Debussyâs Disastrous Love Life
the most important thing to state first is that there will be no bawdy puns where i joke about debussys name and make it sound naughty, that being said:
when i said in my last post that debussyâs romantic life was a literal soap opera, i really meant it, except the only reason this might not be in a soap opera is because some parts may not be suitable for cable television, not that anyoneâs watching anymore anyway.
i promise im just reading all of this off wikipedia so it really is true this time, the last story may have been somewhat apocryphal but i really hope notÂ
ok well let me first paint you a picture of paris around the turn of the century and shortly after. it had a very palpable aesthetic, you had your cafes, and your quirky cool bohemians hanging out at the cafes like hippies over fifty years before that even became a thing, and art nouveau was starting to gain traction which was real pretty looking, and you had cholera if you didnt boil your water before drinking it (unless you wanna go tchaikovsky and say âim depressed anyway, fuck itâ) erik satie fit into this picture by playing his atmospheric almost melancholic gnossiennes to slip through the conversations and create that quintissential turn of the century parisian vibe.
debussy fit into this picture as a homewrecker i guess. first he met a woman called gabrielle around the time he met satie and they started living together in the summer of 1893, and he basically cheated on her with a singer named therese roger like only a year after they moved in together. their engagement was promptly called off, and debussy lost friends as a consequence. eventually he set his sight on gabrielleâs friend lilly though, and dumped gabrielle for lilly. debussy even threatened to kill himself if lilly didnât accept him. wasnât he so dreamy? debussy really watched the office, saw kelly on screen for a minute, then said âi wanna be like her.â lilly did accept debussyâs affections though, and they got married around 1899.
then he cheated on her too.
this time it happened almost five years into their relationship (which i guess is improvement?). apparently he didnât think she was smart enough, or that she had the right sensitivity for music, so he had already become a bit indifferent towards his current girlfriend i guess. he then happened to meet the mother of one of his piano students, one emma bardac, an intriguing, sophisticated singer who was very sharp in conversation and was also the wife of a prominent banker (but still had plenty of extramarital relationships). instant fireworks.
debussy convinced lilly to stay at her home alone for a while, and immediately after left the city with emma on a steamy forbidden clandestine elopement to the north of france. now, i know debussy cheated on multiple women, and as youâll soon see, kinda drove his previous girlfriend lilly to do something sheâd really regret, but easily his worst moral crime was taking a significant other to the north of france when he had no reason at all not to go to the south instead. honestly, who goes to the part of france that has english weather??  when the part of france thatâs by fucking italy and spain is just right there, beckoning you to pristine romantic mediterranean sandy beaches? i donât care if he wrote la mer or prelude to the afternoon of a fawn or even pelleas and melisande, claude debussy had horrible taste.
anyway, on the 11th of august 1904, debussy wrote to lilly, not telling her there was another woman, but simply that their marriage was off. in debussyâs defence, he didnât know that the following would happen, but still could have avoided it by just being good to his significant others: two months later, lilly attempted to shoot herself fatally by firing a revolver shot into her chest. fortunately, she lived, but shit really hit the fan after that. the entire story came to public light, embroiling both claude and emma in a deep scandal that resulted in emma being disowned by her parents, divorced from her husband, even more of debussyâs friends disowning him, including messager, dukas, and though he and ravel were never very close, their relationship grew sour when ravel joined other past friends of debussy in creating a public fund to raise money for lilly.
basically everyone in paris was pissed at both claude and emma, so they left for england for a while then eventually came back and chilled there.Â
thatâs kind of it for all the drama, they just married, had a daughter then died pretty much.
thereâs really no moral to the story besides maybe donât cheat on people?
another thing to probably mention is that this kind of stuff with regard to composers probably shouldnât affect our enjoyment of their work. sure, wagner was an awful person for more reasons than just antisemitism, and his wife (lisztâs daughter) cosima *blech* was pretty gross too, but the liebestod from tristan almost made me cry and iâm not ashamed to admit it. beethoven basically drove his nephew to attempt suicide but weâre not really going to pretend his quartets arenât bangers. mozart- no mozart never did anything wrong, actually, if i could kick it with the composers of my choice, mozart and haydn would be pretty high on my list.
the point is, though, just because a composer did something nasty doesnât mean we canât still love their music. except for chris brown, who is objectively awful
peace.