IV
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Claude Debussy
IV
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
No peculiarity of contemporary musical taste is more striking than the extraordinary popularity which the elusive songs and piano pieces of Debussy have enjoyed during the last decade or two. They have been heard, with a delight agreeably mixed with bewilderment, in the drawing-rooms of the whole world, just as Grieg's were at a slightly earlier period; and, like Grieg, their author has become the idol of the amateur. There is no doubt of it, Debussy has been the prime musical fad of the twentieth century. The fact is interesting—worth examination. The reasons of it throw a strong light not only on Debussy himself, but—which is more important—on our whole contemporary musical life.
Claude Achille Debussy, born in 1862 at St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and educated at the Conservatoire, first gained wide fame by his opera, "Pelléas et Mélisande," produced at the Opéra Comique in 1902. By its imaginative re-creation in music of Maeterlinck's fatalism and atmosphere of mystery, by its dramatic directness, its justice of declamation, its moderation and avoidance of Wagnerian exaggeration, perhaps above all by the originality of its harmonic style and its delicately tinted orchestration, it undoubtedly marked an epoch in French music. Debussy had at this time already fixed the fundamental qualities of his style in such compositions as the quartet for strings (1893), more virile than his later works, and the well-known orchestral prelude after a prose poem by Mallarmé, archpriest of the symbolistic movement, "L'Après-midi d'un faune." In later orchestral pieces, the Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), the symphonic sketches "La Mer" (1905), the highly colored "Iberia" (1907), as well as in choral works like the "Martyre de Saint Sébastien" (1911), we see him refining the same manner, seeking always, like his compatriot the poet Verlaine, the subtleties, the delicacies, the shades and half-shades, la nuance, la nuance toujours. It is, however, through his smaller works—his songs and especially his piano pieces—that Debussy is best known to the mass of his admirers; and as the same qualities reveal themselves here too, it is in these that we shall try to understand them. In the "Estampes" (1903), the "Masques" (1904), the "Images" (1905 and 1908), the "Préludes" (1910 and 1913), and many lesser pieces he has created what is virtually a department of his own in the literature of the piano. Here is the essential Debussy.
The adaptation between the art and the audience here, as is always the case where there is extreme popularity, is so perfect that we can equally well begin our study from either end. Let us start with the audience. Not that Debussy consciously sought to "give the public what it wants"; no artist worthy the name does that. What is meant is simply that his qualities were spontaneously such as exactly to satisfy his audience's requirements; or, in biological terms, the organism was fortunate enough to be exactly suited to its environment, peculiarly "fit to survive." As investigating biologists we can therefore either approach the environment through the organism or the organism through the environment—and we choose to do the latter.
The environment of the modern composer is a public numerically larger than ever before, and qualitatively affected by this increased size according to the law of averages—degraded, that is, from the qualities of the minority toward those of the majority. In less abstract terms, the modern audience contains to every one intelligent listener ten or a hundred who are ignorant, untrained, or inattentive. The results of this disproportion are familiar to us on all sides; they range from such a general matter as the very conception of art, and especially of music, as a mere amusement or diversion rather than a spiritual experience, down to such details as the preference, natural to the untrained, of sensuous pleasure (in rich tone-combinations, for example) to emotion and thought (as embodied musically in melody), and of a vague day-dreaming mood when listening to music to the imaginative and sympathetic attention that music requires of him who would really grasp its objective beauty.