1862–1918 · France · 20th century
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a French composer, pianist and music critic whose music is associated with impressionism, though he himself rejected the term. His only completed opera is Pelléas et Mélisande. The site holds Debussy's songs and piano pieces at upper-intermediate and advanced levels.
Claude Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, the eldest of five children. His father, Manuel(-Achille) Debussy, ran a shop selling china and pottery. In 1864 the shop closed and the family moved to Paris.
In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, his mother took Claude to Cannes, to his paternal aunt Clémentine. There he took his first piano lessons from the Italian musician Jean Cerutti, paid for by his aunt. His father remained in Paris and took part in the Paris Commune; after its defeat he was sentenced to four years in prison but was released after a year.
Back in Paris, Claude's piano lessons were continued by Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, a pianist and the mother-in-law of the poet Paul Verlaine. Debussy became her pupil because his father had met her son, the musician Charles de Sivry, in prison.
In October 1872, at the age of ten, Debussy was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. He studied piano with Antoine Marmontel, solfège with Albert Lavignac, harmony with Émile Durand, organ with César Franck, and later composition with Ernest Guiraud. In 1877 he won a second prize for performing a Schumann sonata, but failed in the competitions of 1878 and 1879 and lost his chance of a career as a professional pianist. He repeatedly clashed with his harmony teacher, Durand, who did not accept his early experiments with sound.
In the summers of 1880-1882 Debussy travelled with the family of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's wealthy patron, to Switzerland, Italy and, near Moscow, to the Pleshcheyevo estate, serving as her resident pianist and giving her children music lessons. For von Meck's musicians he wrote a Piano Trio in G major and made a piano-duet transcription of several dances from a Tchaikovsky ballet. In von Meck's house Debussy heard the music of Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Balakirev, and on a trip with her to Vienna he heard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde for the first time. He lost this job after falling in love with one of von Meck's daughters.
Back in Paris, in search of income Debussy became accompanist at Madame Moreau-Sainti's singing studio; there he met the amateur singer Madame Vanier, for whom he wrote several songs, among them "Mandoline".
In 1883 Debussy won the second Prix de Rome for the cantata Le Gladiateur, and a year later, in 1884, the Grand Prix de Rome for the cantata L'Enfant prodigue; winning this second prize was helped, among other things, by the personal support of Charles Gounod. The prize entitled the laureate to live and work at the Villa Medici in Rome. Debussy arrived there two months late and, apart from a few short trips to France, stayed there from 1885 to 1887.
The suite Printemps, which he sent to Paris, was criticised by the Academy for its vague manner of writing, and the author was warned against too great an indulgence in such vagueness — this 1886 report is considered the first known instance in which the word "impressionism" was applied to music. Later the Academy accepted the cantata La Damoiselle élue for performance but rejected Printemps; in response Debussy refused to take part in the concert, and this led to a complete break with the Academy.
After returning from Rome, Debussy went to Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889 to hear Wagner's operas. His enthusiasm for Wagner was strong but short-lived: in time Debussy concluded that developing the Wagnerian style in French music had no future. At the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle he first heard Javanese gamelan music, whose sound influenced his musical language.
In the late 1880s Debussy grew close to the composer Ernest Chausson, whose artistic salon was frequented by Fauré, Ysaÿe, Pauline Viardot, Turgenev and Claude Monet; it was there that he met the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Around the same time he first read the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, who became his favourite writer. In 1890–1891 Debussy met Erik Satie, a pianist at a Paris café-concert; their friendship, at times resembling rivalry, lasted for nearly a quarter of a century.
In 1893 Debussy's String Quartet had its first performance at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique, whose committee he joined that same year. In May 1893 a play by Maurice Maeterlinck — Pelléas et Mélisande — was staged, and after seeing it Debussy resolved at once to turn it into an opera; in November he travelled to Ghent to obtain the playwright's consent.
