Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy’s (1862 – 1918) artistic ideal was that of a free musical style. He envisioned a type of music which expressed individual creative spontaneity, and in which the individual passages “are linked by a mysterious bond and the gift of lucid clairvoyance”, as he explained, taking Mussorgsky as an example. Debussy was often guided by figurative imagination, which is intrinsically ephemeral and fleeting – like the play of ocean waves or the impression of drifting clouds. The very intangibility of such themes corresponds to Debussy’s fundamental aesthetic conviction that music is “made for the inexpressible”. This artistic conviction established Debussy as one of the founders of 20th-century music.

Unlike most of the great composers, Debussy came from a petty bourgeois background with little interest in music. After taking his first music lessons from an aunt while on holiday, he received professional piano tuition from 1870 onwards. At the age of ten, Debussy passed the entrance examination for the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. Despite various difficulties – all his life, Debussy was a strong individualist with a dubious talent for making himself unpopular and offending even his close friends – he was ultimately awarded the Prix de Rome in 1884, the highest honour to be bestowed to a young composer in French musical circles. Nevertheless, he was forced to earn his living as best he could by taking occasional work in the field of music. He achieved an artistic breakthrough with his famous “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”, composed between 1891 and 1894, but it still brought him no tangible success.

The work that crucially changed his career was the opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, on which he worked with long interruptions from 1893 until shortly before the premiere in the spring of 1902. The opera enjoyed immediate success and was recognised as a pivotal work that pointed the way to a new composition technique. This was music with an inimitable sensual appeal, in which sounds and colours did not merely accompany the themes, but incorporated their intrinsic values. Following the success of his opera “Pelléas, Debussy was abruptly elevated to the status of a sought-after composer. Despite this public affirmation, he still continued to experience creative crises. The result was a large number of unfinished projects that existed alongside his masterpieces such as “La Mer” or the “Préludes” for piano. 

The compositions of his last years, from around 1912 onwards, reveal new facets in Debussy’s creative work. His music now takes on a touch of the abstract and, for the first time since his youth, he again turns his attention to chamber music. The year 1915, in which he composed the “Douze Etudes” for piano, among other works, was once again a flight of creative fancy. However, he never really recovered from the cancer, from which he had suffered since 1909, and died in Paris in March 1918.