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Achille-Claude Debussy (IPA /aʃil klod dəby'si/) (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel he is considered the most prominent figure working within the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French composers but also a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth century. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as Symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

Life and work

Early life and studies

Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye in 1862. His parents owned a china shop. Debussy began music instruction when he was nine years old. His talents soon became evident and at age ten Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire. Debussy studied with Ernest Guiraud, César Franck and others at the Paris Conservatoire (1872–84). From 1880 to 1882 Debussy was employed by Nadezhda von Meck (Tchaikovsky's patron), giving music lessons to her children.

As the winner of the Prix de Rome, he received a scholarship by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which included a four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome to further his studies (1885–87). According to letters from this period, Debussy often was depressed and unable to compose, but he also met Franz Liszt, and finally composed four pieces, which were sent to the Academy; the symphonic ode Zuleima (after a text by Heinrich Heine), the orchestral piece Printemps, and the cantata La damoiselle élue (1887–88), which was criticized by the Academy as "bizarre" and in which some stylistic features of Debussy's later style emerged for the first time. The fourth piece was the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, which was still indebted to César Franck's music and withdrawn by the composer himself.

With his visits to Bayreuth (1888, 1889) Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which was to have a lasting impact on his later work. Wagner's influence is evident in the La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1889) but other songs of the period, notably the settings of Verlaine (Ariettes oubliées, Trois mélodies, Fêtes galantes, set 1) are in a more capricious style.

Later, in Paris, during the Exposition Universelle (1889) Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward.

Early works

Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner's style and heavy emotionalism. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring harmonic exploration. In this work he utilised the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales, such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony.

The Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement. This suite contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, "Clair de Lune."

Influenced by the contemporary symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy wrote one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In contrast to the large orchestras so favoured by late-romanticism, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasising instrumental colour and timbre. Despite Mallarmé himself and Debussy's colleague and friend Paul Dukas having been impressed by the piece, it caused controversy at its premiere – the composer Camille Saint-Saëns thought it "pretty" but lacking any "style". It subsequently launched Debussy into the spotlight as one of the leading composers of the era.

Middle works

The three Nocturnes (1899), include characteristic studies in veiled harmony and texture ("Nuages"), exuberance ("Fêtes"), and whole-tones ("Sirènes"). La Mer (1903–1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement ("Jeux de vagues") proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour. The three Images pour orchestre (1905–1911) are more loosely linked, and the largest, Ibéria, is itself a triptych, a medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions.

In reaction to Wagner and his highly elaborate late-romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would be his only complete opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.

During this period Debussy wrote much for the piano. The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano (1901) utilises rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music. His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905) combine harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: "Reflets dans l'eau" is a musical description of rippling water; "Hommage à Rameau", the second piece, is a slow and yearningly nostalgic. It takes as its inspiration a melody of Jean-Philippe Rameau's, from Castor et Pollux.

The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. "Pagodes" is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by the Javanese music. Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1909) for his beloved daughter, whom he nicknamed Chou-chou. The suite recalls classicism as well as a new wave of rag-time music. Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner in the popular piece Golliwog's Cakewalk.

The first book of Preludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy's preludes are replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular "La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") and "La Cathédrale Engloutie" ("The Engulfed Cathedral").

The music for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911), a lush and dramatic work and written in only two months, is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.

Late works

Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies. The forms are far more irregular and fragmented. The whole tone scale dominates much of Debussy's late music.

His two last volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915) interprets similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises and includes pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

With the sonatas of 1915–1917, there is a sudden shift in the style. These works recall Debussy's earlier music, in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. Despite the thinner textures of the violin sonata (1917) there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves. This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism which was to become popular after Debussy's death. Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in 1918 so that he only completed three (cello, flute-viola-harp and violin sonatas).

The last orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its own field of motivic connection. At first Jeux was overshadowed by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, composed in the same year as Jeux and premiered only two weeks later by the same ballet company. Decades later, composers such as Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué pointed out parallels to Anton Webern's serialism in this work. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet, who also helped Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre de St. Sébastien.

The second set of Preludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, sometimes utilising dissonant harmonies to evoke moods and images, especially in the mysterious Canope; the title refers to a burial urn which stood on Debussy's working desk and evokes a distant past. The pianist Claudio Arrau considered the piece to be one of Debussy's greatest preludes: "It's miraculous that he created, in so few notes, this kind of depth."

Death

Claude Debussy died in Paris on March 25, 1918 from colorectal cancer, in the midst of the German aerial and artillery bombardment of Paris during the Spring Offensive of World War I. At this time, the military situation in France was desperate, and circumstances did not permit his being paid the honour of a public funeral or ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets as shells from the German guns ripped into his beloved city. It was just eight months before France would celebrate victory. He was interred in the Cimetière de Passy, and French culture has ever since celebrated Debussy as one of its most distinguished representatives.

