer. But they also exhibit an astonishing refinement and a remarkable ability to encapsulate the very essence of the poetry, down to the slightest prolongation of a word, or a syllable. […] These album leaves clearly foreshadow the mastery to follow. Such is the interest of these revelations and of all of those that are still to come—because we have by no means reached the end of our surprises. Sooner or later someone will discover the sylphlike music that Debussy wrote for The elves, by Leconte de Lisle, or perhaps the elegant, ornamental mélodie [Fête galante] that later became the minuet of the Petite suite for piano four-hands.

    Here we learn that Photiadès was aware, already in 1926, of two Debussy manuscripts, most notably including that of Les elfes, whose very existence was completely unknown to modern Debussy scholars until recently, when they turned up in a private collection along with eight more song manuscripts from the pen of the master whom we now affectionately refer to as Claude de France.

  • 19 - Marius-François Gaillard's Debussy: Controversies and Pianistic Legacy

  • from Part Five - Performance and Reception
    • By Caroline Rae, University and concertizing pianist and has published widely on twentieth-century French music as well as on the musical writings of Alejo Carpentier.
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 562-580

  • Summary

    A prominent figure in the Parisian musical milieu during the interwar years, Marius-François Gaillard (1900–73) achieved considerable success as both a pianist and a conductor, while his compositional activities were recognized by René Dumesnil in La musique en France entre les deux guerres 1919–1939, where he was acknowledged as among the most notable French composers of his generation. Yet Gaillard has since been relegated to little more than a footnote in French music of the period, despite making an important contribution to Parisian musical life and leaving a significant Debussyan legacy. In addition to promoting new music of the age through founding an orchestra and concert series bearing his name for which he conducted many works by his contemporaries, including the Paris première of Varèse's Intégrales (revised version), Gaillard became the first pianist to perform the (then) complete works of Debussy in public in 1920. This remarkable feat, which is at least as historically important as Alfred Cortot's more often cited première of Debussy's Fantaisie in December 1919, has received little attention, Debussy scholars remembering Gaillard more for the controversies surrounding his completion of the composer's unfinished cantata Ode à la France. Repeating his Debussy cycles several times in both Paris and South America, Gaillard subsequently made the largest collection of commercial recordings of Debussy's piano works by any individual pianist up to 1930.

    So how did a figure of such ability and versatility fade into obscurity? Did Gaillard diversify his musical activities too widely? Did the Debussyan controversies that dogged his early career result in professional alienation, or were there other reasons for the rapid decline of his career after the Second World War? This essay will address these questions while exploring Gaillard's credentials as a viable Debussyste, and propose that the quality of his achievements as a performer merits his reinstatement in the pantheon of great twentiethcentury French pianists.

    Gaillard first established his name as a pianist. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with the redoubtable Louis Diémer as well as with Georges Falkenberg, and thus descended from a distinguished French pianistic tradition, the genealogy of which merits scrutiny. Diémer had been a pupil of that pillar of the late nineteenth-century pianistic establishment at the Paris Conservatoire, Antoine-François Marmontel, who studied with one of the most influential teachers of the first half of the nineteenth century, Pierre Zimmerman.

  • 12 - Secrets and Lies, or the Truth About Pelléas

  • from Part Three - History and Hermeneutics
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 353-365

  • Summary

    Let us begin at the end: with the single scene that makes up act 5 of Pelléas et Mélisande. Of all the incongruities that trouble Debussy's opera, those of the final act are somehow the most troubling. No other scene offers such a diverse assortment of characters, voices, points of view: Arkel, Golaud, le médecin, Mélisande. Peering into a bedroom of the castle, we watch the resident sage, his aggrieved grandson, and a doctor doling out prescriptions for a dying princess, alongside an unexplained newborn and several silent female attendants. What are they doing here? The unlikely figures crowd both the stage and the plot, vying for our attention and derailing the dénouement. The bourgeois melodrama has taken a dramatically wrong turn. In the previous act the cuckolded Golaud kills Pelléas right on cue, but the story refuses to stand in judgment. By the end of act 5 the domestic tragedy has become a ghost story. When death finally brings the action to a halt, it is no one's fault, and yet the equivocal ending mocks as much as it moves us. The scene's obstinate plea, “Il faut dire la vérité” (You must tell us the truth), goes unanswered. Right to the end, the play has held its tongue.

