Debussy, (Achille-)Claude
(b St Germain-en-Laye, 22 Aug 1862; d Paris, 25 March 1918 ). French composer. One of the most important musicians of his time, his harmonic innovations had a profound influence on generations of composers. He made a decisive move away from Wagnerism in his only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and in his works for piano and for orchestra he created new genres and revealed a range of timbre and colour which indicated a highly original musical aesthetic.
9. Theatre works and projects.
Even if Debussy completed very few works for the theatre, he devoted much time to various projects and expressed opinions on the subject which give us a precise idea of the range of his tastes. The theatre fascinated him from childhood, and he even appointed himself teacher of dramatic art to his friend René Peter. He had a profound admiration for Shakespeare and cherished an intention to write incidental music for As you like it for 30 years. He admired the work of Ibsen among his contemporaries, because it was ‘exceptional’.
M. Croche complained about the ‘pathological need to write operas’; he reproached Gluck for harbouring ‘the infancy of Wagnerian formulas’ and for failing to understand French prosody, making of it ‘a language of stresses when it is a language of nuances’; he claimed to like Rameau for being ‘lyrical’, but his campaign on Rameau’s behalf was perhaps more one of national principle than of reverence for a possible model. He spoke out vigorously against Italian verismo composers and even more so against Charpentier and his claims to express the reality of life. As for Wagner, after the infatuation of his youth, Debussy remained faithful to Parsifal and Tristan all his life, in spite of the polemical character of his utterances on the subject.
Two non-traditional forms of theatre had an appeal for him as a young man. One was the little puppet theatre in the passage Vivienne where Maurice Bouchor practised the art of pantomime; the atmosphere was unreal, the puppets moving with hieratic slowness to incidental music composed by Bouchor’s friends Chausson and Paul Vidal. The other was the shadow plays created by Henri Rivière at Le Chat Noir, which involved the projection of silhouettes against various scenic backgrounds, and was influenced by japonisme. But after André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, it was the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, run first by Paul Fort then by Lugné-Poe, which most held his attention, and which alone represented symbolist tendencies in the theatre after 1891; the plays by Ibsen and Maeterlinck which were staged by the company embodied a drama of great suggestive power in which destiny and fate loomed large.
Apart from Le martyre de Saint Sébastien and his two ballets, most of the stage projects to which Debussy devoted himself were not commissioned, but belonged to his ‘imaginary’ theatre. Some were merely transient ideas (Salammbô, La grande bretèche, Dionysos, L’Orestie), others were indefinite promises that were not kept (Les noces de Sathan, Le pélerin d’amour), or sketches that were soon abandoned (L’histoire de Tristan, Le chevalier d’or).
Debussy himself explained that he had tried to write for the theatre before composing Pelléas, but the form in which he had wanted to do it was ‘so unusual that after various attempts’ he had given up. This was a reference to his attempt to write a scène lyrique on a text by Theodore de Banville, Diane au bois, on which he worked during his stay in Rome; he observed at the time that he had no precedents for it and that he needed to ‘invent new forms’ in order to ensure that ‘the emphasis remained lyrical without being swamped by the orchestra’. He is also reported to have set one scene of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axel, a play with very strong Wagnerian associations, but the manuscript is lost. The next and most surprising project was an opera on a libretto by Catulle Mendès, a member of the ‘Parnassian’ school, Rodrigue et Chimène, on which he spent more than two years in 1890–92. The libretto itself was over 12 years old and treated the story of El Cid in a very conventional format in the tradition of grand opera; nothing could have been further from Debussy’s symbolist notions, but nevertheless he sketched three acts (out of what seems to have planned as a four-act work). Mendès’s influence in theatrical circles, in addition to Debussy’s own chronic lack of money, are the only plausible explanations for this curious diversion on the composer’s aesthetic path. The score does not feature musical motives associated with individual characters; the vocal style is very lyrical and entails quite wide intervals. That the style is partly Wagnerian is not surprising but it also exhibits anticipations of Pelléas, notably in the second act. Later, Debussy must have blotted out his memories of the work when he told a journalist: ‘I have never written duets and I never shall’ (1909); in fact, duets are found not only in Rodrigue but also in Diane au bois. Only a few months passed between his abandonment of Rodrigue and the shock of Pelléas et Mélisande, Maeterlinck’s play, performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 17 May 1893, and the answer to the dream that Debussy had revealed to Guiraud four years earlier: a text ‘half saying things’, with characters ‘of no time, of no place’, which did not impose on him an obligatory big scene (scène à faire). Maeterlinck gave him permission to make cuts and he undertook the composition of one of the scenes in August 1893.
