Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) can be best described as the quiet revolutionary. While Schoenberg and Stravinsky's innovations were greeted with emotions ranging from bafflement to outright anger and contempt by their audiences, Debussy draped his listeners with a refulgent sound of colours so enchanting that his audiences did not realise he was revolutionising harmony and form no less radically than his more astringent contemporaries. Debussy's music was labelled as the first musical 'impressionist', but he himself hated the term and although he was one of the greatest influences on 20th century music there was never an impressionist movement as there was in painting.

Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, one of his teachers being a certain César Franck. From the outset Debussy proved to be a troublesome student who rejected the musical strictures imposed by the academy, certainly his relationship with Franck was stormy. Debussy had his own ideas and felt the conventionalities of the time deadening. In 1880 he was employed as music teacher to Nadezha von Meck, erstwhile patron of Tchaikovsky and in 1884 he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome for his composition L'Enfant prodigue.

The Prélude à l'apres midi d'un faune of 1884 was a landmark work in Debussy's career and can be rightly called one of the first compositions of the modern era. The evocative flute opening flows into a score of startling lushness that does indeed waft as in a dream. Hearing the Javanese gamelan performed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle strengthened Debussy's belief in a much more flexible model in the timbre, scale and structure of his pieces. Pelléas et Mélisande, first performed in 1903, is Debussy's masterpiece. In Pelléas everything is understated, there are no soaring peaks or troughs in the music reflecting the claustrophobic, interior, nature of the work. Psychologically as well as musically Debussy had written the first twentieth century opera.

1905 saw the premiere of arguably Debussy's finest orchestral score, La mer. Part tone poem, part symphony La mer is unrivalled in its depiction of the ocean from calm to raging storm. Debussy's piano work, the core of his oeuvre, reached a new peak in this decade – Pour le piano, Estampes and the first book of the Preludes, some of the most important piano music of the twentieth century were composed between 1900 and 1910. During that year Debussy began suffering from the first symptoms of the colorectal cancer which was to kill him eight years later although he continued writing superb music, including chamber works and the ballet, Jeux. Debussy finally died on March 25, 1918 at the same as the Germans were bombarding Paris. Due to the worsening war situation, Debussy did not receive a full state funeral and he was buried in one of Paris's least ostentatious cemeteries, the Cimetière de Passy.

Key works: Images, La Mer, Nocturnes, Prélude à l'apres midi d'un faune, String Quartet, Cello Sonata Syrinx, Violin Sonata, Arabesques, Children's Corner, Etudes, Images, Preludes, Suite bergamasque (inc. Claire de lune), Pelleas et Melisande, Jeux