Claude Debussy was born in St German-en-Laye and was encouraged
to take up music at an early age. He entered the Paris
Conservatoire at the age of ten, and quickly learned to play a
considerable repertoire of very difficult piano works. However, he
abandoned his planned career as a virtuoso pianist when he joined the Conservatoire's composition class in 1880 and won the
coveted Prix de Rome competition twice. He travelled extensively
in these early years, visiting Italy, Vienna, and Russia. He also
spent two unhappy years studying in Rome. He was known as a moody,
unsociable youth who found it difficult to endure the company of
strangers even temporarily.
Debussy returned from Rome in 1887, and m 1888 and 1889
followed the well-worn path to Bayreuth in order to sample
Wagner's genius. He also attended the World Exhibition in Paris in
1889 where, like Ravel, he was enthralled by the Javanese gamelan
music. During this tune he set up house with a girlfriend,
Gabrielle Dupont, with whom he would live in poverty for six
years.
In 1892 he began one of his best-known orchestral works,
Prelude a l'apresmidi d'un faune. At the first performance it
was enthusiastically received and accorded an immediate encore,
and the work is now recognized as breaking new musical ground with its unconventional and "impressionistic" harmonics.
Based on a poem by Stephane Mallarme, which describes the dreams
and desires of a faun basking in the afternoon heat, the music
consists of a beautiful and sensual mosaic of sound graphically
depicting the erotic content of the poem.
In 1893 Debussy began work on his only completed opera,
Pelleas et Melisande. It took the composer almost ten years to
finish and was premiered at the Opera-Comique in 1902. The music
turns away from the drama and thunderous passion of Wagnerian
opera, remaining for the most part subdued and always allowing the
words to be clearly audible. The trance-like quality of the score
almost hypnotizes the listener with a new and beautiful world
of sound. For many
Pelleas et Melisande is Debussy's finest creation.
The years 1904 and 1905 were especially fertile for Debussy. He
completed the first book of Images for piano and the
popular orchestral work La Mer (The Sea) which makes full
use of the impressionistic techniques developed in previous works.
At the same time Debussy's personal life was in tumult. In 1904 he
left his wife. Lily, whom he had married barely five years before,
to move in with a wealthy lady, Emma Bardac, who was later to
become his second wife. Distraught, his first wife shot herself;
she was badly wounded and taken to a nursing home. An enormous
scandal ensued, fuelled by comments from the press. Many of the
composer's friends held him to blame and broke with him in
disgust. During this time he was also plagued by a series of
lawsuits, a result of debts, which continued to plague him until
his death.
Debussy was now well established and his music increasingly
performed, although controversy attended nearly every new work at
its first performance. A second book of Images for piano
was followed in 1908 by the delightful collection of piano pieces
Children's comer, dedicated to his daughter. From this set
the Golliwog's
Cakewalk is especially well known, featuring a playful
skit on the opening of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde.
Two sets of Preludes were completed in 1910 and 1913 and a
book of Etudes in 191 5 — also for the piano.
Debussy's last major orchestral work, the ballet score Jeux,
has been described as "a beautiful nightmare." Commissioned by
Diaghilev, it was premiered in 1912. In 1909 Debussy had been
diagnosed as having cancer, which by 1915 was so serious that he
had to undergo surgery. He died m 1918, internationally recognized
as the foremost French composer of his time. The use of exotic and
unconventional harmonies, together with the delicate colouring
which characterizes his work, have revealed Debussy as an
innovator who has inspired generations of subsequent composers,
and have ensured him a position among the greatest of
twentieth-century composers.
