Saint-Saëns has also been an extensive traveller and has spent much time in Algiers. He is an incomparable pianist, a fine musical critic, and an excellent writer. Saint-Saëns is another instance of the general culture required of the modern musician—the type that came into existence after the Revolution of 1830 (see page [244]).
Saint-Saëns was made an officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 1884. On June 2, 1896, the fiftieth anniversary of his first public appearance was celebrated in the Salle Pleyel, on which occasion Taffanel conducted the orchestra and Sarasate played a sonata by Saint-Saëns (see illustration facing 268), with the composer at the piano. At the age of seventy he came to America and astonished his audiences by playing his five piano concertos, accompanied by Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, with marvellous skill and the fire of youth.
Debussy is a modern of the moderns; and, moreover, he has led music into a new path.
Debussy is, however, but one of a group of French musicians who, for the last thirty or forty years, have been developing French music more according to the traditional taste of their nation than it had been since the days of Rameau. In fact, these musicians have carried music back to its fountain head; and we may say that the same spirit that characterized the works of the trouvères of the Fifteenth Century (music such as is being played by King René’s musicians in our [frontispiece]); the same spirit that was expressed in the music of the French Renaissance; the same spirit that was heard in the operas and ballets of Lully and Rameau lives again, though in a new form.
Of all these modern French composers—Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Chausson, Henri Duparc, Paul Dukas, Florent Schmitt, Déodat de Séverac, and Ernest Satie—Claude Debussy is the leading spirit; and, perhaps, the greatest genius.
Claude Achille Debussy was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in 1862. He entered the Conservatory in Paris at the age of twelve and studied under Albert Lavignac, Marmontel, Durand, and Guiraud. In 1884 he took the prix de Rome; and from the Eternal City he went to Russia. On his return to Paris he became one of the frequent guests at those famous soirées of Mallarmé, where painters, poets, sculptors, and musicians gathered.
His piano works, songs, instrumental pieces, and orchestral compositions, such as L’Après midi d’un faune, were admired by many persons on their first hearing; but his audience was comparatively small until the opera of Pelleas et Mélisande made him known throughout the world. Here was an entirely new idea in music. The Orchestra did not annotate, nor emphasize the actions of the persons on the stage, but it became a soft, melodious atmosphere, a delicious web of harmony enfolding the entire work. It was like nothing that had ever been written.
DEBUSSY