    The plea for truth belongs, of course, to Golaud, the opera's most miserable character, but it might as well be our own. Judging from the controversial reception of the very first Pelléas, it seems that Debussy's audiences had just as much trouble deciphering the opera's meaning, and a century of performances has hardly made things easier. We still struggle to comprehend Mélisande's veiled actions. Like Golaud, we wonder why she lies, and why she dies. Chalk it up to mystery, the guidebooks tell us, but that does not solve the problem. For Pierre Boulez, to call Pelléas a “mystery” is simply to skip all the hard work, to substitute (as he puts it) a “flat, soothing, modest, and moreover simpleminded image” for a real explanation. Debussy did not shrink from the drama's contradictions. Why should we?

    Indeed, Debussy may have added to those contradictions when he made his well-known cuts to Maeterlinck's original play. As if taking a cue from Mélisande, he left out a few key elements of the story, in effect concealing them from his operatic audience.

  • 20 - Fashioning Early Debussy in Interwar France

  • from Part Five - Performance and Reception
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 581-602

  • Summary

    In the years immediately following Debussy's death in 1918 initial assessments of his significance as a composer tended to concentrate on his middle-period works, which seemed to represent him at his most characteristic. At this early stage, there was some agreement that Debussy's reputation had been shaped by his most memorable and characteristic repertoire, from Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune to the second book of piano preludes. The late works still remained to be fully understood beyond their association with the anguish and struggle of a dying patriotic composer (as Marianne Wheeldon and others have shown), and relatively little was known about Debussy's early works and career. Henry Prunières, the director of La revue musicale, addressed this neglect by devoting a second special issue of his journal to “La jeunesse de Claude Debussy” in 1926, which consisted of extracts from his letters to Henri Vasnier, unpublished early songs, numerous testimonies of those who knew him in his youth and early career, such as Gabriel Pierné, Robert Godet, and Maurice Emmanuel, as well as a study by Charles Koechlin of Debussy's unpublished early songs. The volume provided new insights into a hitherto unexplored and undocumented part of Debussy's career. Prunières took the opportunity to publish four early songs in the musical supplement of the special issue, which initiated debates about their intrinsic value and the extent to which they shed light on Debussy's early style. At stake was what image of Debussy should be remembered, recorded, and published for posterity. There was reluctance on the part of his former colleagues, wife, critics, and biographers to portray a less than perfect side of his genius. At the same time, there was an overreliance on testimony and the presentation of personal documents, including the Vasnier letters, which subsequent research has shown to have been incorrectly ordered and dated. The posthumous documents relating to early Debussy informed subsequent biographies and critical studies of the composer, starting with the Koechlin (1927) and Léon Vallas biographies (1926, 1932, and 1944). In this essay, I tease out the significance of the first attempts to reconstruct and scrutinize the early musical life and work of their near contemporary Debussy. In so doing, I build on the recent scholarly work devoted to Debussy's early compositions by Marie Rolf, Denis Herlin, Richard Langham Smith, James Briscoe, John Clevenger, and many others.

  • 8 - Debussy's Concept of Orchestration

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 254-271

  • Summary

    How Was Orchestration Taught in Paris around the Turn of the Twentieth Century?

