Claude Debussy

Achille-Claude Debussy (born Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, 22 August 1862; died Paris, France, 25 March, 1918) was a French composer who was one of the most important composers of the early 20th century. Most of his compositions are for orchestra or for piano. He also wrote some songs, chamber music and one opera. He made his music very different from the Romantic style, which other composers used at the time.

Claude Debussy

He is often called an Impressionistic composer because he was influenced by the group of painters called the "Impressionists". They were less interested in making their paintings look exactly like the real world but preferred to paint things such as the effect of the sunlight shining on water. Debussy often did so in his music, which creates a special atmosphere.

Life

Claude Debussy did not have an easy childhood. His father was a travelling salesman, and his mother worked as a seamstress. He learned the piano when he was young and joined into the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of 11. For a time, it seemed that he would become a concert pianist, but he did not do well enough in his examination. After winning an important prize, the Prix de Rome, he went to Rome for two years but did not enjoy it. He visited Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889 to hear Richard Wagner’s operas, but he did not like them. He preferred sounds like that of the Javanese gamelan, which he heard in Paris at the World Exhibition.

In 1899, he married a young woman, named Rosalie Texier. He got a job as music critic of a journal called La revue blanche. He wrote his opera Pélleas et Mélisande, which was performed at the Opéra-Comique. Extremely successful, it was performed a hundred times there during the next ten years. He wrote exciting music for orchestra: Fêtes galantes and a work called La Mer (The Sea) which he worked at while he stayed in Brighton, on the south coast of England. It is one of the most exciting pieces of music about the sea.

Debussy was starting to become very famous. His personal life changed. He left his wife because he had fallen in love with Emma Bardac who was an amateur singer for whom Gabriel Fauré had written a song cycle: La Bonne Chanson. Her husband was a banker. Bardac bought an apartment, where Debussy lived with her for the rest of his life. They had a daughter, called Chou-Chou, who was born in 1905. They married in 1908.

Debussy’s next orchestral work was called Images. He began composing a set of preludes for piano. Other works followed: Khamma, Le martyre de St Sébastian and the ballet Jeux, which was produced in 1913 by Segei Dyagilev’s company. People soon forgot about that work because only two weeks later, the same ballet company produced Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which caused a riot.

By this time Debussy was ill with colorectal cancer. His visit to London in 1914 was his last trip to another country. He wrote more piano works: a set of Études and a piano duet called En blanc et noir (In White and Black). He planned to write six sonatas, each for a different group of instruments, but he only wrote three of them: one for cello and piano, one for flute, viola and harp and one for violin and piano. The Sonata for violin and piano (1917) was the last work that he played in public; he played the piano. He died of colorectal cancer in 1918.

Music

Camille Saint-Saëns, for example, did not understand the way that Debussy's musical ideas flowed gently into one another. He was always an opponent of Debussy.

There is a lot of variety in Debussy’s piano music. Some of it is very difficult to play like the Études and pieces such as L’isle joyeuse (The Happy Island). Other collections are much simpler like Suite bergamasque, which includes the very popular piece Clair de lune (Moonlight). He wrote two books of preludes. Each of the pieces has a title, but it is printed at the end of each piece, as if he did not want the listener to know what it was about until afterwards.

Debussy wrote wonderfully for the voice, making the music just right for the rhythm of French. That can be heard in his songs and his opera. Using melodies and harmonies which are often quite simple he creates a special kind of dream-world which can be very powerful. He often uses the whole-tone scale and the pentatonic scale which give the music a hazy feeling because it does not seem to be clearly in one particular key. He liked to use unusual chords for their own sake, not for them to lead to a particular key. He also used old scales known as the church modes.

Debussy’s music had a great influence on many 20th-century composers. John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Frederico Mompou all learned from listening to his music.

References

Groves Dictionary of Music Online