Musicien Franc,ais

Fifteen years ago on a day when the big German guns were bombarding Paris a lonely funeral cortege wove its way the length of the anxious, crowded city, past the Tuileries, the Place de la Bastille to the old Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. Inside the hearse was the cancer-ridden body of Achille-Claude Debussy, the man who had written the greatest opera since Wagner's Parsifal, whose songs and symphonic works scores of lesser men were trying hard to emulate. Newspapers, crammed with War news, paid scant attention to the passing of Claude Debussy. English-speaking people have had to wait until this week for a translation of the only book which fairly and adequately describes Debussy's musical life.*

Unlike Wagner's many biographers, Author Leon Vallas, friend of Debussy, expert on French music, gives sensation-lovers little to relish in his account of France's foremost composer. Debussy was born in Saint-Germain, a half-hour from Paris, where his parents kept a little china shop. They wanted him to be a sailor but he learned to play the piano so capably that the Conservatoire admitted him at 11. There he writhed under the rigid, hidebound instruction. To his teachers' despair he persisted in disfiguring his exercises with consecutive fifths and octaves, producing strange successions of eerie, subtly-modulated chords. Such tendencies led later to the writing of the lovely, sensuous L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, to the Nocturnes which established his kinship with the French impressionistic painters, to Pelleas et Melisande with its mood so tenuous and unearthly that Debussy despaired of its success until he saw Mary Garden play the part of Melisande.

It took Pelleas et Melisande to square Debussy with his musical contemporaries. Then he became an '"influence," a role thoroughly distasteful to his shy, melancholy nature. Author Vallas, who in most instances uses the facts of Debussy's life on which to hang smooth, scholarly appraisals of his genius, makes Pelleas another, far more personal milestone. Alter its success, Debussy abandoned his first wife, companion of his poverty-stricken days. He married the divorced wife of a rich financier, thought his money troubles were at an end. But his second marriage lost him most of his friends and failed to provide the subsidy he needed for his exquisite tastes. He used rare perfumes, drank expensive wines, had his music published on hand-made parchment yellowed to a certain shade. To indulge himself he had to go on taking what odd jobs he could get. He wrote musical criticisms, toured as a conductor, presenting a sorry figure on the platform with his huge, bulging forehead, his dark, drooping beard, his wooden, jerky, amateurish beat.

Time & again Debussy took orders for music. Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza gave him an advance on operas which were never delivered to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Elise Hall, a deaf Boston lady who on her doctor's advice had taken up the saxophone, commissioned him to write a Rhapsodie for her to play at one of her annual solo appearances with the Boston Orchestral Club, which she financed for a decade early in the century. Mrs. Hall was one of the Boston Coolidges* but to Debussy she was just "the Saxophone Lady." He wrote of her in one of the pinny, almost illegible letters which have survived him: "The Saxophone Lady is inquiring about her piece. Of course I assured her that with the exception of Rameses II, it is the only subject that occupies my thoughts. ... So here I am, searching desperately for novel combinations to show off this aquatic instrument. . . . Considering that this Fantaisie' was ordered, and paid for, and eaten more than a year ago, I realize that I am behindhand with it. ... The saxophone is a reed instrument with whose habits I am not very well acquainted. I wonder whether it indulges in romantic tenderness like the clarinet? . . ."

Debussy never finished Mrs. Hall's Rhapsodie. His last ambitious work was an order from Poet Gabriele d'Annunzio who wanted music for his Martyre de Saint-Sebastien to give to his mistress. Dancer Ida Rubinstein. Debussy's idolaters like to call Saint-Sebastien the great French Parsifal. Stage performances are never given to bear out their belief. The few concert performances have made it seem like the product of a tired, sterile mind. The War cast a final blight on Debussy's creative powers. One of his last feeble works was a Berceuse Heroique, dedicated to Belgium's King Albert. In his illness Debussy had become obsessed by his hatred for Germany, by scorn for the way so many French musicians took Germans for their patterns. As a last pro- test he gave himself the title of Musicien Franc,ais. But France paid him no honors the day he rode to his grave. His only funeral march was played by Germany's Big Bertha.

*Claude Debussy: His Life and Works--translated from the French of Leon Vallas by Maire and Grace O'Brien--Oxford University Press ($5.75).

*Mrs. Hall, now twelve years dead, was the daughter of Joseph S. Coolidge, proud descendant of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. Her husband, Richard J. Hall, was a doctor who practiced briefly in California. After his death she returned to Boston, became one of the first U. S. saxophonists, brought up two daughters: Mary Coolidge Hall who lives in Newton, wife of Lawyer Benjamin Loring Young; and Elise Hall, late wife of Arthur S. Pier who teaches at St. Paul's School. The "Boston" Coolidges are no kin to Vermont's late Calvin Coolidge or to Senator Marcus Allen Coolidge.

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