Debussy Quotes

“When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien.
Hunting knife”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Un artiste est par définition un homme habitué au rêve et qui vit parmi des fantômes.”
― Claude Debussy

“Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things. And that is why I have this irrefutable need to escape and become involved in adventures which seem inexplicable because they involve a man no one recognizes. And perhaps that is what is best in me! Besides, an artist by definition is a man accustomed to dreams and who lives among phantoms. . . . How could it be expected that this same person would be able to follow in his daily life the strict observance of traditions— laws and other barriers erected by a hypocritical and cowardly world. (Letter from Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand)”
― Eric Frederick Jensen, Debussy

“It was delicious in the garden. The storm had passed over long since, and it was still and warm; the sweetness of the stocks and roses filled the air with the peculiar intensity of fragrance of flowers after rain - in the evening light they had the unnatural shadowy vividness of a coloured photograph. The rain had stirred up the nightingales too - near and far, their bubbling ecstasy welled out from the dark shelter of ilexes and cypresses, and through the open windows of the villa there came presently the cool elusive sequences of Debussy's music - ghosts of melody rather than melodies, evocations rather than statements; gleams on water and pale lights in spring skies, a single star, slow waves beating in mist on a deserted shore. Grace leant back in the corner of her seat, listening, watching the leaves of the buckthorns, like little curved pencils, against the sky above her head; in the relaxation of fatigue her attention was fixed on nothing, but some part of her was profoundly aware of all these things - the scent of the flowers, the song of the nightingales, the cool western music, with its memories of her own Atlantic shores.”
― Ann Bridge, Illyrian Spring

“The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
― Claude Debussy

“I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
― Claude Debussy

“In the garden of harmonies, [Debussy] selects the most beautiful flowers.”
― Romain Rolland, Musicians Of To-Day: Translated By Mary Blaiklock With An Introduction By Claude Landi

“He [Debussy] is said to have failed in the harmony class because of his persistent use of unorthodox (and hence unpermitted) forms. To those who remonstrated with him he exclaimed: "Why are you so shocked? Are you not able to listen to chords without wishing to know their origin and their destination? ... What does it matter? Listen; that is sufficient. [...]”
― Madeleine Goss, Bolero - The Life of Maurice Ravel