The young Claude Debussy wrote a dainty music redolent of pink lampshades and rustling frou-frous. His piano sketches from the late 1880s caress the ear in an undeniably gorgeous way, but leave an impression of dilettante sensation. Debussy only found his voice with his 1905 sea symphony La Mer and the hauntingly strange orchestral fantasia Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. These are among the most extraordinary works of music of our time. The hushed intensity of the Debussy sound left its mark on Miles Davis, for one, who saw in the French composer a pre-jazz master of the sonic impressionist sketch.
This excellent new biography of Debussy, subtitled A Painter in Sound, looks at a composer in thrall to Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities (among them the Japanese koto used by David Bowie to ambient effect on his Heroes album). Debussy’s thirst for “un-French” music put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard, who found him fandangled and foreign as a pagoda, says Stephen Walsh. Debussy’s ability to create new possibilities in sound is, of course, what makes him so modern. Walsh is a superb guide to this music, but he is rather less interested in the details of Debussy’s life. (His groundbreaking biography of Stravinsky likewise concentrated more on the music.)
The composer’s humble birth in a suburb of Paris in 1862 is quickly reviewed by Walsh. Money was tight in the Debussy family flat behind Saint-Lazare station, where Claude’s mother was a seamstress and his father a shopkeeper. The teenage Claude cut a “mildly grotesque” figure, with his high-domed forehead and crinkly black hair. At the Paris Conservatoire where he studied in the late 1870s, he discovered the polyphonic motets of Palestrina and other Renaissance composers; traces of their multi‑voiced sacred works can be heard in his 1911 stage work, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, with its sheets of harp and celesta sounds.
Having left the “straitlaced” Conservatoire, Debussy befriended the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a lexical innovator whose writing glowed with a melancholy sense of emptiness (“The flesh is sad and I’ve read all the books”). As Walsh reminds us, Mallarmé was a tireless promoter of Edgar Allan Poe, in whom he found a European symbolist sensibility. For years Debussy worked on an opera based on Poe’s chain-rattling story The Fall of the House of Usher, but it was never completed.
By the time Debussy’s first string quartet was premiered in Paris in 1893, he was on his way to recognition. Though indebted to the chamber music of Marcel Proust’s beloved César Franck, there was a stillness in the slow movement that suggested new horizons. From here it was not such a leap to La Mer, Debussy’s best-loved work. The composer’s translation of the sea into orchestra was a signpost in the development of contemporary classical music. The symphony has little metre or pulse but, an impressionist marvel, it trembles like a mass of shimmering pointillist particles.
Debussy had been influenced, says Walsh, by the gamelan orchestras on display at the Paris World Fair of 1889. In Bali’s percussive cling-clang of gongs and metallophones, Debussy detected non-western harmonic developments that later served him well for the abstract pianistic moods of Préludes, composed in the early 1900s and built on a gamelan-like idea of “movement through stasis”.
After a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking, Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55, of rectal cancer. In terms of modern composition he is a forerunner of the atmospheric sound clusters of György Ligeti and Terry Riley’s abidingly popular In C (itself a gamelan-influenced interweave of shades and inflections).
For all his dreamy fin de siècle languor, Claude Debussy is no curio from a superseded world. Walsh’s fascinating study will help to win him new admirers.
• Debussy: A Painter in Sound is published by Faber & Faber (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