    From the perpsective of today's music curricula, perhaps the most surprising aspect of Paris Conservatoire teaching in the late nineteenth century is that there were no classes in orchestration. Aspiring composers like Charles Koechlin, Gustave Charpentier and Florent Schmitt learned to write Prix de Rome cantatas in Massenet's composition class, as Debussy had done under Ernest Guiraud in the 1880s, with the ultimate goal being operatic success. Such advice as was given tended to be aesthetic rather than technical, and few escaped the prevailing influence of Massenet in their formative years. Of course, there were orchestration treatises by Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov, and latterly Widor's Technique de l'orchestre moderne (1904), which Ravel is supposed to have kept by his bedside. But despite exceptions like André Gedalge, who gave technical advice in counterpoint and orchestration to Koechlin and Ravel, it was not until Vincent d'Indy became director of the Schola Cantorum in 1900 that orchestration began to be systematically taught. Nevertheless, his teaching focused merely on producing competent orchestrators, ones who could simply make their way adequately in a professional world. We can tell this from the notes Satie took at the Schola in December 1909, where he was advised that, whereas the oboe and bassoon worked well in octaves, the oboe and horn did not. D'Indy filled poor Satie's mind with the harmonic series restrictions of natural horns, leading him to despise the instrument, and he told him that three trumpets signified “the end of the world,” even though he habitually used three trumpets in C himself, as did Debussy. So, it is perhaps not surprising that Satie emerged as an orchestrator who seems to have been paranoid about any form of orchestral doubling. It also perhaps helps to explain why the sink-or-swim methods of the Paris Conservatoire produced the best orchestrators, who despite their absence of specific training and classes, somehow emerged from their august institution fully-fledged, imaginative and resourceful from the outset.

    So how did aspiring composers learn their craft? The answer has to be from studying scores, from orchestrating (or arranging) the music of others, from frequent attendance at concerts and rehearsals, from consulting performers, and most likely also from experimentation.

  • 13 - Vertige!: Debussy, Mallarmé, and the Edge of Language

  • from Part Three - History and Hermeneutics
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 366-392

  • Summary

    Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

    In 1913, nearly twenty years after composing the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Debussy returned to the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé in search of song texts. All three of the poems he chose have something to do with the nothingness of thin air. Each suggests a rhythmic movement of the air: the breathing in and out of a sigh (Soupir), the waving back and forth of a fan (Éventail) and, in the middle of the triptych, the words of a lover who knows their futility even as he speaks (Placet futile). Not only do these poems evoke the movement of air, each draws attention to itself as an object made of air, a poetic conceit to which Debussy responds with music preoccupied with its own evanescence. These late settings of Mallarmé thus reflect upon an aesthetic principle that shapes Debussy's music as a whole, offering, in exemplary and exquisite miniature, a musical counterpart to Mallarmé's poetry, acts of saying that draw attention to the “nothing” of which they speak so eloquently (for the poems and their translations, see appendix 13.1).

    The first song of Debussy's set is “Soupir.” Mallarmé's poem consists of a single sentence, rising and falling like the inhalation and exhalation of breath that it suggests. It is shaped around a central axis, a transformative moment of reversal marked by the repetition of the phrase “vers l'Azur” which ends the first half of the poem (lines 1–5) and begins the second (lines 6–10). This key moment is reinforced by the punctuation (an exclamation point followed by a dash), which introduces a hiatus but, at the same time, carries one half of the poem into the next. The highpoint of the poem's trajectory is thus marked by a momentary silence and suspension of motion. As Marie Rolf demonstrates in her detailed study of this song, the reflective symmetry of Mallarmé's poetic arc is manifest at both a structural and semantic level. The rhythm and enjambment of the two halves, flowing toward and away from this central point of repetition, reinforces the poetic imagery itself, which hinges on the idea of rising and falling.

