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(Achille) Claude Debussy (French: [aʃil klod dəbysi]; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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- Early period
- Middle period
- Late period
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
Apr 2, 2014 · Learn about the life and works of Claude Debussy, the French composer who pioneered musical impressionism. Explore his influences, achievements, legacy and famous quotes.
Jun 16, 2023 · Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was a French composer most famous for his piano and orchestral music. Works like Clair de Lune have become piano standards while La Mer , with its unusual use of instruments and impressionistic use of waves of sounds instead of melodies, broke the mould of convention and ushered in the innovative music of modernism in ...
- Mark Cartwright
Claude Debussy, painting by Marcel Baschet, 1884; in the Versailles Museum. Claude Debussy, (born Aug. 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25, 1918, Paris), French composer. Born into near poverty, he showed an early gift for the piano. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1873, and soon thereafter he was employed as pianist ...
Claude Debussy - Impressionism, Orchestral, Piano: Debussy’s music marks the first of a series of attacks on the traditional language of the 19th century. He did not believe in the stereotyped harmonic procedures of the 19th century, and indeed it becomes clear from a study of mid-20th-century music that the earlier harmonic methods were ...
Learn about Claude Debussy, one of the most influential impressionist composers of the 20th century. Explore his life, works, videos, news and more on Classic FM.
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