Meanwhile, Debussy had discovered Boris Godunov, with its supple and finely shaded melodic recitative and its great harmonic freedom which helped him to distance himself from the Wagnerian model. He finished a first version of Pelléas during 1895 and many of his friends were struck by the modernity of the excerpts they heard in private. Various plans to get it staged came to nothing, while Debussy refused to allow excerpts to be given in concert performance despite Ysaÿe’s encouragement. Before he had orchestrated it, he was certain that he wanted to see it performed not in one of the large national theatres but in a more modest venue, such as Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. In the end he had to accept the offer of André Messager and Albert Carré to produce Pelléas at the Opéra-Comique, where it became necessary at the last moment to prolong four interludes to allow time to change the sets. Although the first performances were not a truly popular success, a large artistic and musical constituency recognized them as an event that overthrew all the traditions of operatic composition, as well as presenting the masterpiece of the symbolist movement late in its history.
In Pelléas singing remains on the threshold of speech, ideally adapted to the specificities of language, but it brings out the interior music of the text and succeeds in revealing the hidden nuances of a scenario which might otherwise appear, at first sight, to be a simple family drama. Commentators have counted varying numbers of identifying motives in the score, associated with the characters, or with certain symbols and ideas. There are essentially only three that truly play a role in the melodic fabric: Pelléas, Mélisande and Golaud; they do not always recur in exactly the same form but change shape and colour according to the changing situations. They are not leitmotifs but are woven into the orchestral texture in order to unify and energize the discourse. The tension and progression of the drama are ensured by the subtlety of the orchestra – seldom used at full strength – which constantly serves to change the work’s mood. After the score was published, Debussy carried out a number of changes, notably in order to improve the balance of winds and strings and to refine the timbres and sonorities. But the permanent contrast between shadow and light, the atmosphere of dream and mystery, the expression of a view of the role of fate and destiny which is close to that of the ancient Greek theatre: all are obtained by the totality of the elements of the musical language, deployed in a profoundly personal manner.
Debussy next turned to a different form of theatre with two works that he himself adapted from stories by Edgar Allan Poe. He told a journalist in 1908 about his new taste for short pieces, the ‘condensed forms of opera’. After Pelléas he put all his hopes into the search for a theatre of fear and ‘progressive anguish’ inspired in him by Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher. He envisaged the two works being performed as a double bill, and even signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, before finally allowing the Opéra-Comique in 1911 to announce their performance in the following season. Only opening fragments have been found for Le diable dans le beffroi, in which Debussy said he wanted ‘extremely simple but at the same time extremely flexible choral writing’. Three versions survive of the libretto for La chute de la maison Usher, written between 1908 and 1916, but only fragments remain of the music in short score, including an incomplete monologue for Roderick Usher, in which a parlando style is pushed to an extreme, along with some passages of great expressive intensity. But the reconstruction of the fragments first performed in 1977 does not allow a clear idea of it to emerge, mostly because of unidiomatic orchestration and misinterpretation of keys and clefs. These uncompleted projects constituted the principal disappointment in Debussy’s artistic career, and were undoubtedly the reason for his statement that ‘perhaps we have not yet found the lyric form answering to our present state of mind’.
Among the many proposals for stage works that were put to Debussy, it was almost by chance that he came to write incidental music for Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, written by Gabriele d’Annunzio in five long acts (‘mansions’) for Ida Rubinstein. Assisted by André Caplet, Debussy took only two months to write a score which uses very large forces (notably six horns, four trumpets and three harps) and displays an eclecticism perhaps more marked than that of other mature works, expressing the ambiguity of a text which oscillates between Christianity and paganism, eroticism and mysticism. Certain unifying motives run through the work: that of the Cross, that of the Passion (third and fourth ‘mansions’) and the invocation ‘Sébastien’. It is characterized by the sharpness of dissonances (especially in the third ‘mansion’) and a harmonic language imprinted with modal clashes and ambiguities (in the ‘Danse extatique’). At the end of his life Debussy wanted to revise the work, reducing the text and adding to the music; in 1916, with Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, he conceived the project of transforming Le martyre into a drame lyrique. As it is, it represents a somewhat hybrid genre incorporating elements of oratorio, sacred dramatic mime and ballet.
Debussy was rather reserved in his attitude to the aesthetic of the Ballets Russes, and seems to have preferred the idea of rejuvenating the old form of opera-ballet (Fêtes galantes after Verlaine, renamed Crimen amoris). He wrote the scenario – but not the music – of Masques et bergamasques, but he detested the choreography which Diaghilev commissioned from Nizhinsky for Jeux, a work which finally found a new life for itself in the concert hall. He fell out with Maud Allan who commissioned the ballet Khamma; the score, which has its Stravinskian moments, was not played in his lifetime.
Debussy did not like the atmosphere in big theatres, and distrusted producers. He generally avoided going to performances of his own works; when he made an exception for Pelléas, in Brussels and London, he escaped before the première; he never attended a performance of the opera in conditions that completely satisfied him.
He showed a real interest in the cinema. Having been won over by the use of cinematic technique in a realization of Eugène Sue’s Juif errant at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu, he suggested using cinematographic projections to enhance a non-staged performance of Das Rheingold in 1903. In another review, in 1913, he predicted a role for the new art form as ‘a means of reviving the taste for symphonic music’. He responded with positive interest to a proposal for a film version of Le martyre de Saint Sébastien in 1914, but nothing came of it.
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