Fifteen years ago on a day when the big German guns were bombarding Paris a lonely funeral cortège wove its way the length of the anxious, crowded city, past the Tuileries, the Place de la Bastille to the old Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Inside the hearse was the cancer-ridden body of Achille-Claude Debussy, the man who had written the greatest opera since Wagner's Parsifal, whose songs and symphonic works scores of lesser men were trying hard to emulate. Newspapers, crammed with War news, paid scant attention to the passing of Claude Debussy. English-speaking people have had to wait until this week for a translation of the only book which fairly and adequately describes Debussy's musical life.*
Unlike Wagner's many biographers, Author Léon Vallas, friend of Debussy, expert on French music, gives sensation-lovers little to relish in his account of France's foremost composer. Debussy was born in Saint-Germain, a half-hour from Paris, where his parents kept a little china shop. They wanted him to be a sailor but he learned to play the piano so capably that the Conservatoire admitted him at 11. There he writhed under the rigid, hidebound instruction. To his teachers' despair he persisted in disfiguring his exercises with consecutive fifths and octaves, producing strange successions of eerie, subtly-modulated chords. Such tendencies led later to the writing of the lovely, sensuous L'Après-Midi d'un Faune, to the Nocturnes which established his kinship with the French impressionistic painters, to Pélléas et Mélisande with its mood so tenuous and unearthly that Debussy despaired of its success until he saw Mary Garden play the part of Mélisande.
It took Pélléas et Mélisande to square Debussy with his musical contemporaries. Then he became an '"influence," a role thoroughly distasteful to his shy, melancholy nature. Author Vallas, who in most instances uses the facts of Debussy's life on which to hang smooth, scholarly appraisals of his genius, makes Pélléas another, far more personal milestone. Alter its success, Debussy abandoned his first wife, companion of his poverty-stricken days. He married the divorced wife of a rich financier, thought his money troubles were at an end. But his second marriage lost him most of his friends and failed to provide the subsidy he needed for his exquisite tastes. He used rare perfumes, drank expensive wines, had his music published on hand-made parchment yellowed to a certain shade. To indulge himself he had to go on taking what odd jobs he could get. He wrote musical criticisms, toured as a conductor, presenting a sorry figure on the platform with his huge, bulging forehead, his dark, drooping beard, his wooden, jerky, amateurish beat.