  • 14 - Follow the Leader: Debussy's Contrapuntal Games

  • from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 395-418

  • Summary

    Debussy and counterpoint: the statement initially sounds preposterous. Debussy is normally remembered as the quintessential harmonist, who flaunted the conventional rules of voice leading. When quizzed by his teacher Ernest Guiraud in 1889 or 1890, he famously denied that there was any need to resolve French sixth chords or any reason to avoid parallel triads. According to him: “pleasure is the law.” And when he addressed the same issues later in his career, Debussy went so far as to denounce the conventional distinction between so-called perfect and imperfect chords: “Nothing is more mysterious than a perfect chord! Despite all theories, both old and new, we are still not sure, first why it is perfect, and second, why the other chords have to bear the stigma of being imperfect. Music ought therefore to free itself as quickly as possible from these little rituals with which the conservatories insist on encumbering it.”

    When Debussy denounced traditional rules of counterpoint, he challenged an area of music theory whose history dates back many centuries. Vast in scope, contrapuntal theory deals with the conditions under which voices can be stacked above or below one another. Traditional species counterpoint focuses on three main issues: how individual voices proceed from one note to the next (e.g., the predominance of steps over leaps); how stacked voices proceed in relation to one another (e.g., the role of oblique, contrary, similar, or parallel motion); and how far apart those voices should be stacked (e.g., the classification and treatment of consonances and dissonances). Learned counterpoint then considers the ways in which specific melodic lines can be transformed (e.g., transposition, inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, augmentation and diminution), restacked (e.g., invertible or double counterpoint at the octave, tenth, and twelfth), and staggered (e.g., strict canonic imitation, free fugal imitation, and stretto).

    Although contrapuntal theory was originally developed to explain modal polyphony from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was subsequently adapted to cover tonal works from the common-practice period, including the scholastic fugue. These adaptations were necessary because the individual voices now operated within the context of functional harmony. In styles where the textures are controlled harmonically rather than intervallically, the individual lines can contain more frequent and more extreme leaps; in so-called compound melodies such leaps are created by shifting from one chord tone to another or from one “latent voice” to another.

  • 2 - The Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy Thirty Years On

  • from Part One - Historiographical and Editorial Issues
    • By Roy Howat, Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 38-56

  • Summary

    When the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy were set in train in 1982, we could hardly have foreseen how extensively the project would affect the lives of the main participants or our understanding of the composer—even if our perceptions in 1982 of Debussy's printed scores and manuscripts had played a major part in motivating the enterprise. In an existing chapter and article I have already recounted the project's early history and some of the initial decisions concerning editorial philosophy and method. Thirty-six years after inception, it seems appropriate to consider how the edition is interacting with the musical world, and how these interactions may influence volumes still to come. (In 2018 the edition is over halfway to completion, twenty-one volumes issued out of a total of thirty-seven, with the piano music entirely covered—a state of affairs that bears witness to the complexity of the editorial task.) Has the edition motivated perceptible shifts in performing and editorial practice? If so, are they desirable ones, and on what grounds do we decide that?

    Three categories of answers can be offered. An immediate answer comes from repertoire the edition has made available (or available in reliable texts), much of it now recorded more than once from the new edition. It was a thorough surprise, but a happy coincidence, that Debussy's hitherto unknown and apparently last piano piece, Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon of early 1917, surfaced at auction late in 2001, just in time for publication in 2002 in volume four of the piano works, and as a separate Durand offprint. (I say “apparently last piano piece” because we will never really know: that label had previously been attached to the Élégie of December 1915, whose rediscovery in the 1970s had usurped it in turn from the Douze études.) Volumes 2 and 4 of the piano works also present several other mature pieces unavailable until the late 1970s: the three Images of 1894 (one of them an early version of the “Sarabande” of Pour le piano), the Morceau de concours of 1904 (first printed in the magazine Musica in a January 1905 spot-the-composer competition), and the aforementioned Élégie, now furnished with some vital accidentals hitherto missing.

