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Classical
Debussy at 150: The Impressions Still Deceive
CLASSICAL music institutions are ordinarily quick to seize on major anniversaries of a composer'due south nascence or expiry as a user-friendly programming hook. Get ready for the Wagner and Verdi bicentennial celebrations adjacent year.
But what happened to Debussy, born 150 years ago on Midweek in St.-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris? His anniversary has fatigued surprisingly niggling detect, at least from major New York institutions. Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center take scheduled no special events or festivals. The Metropolitan Opera terminal brought back its production of "Pelléas et Mélisande" for the usher Simon Rattle's overdue house debut in 2010, but for just five performances.
In truth, major institutions sometimes employ anniversaries every bit an excuse to programme lots of familiar repertory, so letting Debussy's slip by is inappreciably scandalous. Yet information technology does seem a curious oversight.
Mayhap Debussy is non considered enough of an audience describe, but I suspect that the real reason may be more than complicated. Nosotros like to think we know and adore Debussy. Ah, Debussy the cracking Impressionist! For painting in that location is Monet. For music, Debussy. "La Mer," how gorgeous. There are the inventive pianoforte pieces, with their watery textures and evocative titles like "Estampes" and "Images." And of course the diaphanous orchestral beauties of "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun."
Yet the attracting surfaces of Debussy'southward works tin can mask the utter daring of the music, merely as the surface beauties of Impressionist paintings can hibernate the shocking experiments the works represent. (I volition return to the question of whether Debussy can rightly exist chosen an Impressionist.)
I think we take Debussy for granted, and this may explicate the lack of celebration this year. But by whatever mensurate, Debussy was one of the near radical composers in music history. This unlikely genius from a humble background had almost no formal teaching except in music: he was admitted to the Paris Conservatory at 10.
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His radicalism has many aspects, beginning with his pathbreaking harmonic language. Debussy loved chords with unresolved dissonances, which sound jazzy to us today, like those used by Duke Ellington and Bill Evans. But there are likewise echoes of the Renaissance in Debussy's harmonic language, every bit well every bit the East Asian pentatonic scales that Debussy embraced after his epiphany at an international exposition in Paris in 1889. The inventive colors and timbres in his music are often veiled through hazy textures. Still a refined French sensibility is at work as well, so that each chord and gesture, no matter how blurry, is etched with careful detail.
Merely the most radical chemical element of Debussy's artistry involved his arroyo to time. Afterward hundreds of years of pulsating rhythm, Debussy dared to write whole stretches of almost static music. He wrote plenty of dances and cakewalks, incoherent piano pieces, a cord quartet and, at the end of his life, three unconventionally Neo-Classical sonatas. Still, stretching time to its limits was a authentication of his.
Earlier composers had experimented in this way to some extent, especially Wagner, to whom Debussy had a lifelong love-detest attitude. In the mid-1880s, Debussy was "a Wagnerian to the pitch of forgetting the elementary rules of courtesy," he recalled. But the Wagnerian spell began to lift for Debussy after pilgrimages to the Bayreuth Festival in the summers of 1888 and 1889. In later years he was oft caustically critical of Wagner.
Debussy earned coin from publishers by preparing pianoforte reductions of the Wagner operas. His friend Pierre Louys said that Debussy once won a bet that he could play through "Tristan und Isolde" by heart.
Debussy'due south allure to Wagner is like shooting fish in a barrel to sympathise. Wagner's orchestrations shimmer with a sensuous glow that strongly influenced Debussy, and Wagner certainly experimented with fourth dimension-stands-still pacing. Notwithstanding what Debussy did with rhythm was quite different. For me this comes through by comparing the orchestral openings of "Tristan" and "Pelléas."
In the Prelude to "Tristan," Wagner's richly chromatic harmonic writing unfolds at a stunningly deliberate pace. There is trivial sense of pulse, just heaving forward motion. However Wagner's chords are total of harmonic implications: each i drives, however haltingly, to the next.
"Pelléas" begins with bare chords hinting at medieval sacred music. But the chords do not impel the music forward. The passage sounds about like a fragment of brackish, harmonized plainchant. This leads to a quietly ominous theme with a dotted-note rhythm that is associated with Golaud, the world-weary older grandson of Arkel, a wizened king in some vaguely medieval time and place. Simply Golaud's essentially ii-notation theme (an alternating whole footstep) seems most stuck in place.
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And the opening of "Pelléas" is hardly Debussy'southward most radical experiment in static rhythm. One of my favorite examples is the piano prelude "La Terrasse des Audiences du Clair de Lune" ("The Terrace for Moonlight Audiences"). It begins with a fragmentary theme in soft chords. Then the left hand sounds a depression, sustained C sharp as the right hand traces a winding, quizzical line that descends from on high. In the middle comes a motif in quiet octaves that could exist pagoda music. These elements happen in increasing complication, just always hushed. However for all the inner activity, the music merely hovers in place and shimmers in sound. When, well into the piece, that depression C precipitous pedal tone moves up to a D sharp, it is as if a tectonic musical plate has shifted.
