Composer, born in St Germain-en-Laye, NC France. Educated at the Paris Conservatoire (187384), he studied piano under Antoine-François Marmontel, and in 1884 won the Prix de Rome. His early successes were the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), and his piano pieces, Images and Préludes, in which he experimented with novel techniques and effects, producing the pictures in sound which led to his work being described as musical Impressionism. He extended this new idiom to orchestral music in La Mer (1905, The Sea) and other pieces.
Debussy was not only one of the most important French composers but was also one of the most important figures in music at the turn of the last century; his music represents the transition from late-romantic music to 20th century modernist music.Life and work
Early life and studies
Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye in 1862. Debussy began music instruction when he was nine years old, but his talents soon became evident and at age ten Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire. Debussy studied with Ernest Guiraud, César Franck and others at the Paris Conservatoire (1872-84). From 1880 to 1882 Debussy was employed by Nadezhda von Meck (Tchaikovsky's patron), giving music lessons to her children. According to letters from this period, Debussy often was depressed and unable to compose, but he also met Franz Liszt, and finally composed four pieces, which were sent to the Academy; the symphonic ode Zuleima (after a text by Heinrich Heine), the orchestral piece Printemps, and the cantata La damoiselle élue (1887-88), which was criticized by the Academy as "bizarre" and in which some stylistic features of Debussy's later style emerged for the first time. The fourth piece was the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, which was still indebted to César Franck's music and withdrawn by the composer himself.
With his visits to Bayreuth (1888, 1889) Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which was to have a lasting impact on his later work.
Later, in Paris, during the Exposition Universelle (1889) Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward.
The first masterpieces
Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner's style and heavy emotionalism. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring harmonic exploration.
Influenced by the contemporary symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy wrote one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In contrast to the large late-romantic orchestra, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing orchestral colours and timbres of the instruments. Even if Mallarmé himself and Debussy's colleague and friend Paul Dukas were impressed by this piece, the work caused controversy at its premiere; It subsequently launched Debussy into the spotlight as one of the leading composers of the era.
Pelléas et Mélisande
In reaction to Wagner and his highly elaborate late-romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would be his only finished opera.
Orchestral music: Les nocturnes, La Mer, Images
Among Debussy's major orchestral works are:
The three Nocturnes (1899), characteristic studies in veiled harmony and texture ('Nuages'), exuberant ('Fêtes'), and whole-tone ('Sirènes').Music for piano
During this period Debussy wrote much piano music. This suite contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, "Clair de Lune." Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1909) for his beloved daughter whom he nicknamed Chou-chou. Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner in the popular piece Golliwog's Cakewalk. Unlike in his earlier work, Debussy no longer hides discords in lush harmonies.
The music for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911) a lush and dramatic work and written in only two months, is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.
The last orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its own field of motivic connection. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet, who also helped Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre de St. Sébastien.
The second set of Preludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, sometimes utilising dissonant harmonies to evoke moods and images, especially in the mysterious Canope; the title refers to a burial urn which stood on Debussy's working desk and evokes a distant past. The pianist Claudio Arrau considered the piece as one of Debussy's greatest preludes: "It's miraculous that he created, in so few notes, this kind of depth."
Late music: En blanc et noir, the Etudes and the three Sonatas
His two last volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915) interprets similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises and includes pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). These works recall Debussy's earlier music, in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism which was to become popular after Debussy's death. Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in 1918.
Death
Claude Debussy died in Paris on March 25, 1918 from colorectal cancer, in the midst of the German aerial and artillery bombardment of Paris during the Spring Offensive of World War I. He was interred in the Cimetière de Passy, and French culture has ever since celebrated Debussy as one of its most distinguished representatives.
Musical style
The term "impressionist", widely applied to Debussy and the music he influenced, is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. It is widely held that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed.
Rudolph Réti points out these features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":
Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality" (Reti, 1958).
Mathematical structuring
Given that Debussy's music is apparently so concerned with mood and colour, it is somewhat unexpected to discover that according to one author many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even when they apparently also use a classical structure such as sonata form. Howat (1983) suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence.
The only evidence that Howat introduces to support his claim appears in changes Debussy made between finished manuscripts and the printed edition, with the changes invariably creating a Golden Mean proportion where previously none existed. Published editions lack the instruction to play bars 7-12 and 22-83 at twice the speed of the remainder, exactly as Debussy himself did on a piano-roll recording. At the same time, Howat admits that in many of Debussy's works he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably in the late works) and that no extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.
Influence on later composers
Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Debussy in film and pop culture
Debussy's music has been used countless times in film and television. In Casino Royale (1967 film), Sir James Bond (David Niven) "sets aside" time in his day (and world crisis) to play Debussy, performing Clair de lune on a grand piano in his mansion's music room. The band Art of Noise released an album in 1999 titled The Seduction of Claude Debussy, described as "the soundtrack to a film that wasn't made about the life of Claude Debussy." La mer est plus belle que les cathédrales ("The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals"), one of Debussy's many settings of poems by Verlaine, is used in Luis Bunuel's film L'Âge d'Or.
Debussy's music was first used legally in 1948 in the David O.
Notable compositions
Piano
Deux Arabesques (1888) Petite Suite (1889) Suite bergamasque (1890) including Prélude, Menuet, Clair de Lune, and Passepied Rêverie (1890) Valse romantique (1890) Nocturne (1892) Pour Le Piano (1899) Estampes (1903) L'Isle Joyeuse (1904) Images, sets one and two (1905, 1907) a very notable piece being Reflets dans l'eau Children's Corner Suite (1909) Préludes, book one and two (1910-1913) including La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, La Cathédrale Engloutie and Canope La plus que lente (valse pour piano) (1910) Etudes, book one and two (1915)Two pianos or piano, four hands
Six épigraphes antiques for piano, four hands (1914, from the music for Chansons de Bilitis) En blanc et noir for two pianos (1915)Opera
Pelléas et Mélisande (1893-1902)Cantatas
L'enfant prodigue for soprano, baritone, and tenor and orchestra (1884) La demoiselle élue for two soloists, female choir, and orchestra (1887-1888, text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) Ode à la France for soprano, mixed choir, and orchestra (1916-1917, completion by Marius Francois Gaillard)Orchestral
Le printemps for choir of four voices and orchestra (1884) Printemps Suite Symphonique for soprano soloists, chorus (textless) and orchestra, orchestrated by Emil de Cou Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, (tone poem) for orchestra (1894) Nocturnes for orchestra and chorus (1899) Danses Sacrée et Profane for harp and string orchestra (1903) Music for Le roi Lear, two pieces for orchestra (1904) La Mer, esquisses symphoniques (Symphonic Sketches) for orchestra (1905) Images pour orchestre (1905-1911) Le martyre de St. Sébastien, fragments symphoniques for orchestra (from the music for the play by d'Annunzio, 1911) Printemps Suite Symphonique, 1887-1913, orchestrated by Busser Khamma, ballet (1911-1912, orchestrated by Charles Koechlin) Jeux, ballet (1913) La boîte à joujoux, ballet (1913, orchestrated by André Caplet)Music for solo instruments and orchestra
Fantaisie for piano and orchestra (1889-1890) Premiere Rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra (or piano) (1909-1910) Petite pièce for clarinet and orchestra (or piano) (1910) Rhapsody for alto saxophone and orchestra (or piano) (1901-1911)Chamber music
String Quartet in G minor (1893) Music for Chansons de Bilitis for two flutes, two harps, and celesta (1901, text by Pierre Louys) Syrinx for flute (1913) Sonata for cello and piano (1915) Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915) Sonata for violin and piano (1917)See also: List of compositions by Claude Debussy
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