  • 4 - “Paysage sentimental”: “Si doux, si triste, si dormant …”

  • from Part One - Historiographical and Editorial Issues
    • By David Grayson, professor of music at the University of Minnesota.
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 105-124

  • Summary

    “Paysage sentimental” may not be among Debussy's more popular songs, but it played a meaningful role at the start of his career, and its vicissitudes during the twenty-year period following its composition were closely intertwined with his personal and professional life. The song is dated November 1883 in its sole surviving autograph manuscript, which is contained in the so-called Recueil Vasnier, the small volume of thirteen chansons that the young composer presented to Mme Vasnier, his muse and lover, in January 1885, at the time of his departure for the Villa Médici in Rome. The Recueil Vasnier is unusual in several respects. It was clearly conceived as a presentation manuscript, representing Debussy's evident intent to provide his muse with an organized collection of fair copies of a selection from among the songs that he had composed for her and that they had performed together. Yet some of the songs bear signs of revision, sometimes significant, and some are unfinished in various ways. Moreover, they do not constitute a single, coherent collection but rather were arranged in three sections, the second of which was left incomplete.

    The first section is a set of five Verlaine settings entitled “Fêtes galantes.” This set has its own title page (on fol. 1r), listing and numbering the five songs: “Pantomime,” “En sourdine,” Mandoline, “Clair de lune,” and “Fantoches.” The individual songs are undated, but from other evidence, including dates inscribed in different manuscript copies, we can infer that they were composed over about a year, between January 1882 and early 1883. They do not seem to be arranged in chronological order, but rather in a sequence designed for performance. Their consecutive performance is further suggested by the fact that Debussy copied the five songs sequentially, without individual title pages, on both rectos and versos from folio 1v through folio 11r, thus ending one folio short of filling the first of the manuscript's four gatherings, each of which originally consisted of six nested bifolios.

    On folio 12r, the last folio of the first gathering, Debussy provided a title page for the sixth song in the Recueil, “Coquetterie posthume,” based on a poem by Théophile Gautier. The song itself begins on the verso of the same folio and continues into the second gathering.

  • 7 - Between Massenet and Wagner

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 225-253

  • Summary

    “Do not have me say poison,” pleaded Charles Koechlin in 1926 as he reflected upon the influence of Massenet on the young Debussy. Massenet: the charmer, the composer attentive to his market. Debussy: the bold revolutionary who struggled to attain aesthetic autonomy. Even though these epithets are reductive, and have even become stereotypes, they are difficult to disentangle from any consideration of the relationship of these two figures. That relationship has to negotiate the large chasm that separates them in the usual way of tracing the history of music, a narrative where Debussy assumes the role of a colossal figure who had a major impact on the destiny of Western music, whereas Massenet has a negligible part to play. Koechlin strongly implies that many musicians in the 1920s thought that Massenet had the effect of poison on the young Claude-Achille. It is worth positioning Koechlin's remark in its original context: “Debussy took a long time to shake off the influence (do not have me say poison) of Massenet. It can happen that a lot of time elapses before an artist discovers himself.”

    In underlining the slow artistic development of Debussy, Koechlin implicitly touches upon a major issue in debates about his stylistic evolution, debates that have affected the way that critics have positioned Massenet in relation to his younger colleague. According to Maurice Emmanuel, Debussy discovered his own voice quite quickly. In anecdotes first published in a special edition of La revue musicale devoted to Debussy's youth—anecdotes that would become widely disseminated—Emmanuel tells of how Debussy entertained his fellow students at the Conservatoire with “a plethora of chords […], a rippling of weird arpeggios, a gargling of trills with three simultaneous pitches [and] series of unanalyzable harmonic progressions.” Emmanuel took up the same theme in a monograph about Pelléas et Mélisande dating from the same period. Responding to the “cascades of chords” applauded by Debussy's classmates, Émile Durand, the harmony teacher, snapped the piano cover shut on the fingers of his student and scolded him: “you would be better served by practicing harmonic progressions.” In short, Emmanuel tells of the coexistence of two Debussys at the Conservatoire: one, Claude-Achille, who followed the compositional regime of the school, and the other, the “authentic Debussy,” whose mature stylistic and syntactical orientation was already to a certain extent in place.