If Debussy is being disregarded on his birthday because he remains difficult to peg, he is partly to blame. He was a contrary sort, an creative person who knew what he did not similar but not always where he belonged.
He could be a skilful colleague. He maintained a thirty-twelvemonth friendship with the sardonic Satie, whose experiments in harmony influenced him. And in that location is a wonderful account of Debussy sitting at a pianoforte with Stravinsky in 1912 to try out Part 1 of "The Rite of Spring" in a pianoforte version for four easily, at the habitation of friends.
The British music historian Edward Lockspeiser, in his important biography of Debussy published in 1936 and updated several times, gets at the essence of the man and the artist when he suggests that Debussy "obscured himself from the outside world by a screen of bristling irony."
Lockspeiser quotes a revealing alphabetic character Debussy wrote to the composer Ernest Chausson in 1893: "Here I am, just turned 31 and not quite sure of my aesthetic. There are however things that I am not able to practice — create masterpieces, for case, or be actually responsible — for I take the fault of thinking too much most myself and only seeing reality when it is forced upon me and and then unsurmountable."
And so was Debussy an Impressionist? In his authoritative entry on Debussy for the 2001 edition of The New Grove Lexicon of Music and Musicians, the French musicologist François Lesure strongly argues no. He places Debussy in the Symbolist motility in French literature and arts, which thrived for about a dozen years starting in 1885. It's an aesthetic Debussy characterized, Lesure writes, by "rejection of naturalism, of realism and of overly clear-cut forms, hatred of emphasis, indifference to the public and a taste for the indefinite, the mysterious, even the esoteric."
Some of these tenets sound like what many of us would associate with Impressionism. When "La Mer" was introduced in 1905, Debussy allowed the program notes to depict the piece equally "musical Impressionism," the "formula for which is the sectional property of its composer." Notwithstanding in 1908 Debussy wrote to his publisher that he was trying "something unlike" and that it was "what the imbeciles call Impressionism, but almost the least appropriate term possible."
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What are we to conclude? Well, for someone whose job involves trying to make music accessible to general readers, these questionable terms, similar Impressionism, atonality (which Schoenberg hated) or Minimalism (which Philip Drinking glass disavows), come up in handy.
Lesure describes "Pelléas et Mélisande," commencement performed in 1902, as the "masterpiece of French Symbolism." Debussy adapted Maurice Maeterlinck's 1893 Symbolist play. Mélisande, a lovely, fragile and secretive immature woman, is discovered lost in the woods by the somber but decent Golaud, who marries her. But Golaud'south impulsive younger blood brother Pelléas falls uncontrollably in love with Mélisande, an issue that leads to tragedy. Debussy's stunning music taps into the subliminal undercurrents stirring below seemingly inconsequential dialogue, avoiding explicit flourishes while illuminating the unconscious.
Withal Maeterlinck, who apparently cared as little for musicians every bit he did for music, could not stand the opera, every bit he made articulate in a letter to the newspaper Le Figaro: "Arbitrary and absurd cuts have made information technology incomprehensible."
"I can only wish for its immediate and decided failure," he concluded.
That Debussy commencement promised the role of Mélisande to Maeterlinck's mistress and so abruptly reneged did not help their relations. But Debussy chose wisely in entrusting the function to the Scottish soprano Mary Garden. A very scratchy but priceless 1904 recording has Debussy at the piano accompanying Garden in three short songs, "Ariettas Oubliées," and an excerpt from "Pelléas." Garden'due south singing is tender and poignant yet veiled and a petty cool, perfect for the character and the music. For all the assumptions today well-nigh the how to perform Impressionist (oops, that word) piano music, Debussy's playing, while light of touch, is rhythmically articulate.
As Debussy'southward interest with Maeterlinck suggests, he could exist willful and petulant. Later returning early and dissatisfied from what was to take been a three-yr sojourn in Italy equally a winner of the Prix de Rome, he began a long, tempestuous human relationship with Gabrielle Dupont. He left her for her friend Rosalie Texier, a fashion model whom Debussy married in 1899. But he grew to find Texier intellectually limited and took up with Emma Bardac, the sophisticated wife of a Parisian banker. (Texier subsequently attempted suicide.) He had a daughter with Bardac, his only child.
In his last years he was stricken by rectal cancer, and in 1915 he underwent i of the offset colostomy operations. He died in 1918 at 55.
If at that place are no Debussy festivals for New Yorkers to take in this year, some meaning recordings are being released, one featuring the superb French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in both books of Debussy's preludes, due from Deutsche Grammophon in the United States in October. Mr. Aimard, who will play Book Ii of the preludes at Carnegie Hall in November, captures the sly, wistful, fiery and fantastical qualities in these ingeniously diverse pieces while treating them as the audacious contemporary works they are.
By the way, to counter the tag of Impressionism, Debussy placed his imaginative titles for these preludes in small letters at the stop of each piece. Still, he did provide titles like "Feuilles Mortes" ("Dead Leaves"). That could be the proper noun of an Impressionist painting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/arts/music/debussys-150th-birthday-gets-little-notice.html
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