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- Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) (The Art Archive/Alamy)
- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) (Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)
- George Gershwin (1898-1937) (enato Toppo/Getty Images)
- Duke Ellington (1899-1974) (Keystone/Getty Images)
- Maurice Ravel. Impressionism was a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which focused on color and mood. Its two most prominent exponents were the French composers, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, although both men actually rejected the term.
- Arnold Schoenberg. Our next composer, Arnold Schoenberg, was one of the pioneers of the modernist movement, which rejected tradition and embraced individuality.
- Igor Stravinsky. Born in 1882, Igo Stravinksy shot to fame when he was commissioned to write three ballets for the impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes company.
- Sergei Prokofiev. Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was a musical prodigy: he began composing at six years old and wrote his first opera at just nine.
- Edward Elgar (1857–1934) Elgar brought us the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, and a cello concerto to end all cello concertos. The English pastoralist cemented the “English” symphonic sound, his pieces reflecting the mood and patriotism of the nation, in many ways, with sounds and emotions of pre-war Britain audible in contrast to those following the First World War.
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) Another English pastoralist, Vaughan Williams composed the enduringly beloved The Lark Ascending – No.1 in the Classic FM Hall of Fame again in 2020 – and great, sweeping orchestral works like Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, and A London Symphony.
- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Stravinsky changed the musical world. The masterpieces he wrote revolutionised 20th-century music and spanned all genres, from orchestral to choral, and opera to ballet.
- Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) In her short life, the great Lili Boulanger proved herself nothing short of phenomenal – even outside the confines of what was expected of her sex in the days she was composing.
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Igor Stravinsky. Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky [a] (17 June [ O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music .
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French composer Claude Debussy’s works were a seminal force in the music of the 20th century. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed, in many respects, the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers of his time aspired.
What did Claude Debussy create?
French composer Claude Debussy’s major works included Clair de lune (“Moonlight”; in Suite bergamasque, 1890–1905), Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894; Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), and La Mer (1905; “The Sea”).
What was Claude Debussy’s early life like?
Claude Debussy was a gifted pianist by age nine. He was encouraged by an associate of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, and in 1873 he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. While living in a poverty-stricken suburb of Paris, he unexpectedly came under the patronage of a Russian millionaire.
Claude Debussy (born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25, 1918, Paris) French composer whose works were a seminal force in the music of the 20th century. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed in many respects the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers of his time aspired. His major works include Clair de lune (“Moonlight,” in Suite bergamasque, 1890–1905), Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894; Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), and La Mer (1905; “The Sea”).
Debussy showed a gift as a pianist by the age of nine. He was encouraged by Madame Mauté de Fleurville, who was associated with the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, and in 1873 he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied the piano and composition, eventually winning in 1884 the Grand Prix de Rome with his cantata L’Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Child).
Debussy’s youth was spent in circumstances of great turbulence. He was almost overwhelmed by situations of great extremes, both material and emotional. While living with his parents in a poverty-stricken suburb of Paris, he unexpectedly came under the patronage of a Russian millionairess, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, who engaged him to play duets with her and her children. He traveled with her to her palatial residences throughout Europe during the long summer vacations at the Conservatory. In Paris during this time he fell in love with a singer, Blanche Vasnier, the beautiful young wife of an architect; she inspired many of his early works. It is clear that he was torn by influences from many directions; these stormy years, however, contributed to the sensitivity of his early style.
This early style is well illustrated in one of Debussy’s best-known compositions, Clair de lune. The title refers to a folk song that was the conventional accompaniment of scenes of the lovesick Pierrot in the French pantomime, and indeed the many Pierrot-like associations in Debussy’s later music, notably in the orchestral work Images (1912) and the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915; originally titled Pierrot fâché avec la lune [“Pierrot Vexed by the Moon”]), show his connections with the circus spirit that also appeared in works by other composers, notably the ballet Petrushka (1911) by Igor Stravinsky and Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg.