  • 6 - Composing after Wagner: The Music of Bruneau and Debussy, 1890–1902

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 175-224

  • Summary

    The operas of Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) created a sensation in French musical circles during the 1890s. According to the critics, Le rêve (1891) and L'attaque du moulin (1893) offered the first truly French alternative to Wagnerian music drama. During the same period Claude Debussy began asserting his signature style in his first great works, such as Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), and Pelléas et Mélisande (although the opera premièred in 1902, the short score for a substantial portion of the work was written between 1893 and 1895). In this essay I compare the works of Bruneau and Debussy during this decisive decade, paying particular attention to their musical language and poetic associations: the tonal symbolism of F-sharp major and C major in the operas; the conjuring up of dream worlds through whole-tone scales; rhythmic organization (abrupt contrasts combined with the use of liquidation and motivic elimination); and the use of offstage voices to create a sense of distance and stereophonic effects. Richard Langham Smith and Jean-Christophe Branger have both sensitively explored the parallels between Bruneau and Debussy. As they concentrated primarily on the connections between Le rêve and Pelléas et Mélisande, I seek to broaden the discussion: first, by examining a larger group of works, and second, by situating them more precisely within the context of composition in contemporary French music circles. I do not want to minimize the aesthetic differences that distinguish Debussy from Bruneau, or to reduce the former to a slavish imitator of the latter. Still, for a young composer in the 1890s seeking to escape the temptations of Wagnerism, Bruneau's operas would have stood out on account of their success and originality; we should not dismiss a priori the possibility that Debussy was inspired by these works.

    On a historiographical level, several studies have endeavored to contextualize Debussy's music in relation to composers and repertories that have since become canonic, such as Richard Wagner (1813–83) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), and the music of Java and other Far Eastern cultures presented at the 1889 Paris World's Fair.

  • 5 - The “Song Triptych”: Reflections on a Debussyan Genre

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 127-174

  • Summary

    À quoi bon, vraiment, accorder la voix de Bilitis soit en majeur, soit en mineur puisqu'elle a la voix la plus persuasive du monde?—Tu me diras, “Pourquoi as-tu fait la musique?” Ça, vieux loup, c'est autre chose […] C'est pour autres décors.

    —Debussy, letter to Pierre Louÿs

    As is well known, Debussy significantly changed his approach to song composition around the years 1890–91. While he had been writing mélodies more or less continuously since his earliest student days, up to this point he had tended to set texts either singly or in various different groupings—for example, the six Ariettes, paysages belges et aquarelles of 1888 (later revised as Ariettes oubliées, 1903), and the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire of 1887–89. From around 1890 he was to conceive and present the vast majority of his mélodies in groups of three, often titled as such—as in one of the first, Trois mélodies de Paul Verlaine (composed 1891, published 1901), and the last, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913).

    By some measures, the total number of eight “song triptychs” that emerged across this span of more than two decades renders this genre (or subgenre) the one for which Debussy wrote most often. It is thus surprising how little analytical attention it has so far received in the literature. With a few significant exceptions, scholars have tended to treat Debussy's songs individually, in isolation from their composed and published companions. From such studies we have gained, by now, a rich and varied perspective on the approaches to text setting and vocal writing that characterized Debussy's distinct contribution to the history of French art song. But a closer investigation of his evolving approach to the tripartite collection of mélodies—for which he almost always brought together, into new succession, three texts by the same poet—can bring into view further questions of potentially wide implication for our understanding, on one hand, of the famously problematic genre of the “song cycle” and, on the other, of Debussy's own creative development across these two crucial creative decades.

    There was of course plenty of precedent for composing sets of three songs. Schubert and Schumann each wrote a few; a more proximate and relevant instance is possibly Gabriel Fauré's very first song cycle (and his only triptych), the 1878 Poèmes d'un jour, op. 21.

