Unless one had a personal fortune like Ernest Chausson, it was difficult for composers at the end of the nineteenth century to live solely from their profession. Most of the time they supplemented their income through a position at the Paris Conservatoire or in a musical institution, such as the Paris Opéra, or by making a living as a performer. However, Debussy throughout his life did not fall into any of these categories. The comparison with composers who won the Prix de Rome in Debussy’s lifetime is very enlightening in this respect. Reading Debussy’s correspondence might suggest that he was a poorly paid composer who was always short of money. If in the first years of his career he had a difficult time of it, he became, thanks to Pelléas et Mélisande, a famous musician enjoying a comfortable income. A change in lifestyle linked to his remarriage and a difficult divorce, plus the absence of other operas in his catalogue, explain the spiral of indebtedness that kept increasing right up to the end of his life.

Debussy was associated with various French composers whose work stylistically spanned nineteenth-century tradition to the twentieth-century avant-garde. This chapter explores his connections with Ernest Guiraud, Ernest Chausson, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, and Erik Satie. It assesses key issues in each setting. Various relationships are represented here: the student-teacher archetype, less formalised mentorship, peer friendships, the more distant collegial relationship, and sometimes adversarial exchanges. Debussy and these composers engaged with each other in multiple ways; dynamics shifted such that the student became the teacher, a distant figure became a colleague, a peer became a critic. The study of these relationships casts new light on Debussy and the other parties.

This chapter explores the few opportunities for the education of a budding musician in Debussy’s France. These were primarily private teachers, especially piano teachers, and admission to the Paris Conservatoire (or regional conservatoires). The ultimate prize for the aspiring composer was the Prix de Rome, which could be crucial to the advancement of compositional careers. Debussy’s early education with a private piano teacher, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, was critical for his later development; indeed, he praised her playing and supported the claim that she was a pupil of Chopin. He went on to spend a decade at the Paris Conservatoire, where in many ways he trod water, at least until his success in the Prix de Rome. Even then, however, the winning of the coveted prize failed to launch his career in the way it helped others.

This chapter describes new music in Paris in the late 1960s, the period when the young spectral composers were students at the Paris Conservatoire. It opens with an account of Messiaen’s composition class and how elements such as neumes and Messiaen’s analyses of Debussy and Ravel informed Grisey’s, Murail’s, and Levinas’s emerging musical sensibilities. After giving a brief biographical account of those latter composers and Roger Tessier, the chapter touches on serialism’s changing status at a time when it had begun to be taught at the Paris Conservatoire; the effect of May ’68 on the Conservatoire’s pedagogy and on musical mores more generally among young composers; Fifth Republic France’s increased funding for new music festivals in regional cities such as Royan; Boulez and Xenakis’s profiles as the two most influential composers in France; and collectives, aleatoricism, and music theatre in post-1968 composition. The chapter closes with an account of Grisey’s early student works, in particular their creative adaptation of Messiaen’s personnages sonores concept towards the construction of audibly distinct musical figures, which would become a key element in Grisey’s musical style.

This chapter gives an overview of Gérard Grisey’s youth and early musical formation. It shows how, having been given an accordion at the age of five, Grisey went on to become a youthful virtuoso on the instrument, winning medals at the accordion World Cup. It discusses how, as a teenager, Grisey became preoccupied with music, religion, and death, three topics that were for him intimately linked, and how Grisey’s later musical values of beauty, clarity, and perceptivity were already established by the time he arrived at the Paris Conservatoire. It details aspects of his compositional training in Trossingen under Helmut Degen and in Paris under Henri Duttileux, before finishing with a glimpse of Grisey’s interest in the Catholic mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin.

The Paris Conservatoire played a pivotal role in shaping Olivier Messiaen’s music and career. His compositional technique resulted from his student years there, and he later found creative stimulation and financial stability in the same institution as the teacher of hundreds of future composers and musicians. Indeed, Messiaen spent most of his adult life at the Conservatoire. This chapter examines Messiaen’s relationship with the Paris Conservatoire and focusses on the way it shaped French musical culture, the institution, his students, and Messiaen's musical style.