Claude-Achelle Debussy

Born: August 22,1862

Died: March 25, 1918

Claude Debussy was born in St.-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, France. He had a strange look about him, with odd bumps on his forehead. Despite his physical appearance, he became a celebrated pianist, and started at the Conservatoire at age ten! Within two years, he had become skillful enough to play Chopin's F minor Concerto, as well as having begun to compose. He didn't really have any close friends, and was described as being "uncommunicative, not to say surly; he was not attractive to his friends." He was from the start an innovator, rebelling from the status quo, and asking many questions of his elders. He once was asked in composition class what rules he was following as he created his own outlandish chords and refused to resolve them, and he responded "Mon plaisir" [my pleasure]. Even though he was turning things upside down in school, he was winning prizes for his recognized talent, and finally won the most coveted, the Prix de Rome in 1884.

At that time, musical Europe seemed to be idolizing Wagner, and Debussy fought Wagnerism for his entire existence! Satie takes credit for pushing Debussy from Wagner's style into a 'more authentic' style...he was an oddball pianist and composer who entertained customers at Le Chat Noir and got a great job in French artful life. He influenced the advanced French school, first Debussy, then the composers of Les Six, indicating a split with convention. The thought was that when Satie first met Debussy, he seemed to be full of Mussorgsky, and was deliberately looking for a way not easy for him to find. But rather than thinking about prizes and forms, or being anti-Wagnerian, that they should come up with a form of their own, using the means that Claude Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and others had already made known. Debussy was thinking the same thing independently. He was losing interest in Wagner as early as 1894 "Having been an impassioned visitor to Bayreuth for several years, I began to doubt the Wagnerian formula, or, rather, it seemed to me it fitted only the particular genius of that composer, who was a great collector of cliches that he summed up in a formula which seemed unusual only because people did not know music well enough."

Debussy disliked traditional, academic composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and seldom used sonata form which was the common form since Mozart; he also felt that symphony as a form was outdated. His music was of a personal, nearly touchable style, with chords lacking 'suitable' resolution, and where resonance began to be destroyed, and certain twentieth-century beliefs about form and style were brought to light. His historic works proved that the old rules were no longer in force.

There was very little music that Debussy liked, although he felt that Bach had an idea of the truth; he felt contempt towards most of his French contemporaries and those who had recently come before him. He called himself "musicien francais" [French musician] as a bold assertion that he was anti-Wagnerian, and also it echoed his anti-German sentiments during WWI. His music is completely French. He did write one opera which he was pleased with, but which never had much of a following; he never did much publicizing of his music as that would mean he would have to come in contact with other people, and he just hated to do that! Even when he earned the Prix de Rome and had to live in the Villa Medici he was very unhappy, despising the villa and his fellow 'inmates'...he left without completing the full three years of 'forced labor' as he called it. He was unusually ill-tempered and sensitive, very ill-at-ease with people whom he did not know and he hated to appear in public and especially to conduct music or play at concerts. He enjoyed the company of cats. He seemed to behave somewhat like a tomcat himself, although he looked nothing cat-like! He was stout, had little muscle tone, had a very light skin tone lacking any ruddiness, and was lazy; his large, bulging forehead nearly hid his eyes with ample lids, and his beard had the appearance of the Renaissance paintings of Christ. He kept combing his hair over the years to hide the bulges in his forehead, to no avail, and was called "Le Christ hydrocephalique" [the Christ with hydrocephaly or water-headedness]

Although he was difficult to get along with, he was born with genius and the blessed gift of the most perceptive musical ear any musician ever had! He had the gift to find just the right color for a piece with one chord...and these touches of color are what make his music uncommon. And he used the pedals as no one else had also, making it seem he was playing directly upon the strings of the piano, without the aid of the keys. He wrote vast scores of piano music. And he heard differently from other composers, so his music sounds different from other composers' music. There was a new kind of fingering, new spacings, new sounds, and that revolutionary new use of the pedals creating a whole new style. There never has been anything like the music of Debussy, nor his way of thinking of music and revolutionizing music. He died in Paris as it was being attacked by the Germans during WWI on March 25, 1918, but his music will never be forgotten!