Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris into a modest family: his parents ran a china shop that went bankrupt. He hardly went to school. In 1870, during the war, he stayed in Cannes with an aunt, who arranged his first piano lessons. Back in Paris he was noticed by Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, mother-in-law of the poet Paul Verlaine, who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. She prepared him for the Conservatoire.

In 1872, aged ten, he entered the Paris Conservatoire. He studied there for twelve years: piano, solfège, harmony and composition. He was a brilliant but rebellious pupil who loved unusual chords and did not always follow the rules, to his teachers’ despair. In the summers of 1880 to 1882 he was hired as pianist by Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s patron, and travelled with her family to Switzerland, Italy and Russia, where he discovered Russian music.

In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome with the cantata L’Enfant prodigue. But he was bored at the Villa Medici and returned to Paris before the end of his stay. He mixed with the Symbolist poets, notably Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poems he set to music. In 1889, at the Exposition Universelle — the one for which the Eiffel Tower was built — he discovered the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra of gongs and metallophones, and the music of Annamese theatre: these new sounds fascinated him and deeply influenced his music.

Debussy wanted to free music from the traditional rules of harmony: he used ancient or exotic scales, such as the whole-tone and pentatonic scales, chords that do not resolve and supple rhythms. In 1894 he premiered the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, after a poem by Mallarmé, which opens with a dreamy, sensuous flute solo. Pierre Boulez said that “the flute of the faun” opened modern music. He also composed the Suite bergamasque, with its famous Clair de lune, published in 1905.

He worked for nearly ten years on his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, after Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. The work, which avoids grand arias and has the characters sing almost as they speak, in an atmosphere of mystery, caused a scandal and then triumphed. Debussy became famous. His music is often called “impressionist”, by comparison with Monet’s painting, although he disliked the term.

In 1905 he composed La Mer, three “symphonic sketches” evoking the play of light, waves and wind. That same year his daughter Claude-Emma, nicknamed “Chouchou”, was born to the singer Emma Bardac, whom he married in 1908. For Chouchou he composed Children’s Corner (1908), a humorous suite of piano pieces: Jimbo’s Lullaby, Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk and Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, which pokes fun at Clementi’s tedious exercises. He also wrote two books of Préludes for piano (1910–13), with poetic titles such as La Fille aux cheveux de lin and La Cathédrale engloutie.

From 1909 he suffered from cancer. The First World War filled him with despair, but he still composed his Twelve Études for piano (1915) and three sonatas for various instruments, which he proudly signed “Claude Debussy, musicien français”. He died in Paris on 25 March 1918, while the city was being shelled by German guns. He is regarded as one of the fathers of modern music; his influence extends from Ravel to Messiaen, and even to jazz.