Page 250 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 15.2
Claude Debussy at the age of twenty-four
the artists’ contemporaries mocked and jeered. But what is it about the Impres- sionist style that initially caused such a furor?
The Impressionists saw the world as awash in vibrant rays of light and sought to capture the aura that sun-dappled objects created in the eyes of the beholder. To accomplish this, they covered their canvases with small, dab-like brushstrokes in which light was broken down into spots of color, thereby creat- ing a sense of movement and fluidity. Shapes are not clearly defined but blurred, more suggested than delineated. Details disappear. Sunlight is everywhere and everything shimmers.
For their part, musicians found inspiration in the Impressionist art of the day. They, too, began to work with dabs of color. Claude Debussy, whose com- positions most consistently displayed the Impressionist style in music, was de- lighted to be grouped with the Impressionist painters. “You do me great honor by calling me a pupil of Claude Monet,” he told a friend in 1916. Debussy gave some of his compositions artistic titles such as Sketches, Images, and Prints. Rare are the moments in history when the aesthetic aims of painters and musicians were as closely allied.
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Debussy (Figure 15.2) was born in 1862 into a modest family living in a small town outside Paris. As neither of his parents was musical, it came as a surprise when their son demonstrated talent at the keyboard and an extraordinary musi- cal ear. At the age of ten, prodigy Debussy entered the Paris Conservatory for les- sons in piano, composition, and music theory. Owing to his skill as a performer, he was soon engaged for summer work in the household of Nadezhda von Meck (see Figure 12.7), a wealthy patroness of the arts and the principal supporter of Tchaikovsky. This employment took him, in turn, to Italy, Russia, and Vienna. In 1884, he won the Prix de Rome, an official prize in composition funded by the French government, one that required a three-year stay in Rome. But Debussy, like Berlioz before him, was not happy in the Eternal City. He preferred Paris with its bistros, cafés, and bohemian ambience.
Returning to Paris more or less permanently in 1887, the young French- man continued to study his craft and to search for his own independent voice as a composer. He had some minor successes, and yet, as he said in 1893, “There are still things that I am not able to do—create master- pieces, for example.” But the next year, in 1894, he did just that. With the completion of Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun), he gave to the public what has become his most enduring or- chestral work. Debussy’s later compositions, including his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), the symphonic poem La mer (The Sea, 1905), and his two books of Préludes for piano, met with less popular favor. Critics complained that Debussy’s works were lacking in traditional form, melody, and forward motion—in other words, they had characteris- tics of Modernism that was to come. Illness and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought Debussy’s innovations to a halt. He died of cancer in the spring of 1918 while the guns of the German army were
shelling Paris from the north.
228 chapter fifteen european impressionism and modernism
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Claude Debussy (1862–1918) 1886 (oil on canvas), Pinta, Henri Ludovic Marius (b. 1856)/Villa Medici, Rome, Italy/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
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