The Emancipator

To many a casual concert goer, the name Claude Debussy suggests a moody, vaporous music of almost monotonous sweetness and grace. Anybody who ever sat down to a piano lesson has tinkled through Clair de Lune, and since the great Toscanini performances of the 1930s, it has been almost impossible to get through a concert season without at least one rendering of that virtuoso war horse La Mer. But there is another view of Debussy--one that audiences are being reminded of more and more often in the centennial year of his birth. Debussy was in fact, a revolutionary who led such tradition-breakers as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg into the 20th century.

Throughout his career, Debussy ranted against the "rhetoric" and the "emphasis" that played so large a part in 19th century musical idiom. Clarity, precision, balance, proportion were the qualities he was trying for--and he achieved them so brilliantly that he became the great emancipator for a whole generation of composers. In his fascination with primary color, with pure emotion, he resembled the impressionist painters--Cezanne perhaps, or Monet. Debussy still surprises with his strange, exotic and otherworldly sound. Studied in fresh detail--in such books as British Musicologist Edward Lockspeiser's new biography, Debussy: His Life and Mind (Vol. 1)--he still fascinates as a talented and tormented man.

Try Anything. Debussy succinctly defined his approach to musical composition with his reply to the registrar at the Paris Conservatory after that solemn traditionalist became exasperated with the student's habit of making up weird chords What rule are you following? demanded the registrar. Said Debussy: "Mon plisesir." Debussy's pleasure, almost from the time he entered the conservatory at the age of ten, was to break most of the accepted rules of composition. His music was full of dissonances, wildly assorted chords, conflicting rhythmic patterns.

Although he did not reject tonality, he prepared the way for the atonalists by introducing chords outside a composition's signature, producing a feeling of wavering between keys. He would try anything: a friend from the conservatory recalls Debussy's seating himself at the piano and banging out a succession of grinding dissonances as he attempted to imitate the sound of buses rumbling over the cobblestones of the Faubourg Poissoniere. But more important than the technique was the reticence that he restored to concert halls long accustomed to the thunders and tempests of Beethoven and Wagner. No composer spoke with more intense feeling than Debussy--or in a quieter voice.

Tremendous Humbug. The man who challenged the masters was short-legged, plump and swarthy, with violently staring eyes. He wore his hair in bangs to conceal two hornlike protuberances that jutted from his forehead. Contemporaries noted that there was something catlike in his manners, his wit and his sulks. Wrote Poet Andre Suares: "Just as the cat rubs itself against the hand, Debussy caresses his soul with the pleasure which he invokes." A natural bohemian, the composer spent nights roaming Montmartre with celebrities of the period ranging from Mata Hari to Marcel Proust.

Born into an impoverished, nonmusical family Debussy had virtually no formal schooling as a child. Unpopular with the more hidebound instructors at the conservatory, he still managed to win the coveted Grand Prix de Rome by tossing off a composition (L'Enfant Prodigue) in deliberate imitation of Lalo and Delibes, the popular French composers of the day. Debussy was no admirer of either man, or of any other French contemporary. To him Berlioz was "a tremendous humbug, Charpentier was "downright vulgar," Massenet a panderer of "stupid ideas and amateur standards."

Although he felt the pull to Wagner and made ritualistic pilgrimages to Bayreuth, Debussy could not accept ever Wagner without a sneer. Commenting on the characters in Parsifal, he called Amfortas "that melancholy knight of the Grail, who whines like a shopgirl and whimpers like a baby." Yet traces of the Wagnerian influence remained. "But that's the whole of Parsifal,'' muttered Richard Strauss after hearing a particular passage from Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

No Other Reason. Debussy did not start his first important work--the Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'un Fame--until he was 30. But during the next 15 years, he wrote enough to secure any composers reputation, including the revolutionary piano pieces, in which by deft use of the sustaining pedal he transformed the piano from a percussive to a harmonic instrument. Debussy's only opera, Pelleas et Melisande, surprised its audience at its 1902 premiere with its lack of crowd-catching arias or easily hummable melodies. But later audiences began to understand that Debussy was attempting something new in opera; by reducing the vocal parts to declamation--close to spoken language--he was trying to elevate the orchestra to a position of new importance, where it would become the main commentator on the action. His opera's moonstruck tale of love and fratricide, which returned to the Metropolitan last week after an absence of two seasons, had a staunch admirer in Alban Berg, who acknowledged that Pelleas provided him with the model for his own tradition-smashing Wozzeck. But for all his growing success, Debussy's music earned him practically no money. Most of the time he depended on handouts from his few friends.

On the morning of his first marriage, to a model named Rosalie Texier, Debussy was so broke that he had to give a piano lesson to pay for the wedding breakfast.

To marry Rosalie, he was forced to rid himself abruptly of Rosalie's best friend, a girl with dyed blonde hair and "steely eyes" named Gabrielle Dupont, who had lived with him and supported him for ten years. Gabrielle had once shot herself over Debussy's infidelity. She recovered, and the whole sequence was repeated seven years later when Debussy left Rosalie to marry wealthy Emma Bardac, mother of one of his pupils. Rosalie fired two bullets into herself, recovered and disappeared from Debussy's life. So did most of Debussy's friends. To Debussy, the scandal seemed in some mystic way to be payment for "some forgotten debt to life." In the years after 1904, Debussy was more comfortable financially, but both the quality and quantity of his music faded.

A celebrity by then, he kept up with the work of younger composers, found Stravinsky "the most wonderful orchestral craftsman of our age," with an "instinctive genius for color and rhythm." But, he added, "when he is old he will be insupportable--that is, he will be unable to tolerate any music." During World War I, Debussy became ill with cancer. But he composed until a year before he died, in the spring of 1918--because, explained France's greatest composer in a letter, "Claude Debussy, writing no more music, has no longer any reason to exist. They never taught me anything but music."

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