Musical style

Rudolph Réti points out these features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":

1. Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
2. Frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons";
3. Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
4. Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale;
5. Unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge."

He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality" (Reti, 1958).

The application of the term "impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. It is widely held that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908, he wrote "I am trying to do 'something different'-in a way realities-what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics."

Mathematical structuring

Given that Debussy's music is apparently so concerned with mood and colour, it is somewhat unexpected to discover that according to one author, many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat (1983) suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. Sometimes these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure. In other pieces they appear to mark out other significant features of the music. The 55 bar-long introduction to 'Dialogue du vent et la mer' in La Mer, for example, breaks down into 5 sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars in length. The golden mean point of bar 34 in this structure is signalled by the introduction of the trombones, with the use of the main motif from all three movements used in the central section around that point (Howat, 1983).

The only evidence that Howat introduces to support his claim appears in changes Debussy made between finished manuscripts and the printed edition, with the changes invariably creating a Golden Mean proportion where previously none existed. Perhaps the starkest example of this comes with La cathédrale engloutie. Published editions lack the instruction to play bars 7-12 and 22-83 at twice the speed of the remainder, exactly as Debussy himself did on a piano-roll recording. When analysed with this alteration, the piece follows Golden Section proportions. At the same time, Howat admits that in many of Debussy's works, he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably in the late works) and that no extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.

Influence on later composers

Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass as well as the influential Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. He also influenced many important figures in Jazz, most notably Duke Ellington, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jimmy Giuffre and Bill Evans.

Debussy in film and pop culture

This section "Debussy in film and pop culture" does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section "Debussy in film and pop culture" by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Claude Debussy" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2006) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Debussy's music has been used countless times in film and television.

It was first used legally in 1948 in the David O. Selznick film Portrait of Jennie in which various compositions ("Reverie," "Arabesque" the "Nocturnes" and "La fille aux cheveux de lin" inter alii) can be heard. His music has featured in numerous films, plays, and television programs ever since.

Clair de lune is especially popular, having appeared in George Stevens's Giant (1956) when played on the organ in the mansion featured in the film, Casino Royale (1967), The Right Stuff (1983), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Ocean's Eleven (2001), Man on Fire (2004) and Dog Soldiers (2002), to name a few. Terrance McNally's play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, uses the work as remedy to a wounded relationship.

Arabesque No 1 has featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) -- played by the Tippi Hedren character -- and in A Good Year (2006), and used as the theme to the TV programme Star Gazer. It is frequently referenced by characters in Shunji Iwai's film All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). Rêverie was adapted by American bandleader Larry Clinton into a popular song, "My Reverie", which was recorded on several occasions in the late 1930s and '40s by musicians Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey, and others. La Cathédrale Engloutie, of the 24 Preludes, takes an electronic rendition in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) as underscore for a futuristic Manhattan.

The Pet Shop Boys produced a song called "Left to My Own Devices" in which Neil Tennant sings, "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." In the late 1980s, when the duo toured Great Britain, a dancer dressed as Debussy when this song was performed.

List of works

Media

• La fille aux cheveux de lin (Shockwave Player required) at the BinAural Collaborative Hypertext

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References and links

1. Claude Debussy - the Composer BBC h2g2 website
2. "Claude Debussy and the Javanese Gamelan". brenthugh.com. Retrieved January 7. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accesyear= ignored (help)
3. "Canope (Preludes, Book II, 1913)". Steve's Debussy Page. Retrieved 6 January. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

General references

• Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Solfèges), Editions du Seuil, 1977. ISBN 2-02-000242-6
• Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A musical analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-521-31145-4
• Rudolph Reti, Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A study of some trends in twentieth century music. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1958. ISBN 0-313-20478-0.

Further reading

• Jane Fulcher (Editor), Debussy and His World (The Bard Music Festival), Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-09042-4
• Simon Trezise (Editor), The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-65478-5

External links

• IMSLP - International Music Score Library Project's Debussy page
• Extensive works list
• Template:IckingArchive
• Claude Debussy and Impressionism, from carolinaclassical.com
• Claude Debussy discography at MusicBrainz
• Steve's Debussy Page
• Kunst der Fuge: Claude Debussy - MIDI files
• Recording of Debussy's Claire de Lune
• Piano performance of Debussy's Arabesque
• La fille aux cheveux de Lin or The Girl with the flaxen hair

Template:Persondata

• Articles lacking sources from December 2006
• 20th century classical composers
• French composers
• Modernist composers
• Opera composers
• Anti-Wagnerites
• Prix de Rome winners
• 1862 births
• 1918 deaths