This comes out strongly in a second group of pieces in which one may include the L’isle joyeuse, the Estampes and the first series of Images including the Reflets dans l’eau in which he seems to us to reach the height of this middle achievement. L’isle joyeuse is a strange, wild piece, full of his characteristic harmonies, especially those founded upon the whole-tone scale. It is the longest of his pieces for the pianoforte, and is rather unsatisfactory in structure. Perhaps the monotony of key is to blame—for in spite of passages in whole-tone scales, the whole is very clearly in A major. Yet it must be said that this very sameness of key intensifies the early languor and the later Bacchanalian fury—is intoxicating in itself.
The Estampes (‘Engravings’) are among the best of these middle pieces. A comparison of them with works of an early period, with the two arabesques or even the Suite Bergamasque, shows an extraordinary development in Debussy’s art and a change or a more marked independence in his ideals. There is hardly a trace in the earlier works of the new expansion in pianoforte technique which marks the Pagodes, La soirée dans Grenade, and Jardins sous la pluie. Especially in the first of these pieces the whole range of the keyboard is blended into effects of a new sonority of sevenths and ninths. The second is a study in impressionism, in the combination of a few fragments of melody, harmony and rhythm into a whole of new poetic intensity. In the former his technique, in the latter his procedure, are strange and unfamiliar in pianoforte music, yet wholly successful. Their effectiveness is no doubt largely due to the nature of his material. The motives of the Pagodes are Oriental, those in La soirée both Spanish and Moorish. Perhaps for this reason they sound more exotic than the Jardins sous la pluie, which, in spite of odd blendings of harmony, is essentially more conventional than its two companions in the set. Certainly the Jardins is a wholly poetic and effective piece of keyboard music; but it lacks the originality and the elusive suggestiveness of the Pagodes and of La soirée.
The Reflets dans l’eau is superior to the Hommage à Rameau and the Mouvement, with which it is combined in the first series of Images. Technically it is a masterpiece, and both by the quality of its themes and its perfection of form is fitted to stand as a piece of absolute music of rare beauty. The plan of it is logical rather than impressionistic. It is the development of a single idea, not the combination of suggestive fragments. Hence it seems to stand as the most complete result of the art of which the Pagodes and Les Jardins are representative. In the second series of Images the strange piece, Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, is a further experiment in the kind of music of which La soirée is an example. Here as there the music is fragmentary. Here as there there is but an occasional touch of vividness against a background of misty night. In both pieces pictures, words, almost sounds are only suggested to the ear, not completely represented.
On the other hand, the Cloches à travers les feuilles, and the Poissons d’or, respectively the first and last pieces in this second set of Images, are what we might call consistently motivated throughout, in the manner of the Reflets dans l’eau. There is always the rustling of leaves and the faint jangle of bells in the former, always a quiver of water and a darting, irregular movement in the latter; whereas in neither La soirée nor in Et la lune is there the persistence of an idea that is thus predominant and more or less clearly presented.
The last two series of Préludes show us his art yet more finely polished and concentrated. In general these twenty-four pieces are shorter and more concise than the Estampes and the Images, certainly than the representative pieces in them—Pagodes, Les jardins, and Reflets dans l’eau. Most of them, moreover, are in his suggestive rather than his explicit manner. He accomplishes his end with a few strokes, and usually in a short space. The placing of the titles at the end rather than at the beginning of the pieces is an interesting point, too; for one cannot believe that such a finished artist as Debussy shows himself in these pieces to be would have sent his work before the public without a consciousness of the significance of such an arrangement. He does not, as it were, announce to his auditors his purpose, saying, imagine now this sound which you are about to hear as representing in music a picture of gardens through a steadily falling rain. He rather draws a line here upon his canvas and adds a point of color there, all in a moment, and then, having shown you first this strange beauty of combinations, says at the end you may now imagine a meaning in the west wind, a church sunk beneath the surface of the sea, a tribute to Mr. Pickwick, dead leaves, or what not in the way of exquisite and incomplete ideas.
Many of these postscripts are significantly vague: Voiles, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, Des pas sur la neige (Alkan called a piece of his Neige et lave), La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, etc.
Yet, however vague the subject or the suggestion, there is a sort of epigrammatic clearness in the music. The rhythms are especially lithe and endlessly varied, the phrase-building concise yet never commonplace. There is a glitter of wit in nearly all, an unfailing sense of light and proportion. This, not the strange harmonies nor the imagery, seems to us the quality of his music that is typically French. There is infinite grace and subtlety; sensuousness in color, too, though it is spiritualized; but there is little that is sentimental.
The delicacy and yet the sharpness with which he has reproduced qualities in outlandish music must be noticed. In earlier music he gave proof of his insight into the essentials of other systems of music than the French, or the German which has been considered the international. The Suite Bergamasque has a local color. There is Oriental stuff in Pagodes, Spanish and Moorish in La soirée dans Grenade, Egyptian in Et la lune. Traces of Greek or of ecclesiastical modes are abundant. Here, in the Préludes all this and more too has he caught. Greece in Danseuses de Delphes, Italy in Les collines d’Anacapri, the old church in La cathédrale, Spain in La puerta del Vino, cake-walks in General Lavine, England in Pickwick, and Egypt in Canope. There seems a touch of the North, too, in the exquisite little pieces, La fille aux cheveux de lin. In this way alone Debussy has rejuvenated music, doing more than others had done.
Finally, it would be hard to find more essence of comedy and wit in music than one finds in Debussy’s Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum in the ‘Children’s Corner,’ with its ludicrous play on the erstwhile sacred formulas of technical study. This alone should place him among the wits of a century. The Sérénade interrompue and ‘Puck’s Dance’ are both full of mockery. Then there is the eccentric General Lavine, and, perhaps most laughable of all, the merry homage to Pickwick, made up of ‘God Save the King’ and a jig in the English style.
No one can say what the future of his music will be, nor how it will be related to the general development in music by students a hundred years hence. Yet it is certain that it recommends itself to pianists at present because it has expanded the technique of the instrument. It is made up in part of effects which, as we have said, if they are not new in principle, are newly applied and expanded. He has developed resources in the instrument which had not before been more than suggested. His pieces bring into striking prominence the qualities of after-sound and sympathetic vibrations or overtones in the piano, which are as much its possession and as uniquely so as the bell-like qualities it had before been chiefly called upon to produce. Therefore though his accomplishments in harmony and form, in the possibilities of music in general, may be regarded with a changed eye in the years to come, and though he may even some day appear in many ways reactionary, because he has once more associated music with ideas and weakened the independence of its life; yet as far as the pianoforte is concerned he is the greatest innovator since Chopin and Liszt.