![]() The latest addition to that shelf is Stephen Walsh’s “ Debussy: A Painter in Sound” (Knopf), which places proper emphasis on Debussy’s myriad links to other art forms. The shelf of books about Debussy is not large, and every scholar who addresses him faces the challenge of analyzing an artist to whom analysis was abhorrent. The music is easy to love but hard to explain. When both the severe Boulez and the suave Duke Ellington cite you as a precursor, you have done something singular. His influence proved to be vast, not only for successive waves of twentieth-century modernists but also in jazz, in popular song, and in Hollywood. Debussy engineered a velvet revolution, overturning the extant order without upheaval. In 1894, when “Faun” was first performed, its language was startling but not shocking: it caused no scandal, and was accepted by the public almost at once. This is sound in repose, listening to its own echo.ĭebussy accomplished something that happens very rarely, and not in every lifetime: he brought a new kind of beauty into the world. The B-flat harmonies are framed by bar-long voids. Most striking is the presence of silence. Harmonies distant from one another intermingle in an open space. Instead, they recline into a lovely chord of nowhere, a half-diminished seventh of the type that Wagner placed at the outset of “Tristan und Isolde.” This leads to a lush dominant seventh on B-flat, which ought to resolve to E-flat, but doesn’t. Yet, in the fourth bar, when more instruments enter-two oboes, two clarinets, a horn, and a rippling harp-they ignore the flute’s offering of E. A solo flute slithers down from C-sharp to G-natural, then slithers back up the same figure recurs then there is a songful turn around the notes of the E-major triad. The score begins with what looks like an uncertain doodle on the part of the composer. It is best to start where Pierre Boulez said modern music was born: with the ethereal first notes of the orchestral tone poem “ Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun.’ ” Debussy wrote it between 18, in response to the famous poem by Mallarmé. set has the libretto of his only finished opera, “Pelléas et Mélisande,” and the texts of his large output of songs-necessary resources in approaching an acutely literary composer whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Proust recognized as an equal. The other, from Warner Classics, displays Hokusai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” which, at Debussy’s request, was reproduced on the cover of one of his most celebrated scores, “La Mer.” Physical recordings are no longer a fashionable way of listening to music, but you will probably get closer to Debussy if you shut down the Internet and give yourself wholly to his world. One, from the Deutsche Grammophon label, is decorated with Jacques-Émile Blanche’s portrait of the composer, in which he assumes an aristocratic, lapel-grasping pose. They befit a man who treasured pretty things. ![]() To mark the centenary of Debussy’s death, which fell in March, two handsome boxed sets of his complete works have been issued. After a rehearsal of his orchestral suite “Images,” he said, with satisfaction, “This has the air of not having been written down.” In a conversation with one of his former teachers, he declared, “There is no theory. As it coalesces, bar by bar, it appears to be improvising itself into being-which is the effect Debussy wanted. ![]() Bound only lightly to the past, it floats in time. Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old.
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