Claude Debussy And The Poets

Paul Dukas wrote about Debussy that the strongest influence he experienced was that of the poets, not that of the musicians. This book undertakes to demonstrate that thesis by studying Debussy's settings of songs by Banville, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Louÿs, and Debussy himself. A particular insight may be gained in the comparison of six poems by Verlaine set to music by both Fauré and Debussy. The book includes a poetic/musical analysis of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, based on the poem by Mallarmé.

Texts and translation of all Debussy's songs with valuable notes.

Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and literature, Linda Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy's work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations. Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western cultural past in search of the surprisingly ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy's scores and finds convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover.

"The thesis of this book may be simply stated: Debussy's importance lies in his contribution to the central issues of twentieth-century music. Debussy's influence was not limited to a few new idioms which lesser composers could imitate. Rather, Debussy's music offered a new way of thinking about music in general. His greatest influence has been not on his immediate contemporaries but on composers since 1945, when a revolution in thinking about musical time permitted a truer evaluation of Debussy's achievement and a new exploration of his tonal resources. The liberation of the musical moment, the new emphasis on timbre, and the concept of rhythm as duration rather than relation, all depend on Debussy's work, as contemporary composers have demonstrated both in their remarks about music and in their interest in reanalyzing Debussy's late music in light of contemporary techniques. Our picture of Debussy has come full circle. Perceived as a radical composer in the 1890s, as a charming, but minor, figure in the decades following his death, Debussy now emerges as a true revolutionary whose subtle overturning of musical conventions has had as great an effect on the music of our time as the more celebrated revolutions of Stravinsky and Schoenberg." --Preface.

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.

Collects the essays and reviews of the great French composer, together with interviews with him, in which he comments on the composers and musical events of his day and on his own philosophy of music.

Debussy's life is of extraordinary interest because, like Wagner and Stravinsky, he crossed artistic boundaries, associating as much with poets and artists as with musicians. His father was active in the 1871 Paris Commune and the composer's childhood was thus unsettled, his musical preparation erratic, and his subsequent lifestyle somewhat bohemian by the bourgeois norms of the French musical establishment. He never went to a proper school, but was enough of a pianist to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. Whilst still a student he rebelled against the academy-taught "rules of composition" and constructed a language of his own, in constant rebellion against the heavy Wagnerian influence prevalent at that time.In the early 1900s he worked in Paris as a music critic. His own music during these years includes some of the greatest and most influential works of the early twentieth century: the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, his orchestral masterpieces La Mer and Images, a series of profoundly original piano works (including two books of Préludes), and the ballet Jeux, premiered in Diaghilev's 1913 season just before Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which Debussy attended). His later years were plagued by the rectal cancer that eventually killed him in 1918. But he continued to compose until 1917This was a period of political and cultural turmoil in French life, the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, the Dreyfus affair with its religious and military undercurrents, the general instability of the Third Republic, and the First World War. Stephen Walsh's study combines chronological biography with a contextualised picture placing Debussy in the broad artistic and social environment of turn-of-the-century France, making this a significant contribution to the cultural history of the time.

A biography of the composer covering his music and relations with fellow composers, his love affairs, and his last days in war-torn Paris. -- Dust jacket.