IT WAS TO BE A SHORT life. Yet when he died in 1918 at the age of 55, the French symbolist composer, Claude Debussy, who was born 150 years ago tomorrow, was a proven revolutionary. As a student at the Paris Conservatoire he had been challenging and argumentative. Debussy rejected the text book and could justify his rebellious streak through his brilliance at the piano which initially pointed him towards a career as a virtuoso. Yet composition won out. For him, rules were made to be broken and he invented harmonies and chords that radicalised tonality.
All very daring opinions to be expressed by the son of a wayward man who sold crockery: “I wanted from music” declared Debussy when explaining his attitude to opera, “a freedom which possesses perhaps to a greater degree than any other art, not being tied to a more or less exact reproduction of nature but to the mysterious correspondences between nature and the imagination.”
This artistic statement of intent certainly applies to his only opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) which shattered existing operatic convention through its enigmatic characterisation. Here also was a poetic work in which the words were as important as the music. Debussy had been intrigued by Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play and wondered who was Mélisande, the troubled woman found weeping in the forest, and what did she really seek from life. She is fascinating and Debussy ensured that she was to become the most interesting female in opera. His strange, elusive and allusive work, which may or may not be about incest, premiered in 1902.
During rehearsals the composer advised the cast to forget that they were singers. It is an opera about feelings and nuance, most of all it is about language, the said and the unsaid, and it took Debussy’s music to convey this.
Debussy was by then already famous for works such as his setting of Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and Nocturnes (1899). If ever a man was saved by his musical gift it was Debussy. His early life as the first of five children barely raised by distracted parents was chaotic. His mother’s neglect alarmed his aunt Clementine. It was she who looked after the Debussy children in her home for long holidays, and who first noticed young Claude’s interest in music, particular the piano.
Debussy senior was arrested and imprisoned in 1871. The boy became a music student at 10. His father suggested that he should become a sailor. But music won out and at 13, in 1875, he performed at a conservatoire concert. Drawn to experimenting with sound, he appears to have been quite canny in always doing enough to pass his exams without compromising his individuality.
In the summer of 1879, his former piano teacher arranged that Debussy would spend the holidays as a house musician playing for a wealthy music fanatic. He enjoyed those weeks living in luxury. Similar experiences were to follow. The next summer saw him join the household of Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness of Tchaikovsky; he played for the family and taught the children. He also learned how to conduct himself in society. He quickly realised that he wanted such a lifestyle for himself. Madame von Meck was supportive and even sent a piece Debussy had composed for her to Tchaikovsky. The Russian master dismissed it as merely very nice: “Nothing is developed and the form is bungled.”
Debussy returned to Paris and his studies. Aside from a two-year stay in Rome, he would settle in Montmartre with friends such as fellow composers Erik Satie and Paul Dukas. Meanwhile poets such as Mallarmé and Verlaine were pioneering the new symbolist works that would inspire Debussy’s music. Poe’s writings also gripped him. Friendship was to again prove helpful to Debussy. Prior to his stay in Rome he had joined the circle of the wealthy Madame Blanche Adelaide Vasnier. She was married and was also an amateur singer. Debussy wrote many songs for her. Their relationship was interrupted by his winning the prestigious Prix de Rome piano competition that brought him to Italy. Aside from providing him with four years of subsidised study and supervised composition, it gave him freedom. He had wanted it but once he had it, Debussy pined for Paris. For him the only positive outcome from the experience was meeting Franz Liszt, who encouraged the younger man to pursue engagements performing Renaissance music on the piano in Rome’s many little churches. Debussy enjoyed this but otherwise disliked living in Italy. The Prix de Rome required he compose a work: he wrote a cantata setting of a Rossetti poem. It was not well received. Undaunted, Debussy became a Montmartre bohemian and set about looking for a patron.
At the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 he discovered Orientalism and was seduced by Javanese percussive music. Four years later his String Quartet Op. 10 impressed critics, while Debussy’s circle widened – he met Proust and Wilde.
Prelude a l’après-midi d’un faune changed music in France. Mallarmé even felt it deepened understanding of his poem. It consolidated Debussy’s musical reputation. He was also involved with many women, most notably Gabrielle Dupont. The relationship was dramatic, culminating in her suicide attempt. By 1899, Debussy was looking elsewhere and married Lily Texier the following year. Pelléas et Mélisande changed his artistic life. His meeting with a rich divorced Jewish heiress Emma Bardac resulted in a dramatic mutual passion. They eloped. Lily attempted suicide and many of Debussy’s friends turned against him, accusing him of ruthless opportunism. Lily issued divorce proceedings while Emma was disinherited by her millionaire uncle. In the midst of all this domestic upheaval, Debussy’s fabulous new work, a painting in sound, Le Mer premiered in 1905.
He married Emma in 1908 but within a year the first signs of the cancer which would kill him emerged. From 1912 he suffered daily haemorrhaging. Cocaine and morphine enabled him to continue his work.
He met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. In the year before the first World War Debussy completed both books of Preludes as well as the second of his two piano suites for his only child Chou-Chou. He knew he was dying, yet composed his beautiful Études for the piano and also En blanc et noir. In the aftermath of an operation came his elegiac Violin Sonata.
He would never write his long discussed Poe opera. Debussy died in Paris on March 25th, 1918 as German artillery pounded the city. His grieving 12-year-old daughter articulated her loss in a letter: writing that now that her beloved Papa was dead, it would always be night.