11 of 75 DOCUMENTS

The International Herald Tribune

August 17, 2012 Friday
A daring Debussy gets slighted on his birthday;
Radical composer made music that is still proving difficult to classify
BYLINE: ANTHONY TOMMASINI
SECTION: LEISURE; Pg. 11
LENGTH: 1448 words
ABSTRACT
The radical French composer, born 150 years ago on Wednesday, made daring music that is still proving hard to peg down today.
FULL TEXT
Classical music institutions are usually quick to seize on major anniversaries of a composer's birth or death as a programming hook.
Get ready for the Wagner and Verdi celebrations next year.
But what happened to Claude Debussy, born 150 years ago next Wednesday near Paris? His anniversary has drawn little notice.
Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center have scheduled no events.
Perhaps Debussy is not considered enough of an audience draw, but I suspect that the real reason may be more complicated. We like to
think we know Debussy. Ah, Debussy, the great Impressionist! For painting there is Monet. For music, Debussy. ''La Mer,'' how
gorgeous. There are the inventive piano pieces, like ''Estampes'' and ''Images.'' And the diaphanous orchestral beauties of ''Prelude to
the Afternoon of a Faun.''
Yet the alluring surfaces of Debussy's works can mask the daring of the music, just as the surface beauties of Impressionist paintings
can hide the shocking experiments the works represent.
I think we take Debussy for granted, and this may explain the lack of celebration. Debussy was one of the most radical composers in
music history. This unlikely genius from a humble background had almost no formal education except in music: He was admitted to
the Paris Conservatory at 10.
His radicalism has many aspects, beginning with his pathbreaking harmonic language. Debussy loved chords with unresolved
dissonances, which sound jazzy to us today, like those used by Duke Ellington and Bill Evans. But there are also echoes of the
Renaissance in Debussy's harmonic language, as well as the East Asian pentatonic scales that Debussy embraced after his epiphany at
an international exposition in Paris in 1889. The inventive colors and timbres in his music are often veiled through hazy textures. Yet a
refined French sensibility is at work as well, so that each chord and gesture, no matter how blurry, is etched with careful detail.
But the most radical element of Debussy's artistry involved his approach to time. After hundreds of years of pulsating rhythm, Debussy
dared to write whole stretches of almost static music. He wrote plenty of dances and cakewalks, breathless piano pieces, a string
quartet and, at the end of his life, three unconventionally Neo-Classical sonatas. Still, stretching time to its limits was a hallmark of his.
Earlier composers had experimented in this way to some extent, especially Wagner, to whom Debussy had a lifelong love-hate
attitude.
Debussy's attraction to Wagner is easy to understand. Wagner's orchestrations shimmer with a sensuous glow that strongly influenced
Debussy, and Wagner certainly experimented with time-stands-still pacing. Yet what Debussy did with rhythm was quite different. For
me this comes through by comparing the orchestral openings of ''Tristan'' and ''Pellas.''
In the Prelude to ''Tristan,'' Wagner's richly chromatic harmonic writing unfolds at a stunningly deliberate pace. Yet Wagner's chords
are full of harmonic implications: each one drives, however haltingly, to the next.
''Pellas'' begins with bare chords hinting at medieval sacred music. But the chords do not impel the music forward. The passage
sounds almost like a fragment of stagnant, harmonized plainchant. This leads to a quietly ominous theme with a dotted-note rhythm
that is associated with Golaud, the world-weary older grandson of Arkel, a wizened king in some vaguely medieval time and place.
But Golaud's essentially two-note theme (an alternating whole step) seems almost stuck in place.
And the opening of ''Pellas'' is hardly Debussy's most radical experiment in static rhythm. One of my favorite examples is the piano
prelude ''La Terrasse des Audiences du Clair de Lune'' (''The Terrace for Moonlight Audiences''). It begins with a fragmentary theme in
soft chords. Then the left hand sounds a low, sustained C sharp as the right hand traces a winding, quizzical line that descends from on
high. In the middle comes a motif in quiet octaves that could be pagoda music. These elements happen in increasing complexity, but
always hushed. Yet for all the inner activity, the music just hovers in place and shimmers in sound. When, well into the piece, that low
C sharp pedal tone moves up to a D sharp, it is as if a tectonic musical plate has shifted.