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As a holder of the Grand Prix de Rome, Debussy was given a three-year stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, where, under what were supposed to be ideal conditions, he was to pursue his creative work. Most composers who were granted this state scholarship, however, found life in this magnificent Renaissance palace irksome and longed to return to simpler and more familiar surroundings. Debussy himself eventually fled from the Villa Medici after two years and returned to Blanche Vasnier in Paris. Several other women, some of doubtful reputation, were also associated with him in his early years. At this time Debussy lived a life of extreme indulgence. Once one of his mistresses, Gabrielle (“Gaby”) Dupont, threatened suicide. His first wife, Rosalie (“Lily”) Texier, a dressmaker, whom he married in 1899, did in fact shoot herself, though not fatally, and, as is sometimes the case with artists of passionate intensity, Debussy himself was haunted by thoughts of suicide.
The main musical influence in Debussy’s work was the work of Richard Wagner and the Russian composers Aleksandr Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky. Wagner fulfilled the sensuous ambitions not only of composers but also of the Symbolist poets and the Impressionist painters. Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total art work”) encouraged artists to refine upon their emotional responses and to exteriorize their hidden dream states, often in a shadowy, incomplete form; hence the more tenuous nature of the work of Wagner’s French disciples. It was in this spirit that Debussy wrote the symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894). Other early works by Debussy show his affinity with the English Pre-Raphaelite painters; the most notable of these works is La Damoiselle élue (1888), based on “The Blessed Damozel” (1850), a poem by the English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the course of his career, however, which covered only 25 years, Debussy was constantly breaking new ground. Explorations, he maintained, were the essence of music; they were his musical bread and wine. His single completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (first performed in 1902), demonstrates how the Wagnerian technique could be adapted to portray subjects like the dreamy nightmarish figures of this opera who were doomed to self-destruction. Debussy and his librettist, Maurice Maeterlinck, declared that they were haunted in this work by the terrifying nightmare tale of Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. The style of Pelléas was to be replaced by a bolder, more highly coloured manner. In his seascape La Mer (1905) he was inspired by the ideas of the English painter J.M.W. Turner and the French painter Claude Monet. In his work, as in his personal life, he was anxious to gather experience from every region that the imaginative mind could explore.
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In 1905 Debussy’s illegitimate daughter, Claude-Emma, was born. He had divorced Lily Texier in 1904 and subsequently married his daughter’s mother, Emma Bardac. Repelled by the gossip and scandal arising from this situation, he sought refuge for a time at Eastbourne, on the south coast of England. For his daughter, nicknamed Chouchou, he wrote the piano suite Children’s Corner (1908). Debussy’s spontaneity and the sensitive nature of his perception facilitated his acute insight into the child mind, an insight noticeable particularly in Children’s Corner, a French counterpart to Mussorgsky’s song cycle The Nursery; in the Douze Préludes, 2 books (1910, 1913; “Twelve Preludes”), for piano; and in the ballet La Boîte à joujoux (first performed in 1919; The Box of Toys).
In his later years, it is the pursuit of illusion that marks Debussy’s instrumental writing, especially the strange, other-worldly Cello Sonata. This noble bass instrument takes on, in chameleon fashion, the character of a violin, a flute, and even a mandolin. Debussy was developing in this work ideas of an earlier period, those expressed in a youthful play he had written, Frères en art (Brothers in Art), where his challenging, indeed anarchical, ideas are discussed among musicians, painters, and poets. (He had in fact published in one of the anarchist journals poems that he had written and that he later set to music in the song cycle Proses lyriques [1893].)
- Edward Lockspeiser
Aleatory, atonality, serialism, musique concrète, electronic music, and concept music were all developed during the century. Jazz and ethnic folk music became important influences on many composers during this century.
May 23, 2018 · Samuel Barber. An American composer and songwriter of the 20th-century, Samuel Barber's works reflected European Romantic tradition. An early bloomer, he composed his first piece at 7-years old and his first opera at 10-years old. Widely celebrated, Barber was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice during his lifetime.
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