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Time & again Debussy took orders for music. Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza gave him an advance on operas which were never delivered to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Elise Hall, a deaf Boston lady who on her doctor's advice had taken up the saxophone, commissioned him to write a Rhapsodie for her to play at one of her annual solo appearances with the Boston Orchestral Club, which she financed for a decade early in the century. Mrs. Hall was one of the Boston Coolidges* but to Debussy she was just "the Saxophone Lady." He wrote of her in one of the pinny, almost illegible letters which have survived him: "The Saxophone Lady is inquiring about her piece. Of course I assured her that with the exception of Rameses II, it is the only subject that occupies my thoughts. ... So here I am, searching desperately for novel combinations to show off this aquatic instrument. . . . Considering that this Fantaisie' was ordered, and paid for, and eaten more than a year ago, I realize that I am behindhand with it. ... The saxophone is a reed instrument with whose habits I am not very well acquainted. I wonder whether it indulges in romantic tenderness like the clarinet? . . ."
Debussy never finished Mrs. Hall's Rhapsodie. His last ambitious work was an order from Poet Gabriele d'Annunzio who wanted music for his Martyre de Saint-Sébastien to give to his mistress. Dancer Ida Rubinstein. Debussy's idolaters like to call Saint-Sébastien the great French Parsifal. Stage performances are never given to bear out their belief. The few concert performances have made it seem like the product of a tired, sterile mind. The War cast a final blight on Debussy's creative powers. One of his last feeble works was a Berceuse Heroïque, dedicated to Belgium's King Albert. In his illness Debussy had become obsessed by his hatred for Germany, by scorn for the way so many French musicians took Germans for their patterns. As a last pro- test he gave himself the title of Musicien Français. But France paid him no honors the day he rode to his grave. His only funeral march was played by Germany's Big Bertha.
*Claude Debussy: His Life and Works—translated from the French of Léon Vallas by Maire and Grace O'Brien—Oxford University Press ($5.75).
*Mrs. Hall, now twelve years dead, was the daughter of Joseph S. Coolidge, proud descendant of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. Her husband, Richard J. Hall, was a doctor who practiced briefly in California. After his death she returned to Boston, became one of the first U. S. saxophonists, brought up two daughters: Mary Coolidge Hall who lives in Newton, wife of Lawyer Benjamin Loring Young; and Elise Hall, late wife of Arthur S. Pier who teaches at St. Paul's School. The "Boston" Coolidges are no kin to Vermont's late Calvin Coolidge or to Senator Marcus Allen Coolidge.