Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh
Debussy: A Painter in Sound By Stephen Walsh Faber & Faber £20 Oldie price £16.08 inc p&p
Money rarely plays a large role in the stories told about composer’s lives, however important it may be to the composers themselves. Or, if it does, the tale is normally one of rags to riches, and frequently to rags again, all in the service of art.
Walsh’s life-and-works study takes a different tack, starting with an author’s note about the cost of living in 1900 which concludes that Debussy ‘never received an adequate income, liked luxury and was a poor money manager’. It is a curiously pragmatic epigraph for a book rich in salacious biographical detail and musical insights.
Debussy’s celebrated Frenchness is thrown into relief by Walsh’s account of his decidedly cosmopolitan musical training. Alongside studies at the Paris Conservatoire (he finally, and somewhat unhappily, won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1884), Debussy absorbed music from Russia (through Tchaikovsky’s patron, Nadezhda von Meck), Germany (mostly Wagner) and Java (encountered at the Exposition Universelle of 1889). Walsh is admirably clear in his explanation of musical terms and techniques, deftly defining them in parentheses instead of simply depending on metaphor, as is so often the case in writings on music for a general readership.
The year 1890 is seen as one ‘of change and, in many ways, instability’. The 28-year-old composer altered his Christian name from Achille to ClaudeAchille, met a(nother) beautiful girl, Gaby Dupont, and moved out of the parental home to live with a financier friend. He met the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who not only invited him to write incidental music for his poem L’après-midi d’un faune but introduced him to an artistic circle that included painters, poets and the composer Erik Satie.
It was through Pierre Louÿs, whose erotic poems Debussy set in Chansons
de Bilitis, that he gained Maurice Maeterlinck’s permission to adapt
Pelléas et Melisande. Debussy wisely declined Louÿs’s invitation to join him and André Gide on a sex tour of Algeria; his love life was convoluted enough.
Walsh points out that the English edition of his correspondence excluded the more gushing letters Debussy sent to his first wife, Lilly Texier. She walked in on her fiancé in bed with an unidentified woman. Debussy wooed her back with effusions that, Walsh observes, ‘he would never have stooped to set to music’.
When their marriage failed, on Debussy taking up with Gabriel Fauré’s one-time lover Emma Bardac, Lilly attempted suicide. Louÿs reported that Bardac’s husband thought his wife would return to him, as ‘I’m the one with the money’. She did not, though, and had Debussy’s child in 1907 (they married the following year).
During all this rather tawdry turmoil, Debussy was crafting pieces such as Images and La mer. Elsewhere, Walsh queries critics’ use of the term Impressionist to characterise Debussy’s music. Still, he compares La mer to the sea paintings of Monet and Whistler, in its organisation by ‘a deliberate limitation of motive’ and its ‘big colour variation within a narrow range of tones’.
All these sea pictures, Walsh says, are ‘devoid of human interest’, implying that Debussy was able to compartmentalise life and work. There were incursions on the latter, from family holidays (one of the book’s illustrations is of a formally dressed Debussy gazing beyond his young daughter playing on the beach) to the threat of other composers. He criticised his junior, Maurice Ravel, now
unthinkingly paired with Debussy as twin pillars of French Impressionism, for ‘self-conscious Americanisation’.
The arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909 promised lucrative commissions for Debussy but also competition – and friendship – with Igor Stravinsky.
By the time he turned fifty, in 1912, Debussy was greatly respected. He was in demand as a composer and conductor and had been awarded the Légion d’honneur. Debussy continued composing through the First World War, despite suffering from cancer. Late piano works such as En blanc et noir ‘show no trace of decline’, Walsh thinks (SaintSaëns differed), though some of the sonatas might.
Debussy’s death in 1918, argues Walsh, located him at a turning point of history. He was dismissed by the Germans as formless and the French as Wagnerian. It was only after the next war that musicians began to reassess Debussy’s significance as a modernist.
Walsh is wary of taking sides, acknowledging Debussy’s respect for his musical forebears as well as his criticism of them. ‘His music is without ideology and without doctrine,’ he ends. This bourgeois disavowal sits at odds with the nuanced discussions of Debussy’s inventive musical techniques. But perhaps it explains that preliminary emphasis on the pecuniary aspects of the artist’s life.