To many a casual concert goer, the name Claude Debussy suggests a moody, vaporous music of almost monotonous sweetness and grace. Anybody who ever sat down to a piano lesson has tinkled through Clair de Lune, and since the great Toscanini performances of the 1930s, it has been almost impossible to get through a concert season without at least one rendering of that virtuoso war horse La Mer. But there is another view of Debussy—one that audiences are being reminded of more and more often in the centennial year of his birth. Debussy was in fact, a revolutionary who led such tradition-breakers as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg into the 20th century.
Throughout his career, Debussy ranted against the "rhetoric" and the "emphasis" that played so large a part in 19th century musical idiom. Clarity, precision, balance, proportion were the qualities he was trying for—and he achieved them so brilliantly that he became the great emancipator for a whole generation of composers. In his fascination with primary color, with pure emotion, he resembled the impressionist painters—Cezanne perhaps, or Monet. Debussy still surprises with his strange, exotic and otherworldly sound. Studied in fresh detail—in such books as British Musicologist Edward Lockspeiser's new biography, Debussy: His Life and Mind (Vol. 1)—he still fascinates as a talented and tormented man.
Try Anything. Debussy succinctly defined his approach to musical composition with his reply to the registrar at the Paris Conservatory after that solemn traditionalist became exasperated with the student's habit of making up weird chords What rule are you following? demanded the registrar. Said Debussy: "Mon plisesir." Debussy's pleasure, almost from the time he entered the conservatory at the age of ten, was to break most of the accepted rules of composition. His music was full of dissonances, wildly assorted chords, conflicting rhythmic patterns.
Although he did not reject tonality, he prepared the way for the atonalists by introducing chords outside a composition's signature, producing a feeling of wavering between keys. He would try anything: a friend from the conservatory recalls Debussy's seating himself at the piano and banging out a succession of grinding dissonances as he attempted to imitate the sound of buses rumbling over the cobblestones of the Faubourg Poissoniere. But more important than the technique was the reticence that he restored to concert halls long accustomed to the thunders and tempests of Beethoven and Wagner. No composer spoke with more intense feeling than Debussy—or in a quieter voice.
Tremendous Humbug. The man who challenged the masters was short-legged, plump and swarthy, with violently staring eyes. He wore his hair in bangs to conceal two hornlike protuberances that jutted from his forehead. Contemporaries noted that there was something catlike in his manners, his wit and his sulks. Wrote Poet André Suares: "Just as the cat rubs itself against the hand, Debussy caresses his soul with the pleasure which he invokes." A natural bohemian, the composer spent nights roaming Montmartre with celebrities of the period ranging from Mata Hari to Marcel Proust.