Work on the opera took Debussy nearly ten years. In 1894 he announced his engagement to the singer Thérèse Roger, but it was broken off, and it cost him the support of several friends and patrons, Ernest Chausson among them. That December the symphonic prelude Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, inspired by Mallarmé's eclogue of the same name, had its first performance at a Société Nationale concert. The opera Pelléas et Mélisande opened at the Opéra-Comique on 30 April 1902, and afterwards Debussy's name became known both in France and abroad.
In 1899 Debussy married the model Rosalie Texier, known as Lilly. One of his pupils, Raoul Bardac, who had previously studied with Gabriel Fauré, introduced Debussy to his mother, Emma Bardac, the wife of a Parisian banker. In July 1904 Debussy left Lilly and went away with Emma from Paris; they spent part of the summer and autumn in the north of France and in England. In October of that year Lilly Texier shot herself with a revolver but survived; after the ensuing scandal many friends turned away from Debussy. Both divorces went through in 1905: first Emma's from her husband, then, on 2 August, Debussy's from Lilly. In 1908 Debussy and Emma married. In 1905 their daughter Claude-Emma, known as Chouchou, was born; her father later dedicated the piano suite Children's Corner to her.
La mer, the most substantial of Debussy's orchestral works, had its first performance in Paris in October 1905; that same year the family settled into a house near the Bois de Boulogne, where Debussy lived for the rest of his life. To support his family he gave many concerts and conducted his own works in England, Italy, Russia and other countries, although he himself disliked conducting. In 1909 doctors found that Debussy had colorectal cancer.
Despite his illness, Debussy went on composing: two books of piano Préludes appeared, in 1912 the orchestral cycle Images, and in 1913, for Sergei Diaghilev's company, he wrote the music for the ballet Jeux. Only two weeks after its premiere, Jeux was overshadowed by the sensational premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which seized the attention of the whole musical world. The First World War temporarily interrupted Debussy's work, but new piano pieces appeared as early as 1915, among them the Twelve Études in memory of Chopin. That same year, 1915, Debussy had one of the earliest colostomy operations, and of the planned cycle of six instrumental sonatas he managed to finish only three: one for cello and piano, in 1915; a second for flute, viola and harp, also in 1915; and a third, in 1917, for violin and piano.
Debussy died on 25 March 1918 at his home in Paris. His funeral was held without a solemn ceremony while the city was under German artillery bombardment; the composer was buried temporarily at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and a year later reinterred at the Passy Cemetery.
Debussy wrote chiefly for piano and for voice with piano: apart from his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, he wrote songs to the words of various poets, including his own, throughout almost his entire working life. He developed his musical language away from Wagner and the German tradition, and also under the influence of Russian music heard at the von Meck household and of Javanese gamelan heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. He presented his three orchestral Nocturnes in 1900 - first two of them, and the complete cycle a year later. Debussy regarded the classical symphony as outdated and called his La mer not a symphony but "symphonic sketches". He did not give opus numbers to his works, apart from the String Quartet (Op. 10); in 1977 the musicologist François Lesure compiled a catalogue of his works numbered with the letter "L", which sometimes appear alongside the titles of his pieces.
Among Debussy's piano cycles are the two books of Images (1905-1907), followed by the suite Children's Corner (1906-1908), which he dedicated to his daughter Chouchou. A choral part appears in only a few of his works - the early cantata La Damoiselle elue and the late mystery play Le Martyre de saint Sebastien (1911), to a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio, which Debussy orchestrated with the help of Andre Caplet.
The site holds 16 sheet-music editions of Debussy's works, all for different pieces: thirteen songs for voice and piano and three pieces for solo piano - the "First" and "Second Arabesques" and "Clair de Lune" from the Suite bergamasque. The only edition at upper-intermediate level is the song "Mandoline"; the remaining fifteen are marked advanced.
A first acquaintance with Debussy's sheet music on the site can begin with the upper-intermediate song "Mandoline"; the next step is advanced-level piano pieces: the "First" and "Second Arabesques", "Clair de Lune" from the Suite bergamasque, and the song "Aquarelles II. Spleen".