  • 17 - The Games of Jeux

  • from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 476-510

  • Summary

    The story is a familiar one: a ballet is premièred in Paris in the spring of 1913 by the Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky. The ballet is considered the composer's most modern work to date and soon viewed as one of the seminal works of the early century. After 1950 it elicits a number of analytic inquiries. These scholarly essays seek to find coherence through a variety of technical means but concentrate on the ballet score alone. One recent writer made this last point explicitly by basing his study solely on the “musical construction” since, as he argued, the interdisciplinary aspects of the work were soon forgotten after its première. This approach prompted another scholar—the former's “public adversary, private pal”—to question such studies of “the music itself” and to champion hermeneutics. It will be clear that I have been describing the première of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, though before this point in the story, the description could have applied equally well to the première of Debussy's Jeux. To continue the similarities between these two ballets, scholarly inquiry into Jeux has concentrated on the musical score alone with little, if any, reference to ostensibly external factors. This study will instead be both analytical and hermeneutical, with the goal of showing that the formal organization of the ballet gains insight from the study not only of the music, but also of the stage directions, as well as of the contemporary events in Debussy's personal life.

    An examination of Debussy's life in the context of a study of Jeux might initially seem a fruitless line of inquiry. Debussy's friendship with Stravinsky, however, turns out to have been a major event in the French composer's life. Although the musical relationship between these two composers has most frequently been approached in terms of what Stravinsky learned from Debussy, this musical influence actually worked both ways. This is to say that Stravinskian fingerprints appear in Debussy's compositions beginning in 1910. For example, Howat has noted “a methodical exploration of octatonic techniques” after 1910, the year the two composers met. This reaction was undoubtedly the result of Debussy's unequivocally positive reaction to Petrushka, which prompted him to incorporate the Petrushka chord, using the same triads in the same inversions, into his little-known ballet Khamma (see ex. 17.1).

  • 16 - Debussy's G♯/A♭ Complex: The Adventures of a Pitch-Class from the Suite bergamasque to the Douze études

  • from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
    • By Boyd Pomeroy, University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 435-475

  • Summary

    A Pitch-Specific Association

    This paper explores a peculiar feature of Debussy's musical vocabulary, running through his works from early to late, namely an evident attraction to a certain “complex” of harmonic and contrapuntal habits or routines in conjunction with bass pedal points on G♯/A♭. This pitch-specific association often seems to arise independently of a given piece's larger tonal context, and furthermore, in connection with specific formal contexts and expressive content.

    These passages present an intriguing challenge to the analyst in their balance of, or tension between, the evocative resonance of pitch-specific associations and the competing demands of tonal-syntactical coherence in a given tonal-formal context. Although some interesting precedents for this kind of compositional thinking can be found in earlier tonal music of the commonpractice period, it is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, enabled by a post-common-practice approach to tonal form.

    From the perspective of compositional chronology, this “G♯/A♭ complex” might be thought of as a stream or thread running through many of Debussy's works, from early maturity (the Suite bergamasque, ca. 1890) to new departures in late neoclassicism (the Violin Sonata, 1916–17)—though its most elaborate manifestation comes a little earlier, in the (1915) étude “Pour les sonorités opposées,” which it completely dominates, and within which it finds a final resolution of sorts. Although it seems to be mainly associated with his instrumental works, it also makes an occasional appearance in the vocal music.

    Composers’ Tonal Habits

    The G♯/A♭ complex represents an intriguing nexus, or coming together of, certain aspects of musical expression with elements of formal design, in turn conjuring a very specific sound world of harmony, counterpoint, and schemas for elaboration, at a singular transposition level. Some relevant historical precedents for such compositional thinking might include:

  • technical “tonal habits” with historical resonance in particular keys— e.g., the chromatically filled-in interval of a fourth, from its pitchspecific origins in Baroque musical figures and unequal keyboard temperament.

  • tactile associations, especially pianistic ones—specific harmonic, melodic, or contrapuntal idioms associated with the idiomatic (whitekey/ black-key) feel of playing in a particular key, an example of this being what William Rothstein has identified as a “B-major complex” in the music of Chopin.

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