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Born into an impoverished, nonmusical family Debussy had virtually no formal schooling as a child. Unpopular with the more hidebound instructors at the conservatory, he still managed to win the coveted Grand Prix de Rome by tossing off a composition (L'Enfant Prodigue) in deliberate imitation of Lalo and Delibes, the popular French composers of the day. Debussy was no admirer of either man, or of any other French contemporary. To him Berlioz was "a tremendous humbug, Charpentier was "downright vulgar," Massenet a panderer of "stupid ideas and amateur standards."
Although he felt the pull to Wagner and made ritualistic pilgrimages to Bayreuth, Debussy could not accept ever Wagner without a sneer. Commenting on the characters in Parsifal, he called Amfortas "that melancholy knight of the Grail, who whines like a shopgirl and whimpers like a baby." Yet traces of the Wagnerian influence remained. "But that's the whole of Parsifal,'' muttered Richard Strauss after hearing a particular passage from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.
No Other Reason. Debussy did not start his first important work—the Prelude a I'Aprés-midi d'un Fame—until he was 30. But during the next 15 years, he wrote enough to secure any composers reputation, including the revolutionary piano pieces, in which by deft use of the sustaining pedal he transformed the piano from a percussive to a harmonic instrument. Debussy's only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, surprised its audience at its 1902 premiere with its lack of crowd-catching arias or easily hummable melodies. But later audiences began to understand that Debussy was attempting something new in opera; by reducing the vocal parts to declamation—close to spoken language—he was trying to elevate the orchestra to a position of new importance, where it would become the main commentator on the action. His opera's moonstruck tale of love and fratricide, which returned to the Metropolitan last week after an absence of two seasons, had a staunch admirer in Alban Berg, who acknowledged that Pelléas provided him with the model for his own tradition-smashing Wozzeck. But for all his growing success, Debussy's music earned him practically no money. Most of the time he depended on handouts from his few friends.
On the morning of his first marriage, to a model named Rosalie Texier, Debussy was so broke that he had to give a piano lesson to pay for the wedding breakfast.
To marry Rosalie, he was forced to rid himself abruptly of Rosalie's best friend, a girl with dyed blonde hair and "steely eyes" named Gabrielle Dupont, who had lived with him and supported him for ten years. Gabrielle had once shot herself over Debussy's infidelity. She recovered, and the whole sequence was repeated seven years later when Debussy left Rosalie to marry wealthy Emma Bardac, mother of one of his pupils. Rosalie fired two bullets into herself, recovered and disappeared from Debussy's life. So did most of Debussy's friends. To Debussy, the scandal seemed in some mystic way to be payment for "some forgotten debt to life." In the years after 1904, Debussy was more comfortable financially, but both the quality and quantity of his music faded.