Claude Debussy

by David J. Code

French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918) created music that was revolutionary, with a distinctly modern sound that highlighted the intersection of art and life. Here, in this unique biography, David J. Code explores the important moments in the development of Debussy’s literary interests that shaped his music—and in the process brings to life Debussy’s sardonic personality.             Claude Debussy presents an in-depth look at how Debussy’s love for poetry influenced his musical compositions. Code explores both Debussy’s earlier years, filled with student cantatas inspired by Verlaine and Baudelaire, as well as his later works, dominated by nationalistic pieces inspired by French Renaissance poets and composed in the lead-up to World War I. Along the way, Code looks at Debussy’s orchestral compositions and operas, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck.    This book will give readers a fresh way of listening to Debussy’s classic music by offering the most up-to-date critical analysis of the intersection of Debussy’s literary interests and musical compositions and will appeal to any reader with a love of Debussy, as well as modern music, literature, and the arts.

Genres: Music, Biography

216 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2010

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book that gets you listening to Debussy is good, and if it gets you reading Mallarme even better, though your mind wanders into thoroughly seductive, thoroughly ambiguous forests of words and sounds, enlightening here, darkening there, until drunk on beauty you wonder where you are, fabulously lost. I love being rendered useless, while I listen, while I read, and while day's practical light must be entered I just hope that a portion of dreamy night remains, and I have some understanding of what I've read and heard.

I do not know Debussy any better personally after having read this; the image of a rather conservative man harboring voluptuous feelings clothed in radical sounds (rendered accessible by sheer beauty) and penetrating thoughts thick with feeling; the inner man elusive behind a thick body and thick goatee: I do not know Debussy but I know his music, as if Debussy himself is music.What I did learn about him: his music criticism could be wittily and colorfully acerbic; he found travel, and being away from home in general, uncomfortable; he was somewhat politically naive and, especially in his later years, tended toward a simplistic patriotism and near xenophobia; beauty could bring him to tears, shamelessly; he was a good pal of Satie's (of which I'm very envious).

The main thematic thrust of this short but scholarly book is to finally rescue Debussy, once and for all, from the misperception of him as a pure aesthete and voluptuary (in his musical expression) by emphasizing his acute literary and critical sensibilities and how they inform his music. There is mention of cds such as "Debussy for Dreamers" which still to this day cast him as a composer that does not need to be thought about, but rather only felt and dozed to. This perception dogged him even in his day, though even he could not deny that pure beauty was a prime concern of his. He had the luck, and the curse, of living during a time of a great sea change in the relationship between the public and the serious composers whose music they listened to. The past was being codified and the composition of music itself was becoming even more technical, even mathematical. So while Debussy did not enjoy being cast as a wispy aesthete, he also reacted against the trend of draining all emotion (as if that's even possible) from music and making it "pure" and non-referential. He was ever trying to balance the polar ideals of the esoteric and the popular, which for me makes him perennially fascinating.

There was a recurring phrase in the book that particularly intrigued me: "private intoxication and public display". This was a phrase that I believe Debussy himself used to describe his solo piano works in particular. I do not think he was referring to performance as such - Liberace comes to mind, or Jerry Lee Lewis - but rather it described the music itself; the act of composing it, and the meanings encoded therein. Within even some of his most beautifully entrancing pieces are esoteric references and structures that only the initiated can detect; and it is this dichotomy, the sensual and the egg-heady, that can startle you awake even as you continue to dream and loll about in the sounds.

I picked this book up at Book Soup on my recent trip to LA, and just from this offering I can recommend every book in the series. They are real works of scholarship, not dumbed down in any way, but they do not go so far in this regard as to intimidate. They are compact solid little books printed on thick paper, and they include just enough high quality photographs and other visuals to offer the occasional respite from word blur. And as I said, it got me listening to Debussy which led to an intensive return to the syntactically enchanted forests of Mallarme, from which I hope to never completely emerge, bleating raspberries at the workaday world even as I technically bring home the bacon.

[Ola · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt that this book was somehow detached from it's subject matter.