If Debussy is being overlooked on his birthday because he remains hard to peg, he is partly to blame. He was a contrary sort, an artist
who knew what he did not like but not always where he belonged.
The British music historian Edward Lockspeiser, in his important biography of Debussy published in 1936 and updated several times,
gets at the essence of the man and the artist when he suggests that Debussy ''obscured himself from the outside world by a screen of
bristling irony.''
Lockspeiser quotes a revealing letter Debussy wrote to the composer Ernest Chausson in 1893: ''Here I am, just turned 31 and not quite
sure of my aesthetic. There are still things that I am not able to do - create masterpieces, for instance, or be really responsible - for I
have the fault of thinking too much about myself and only seeing reality when it is forced upon me and then unsurmountable.''
On the question of whether Debussy was an Impressionist, in his authoritative entry on Debussy for the 2001 edition of The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the French musicologist Franois Lesure strongly argues no. He places Debussy in the
Symbolist movement in French literature and arts, which thrived for about a dozen years starting in 1885.
When ''La Mer'' was introduced in 1905, Debussy allowed the program notes to describe the piece as ''musical Impressionism,'' the
''formula for which is the exclusive property of its composer.'' Yet in 1908 Debussy wrote to his publisher that he was trying
''something different'' and that it was ''what the imbeciles call Impressionism, just about the least appropriate term possible.''
Lesure describes ''Pellas et Mlisande,'' first performed in 1902, as the ''masterpiece of French Symbolism.'' Debussy adapted Maurice
Maeterlinck's 1893 Symbolist play. Mlisande, a lovely, fragile and secretive young woman, is discovered lost in the woods by the
somber but decent Golaud, who marries her. But Golaud's impulsive younger brother Pellas falls uncontrollably in love with
Mlisande, an event that leads to tragedy. Debussy's stunning music taps into the subliminal undercurrents stirring beneath seemingly
inconsequential dialogue, avoiding explicit flourishes while illuminating the unconscious.
That Debussy first promised the role of Mlisande to Maeterlinck's mistress and then abruptly reneged did not help their relations. But
Debussy chose wisely in entrusting the part to the Scottish soprano Mary Garden. A very scratchy but priceless 1904 recording has
Debussy at the piano accompanying Garden in three short songs, ''Ariettas Oublies,'' and an excerpt from ''Pellas.'' Garden's singing
is tender and poignant yet veiled and a little cool, perfect for the character and the music. For all the assumptions today about how to
perform Impressionist piano music, Debussy's playing, while light of touch, is rhythmically clear.
As Debussy's involvement with Maeterlinck suggests, he could be willful and petulant. After returning early and dissatisfied from
what was to have been a three-year sojourn in Italy as a winner of the Prix de Rome, he began a long, tempestuous relationship with
Gabrielle Dupont. He left her for her friend Rosalie Texier, a fashion model whom Debussy married in 1899. But he grew to find
Texier intellectually limited and took up with Emma Bardac, the sophisticated wife of a Parisian banker. He had a daughter with
Bardac, his only child. In his last years he was stricken by rectal cancer, and in 1915 he underwent one of the first colostomy
operations. He died in 1918 at 55.
There are no Debussy festivals for New Yorkers this year, but some significant recordings are being released, one featuring the superb
French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in both books of Debussy's preludes. Mr. Aimard, who will play Book II of the preludes at
Carnegie Hall in November, captures the wistful and fiery qualities in these diverse pieces while treating them as audacious
contemporary works.
By the way, to counter the tag of Impressionism, Debussy placed his imaginative titles for these preludes in small letters at the end of
each piece. Still, he did provide titles like ''Feuilles Mortes'' (''Dead Leaves''). That could be the name of an Impressionist painting.
LOAD-DATE: August 16, 2012
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2012 International Herald Tribune
All Rights Reserved