He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in his native France in 1903. Debussy was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced many composers who followed.
Debussy's music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of nontraditional tonalities.The prominent French literary style of his period was known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.
Rudolph Reti points out the following features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":
Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
Frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies;
Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale;
Unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge."
He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".
The application of the term "Impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles.
One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908 he wrote: "I am trying to do 'something different' — an effect of reality... what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art." The opposing side argues that Debussy may have been reacting to unfavorable criticism at the time, and the negativity that critics associated with Impressionism; it could therefore be argued that he would have been pleased with application of the current definition of Impressionism to his music.
From the 1890s Debussy began to develop his own musical language which was largely independent of Wagner's style, coloured in part from the dreamy, sometimes morbid, romanticism of the Symbolist movement. Debussy became a frequent participant at Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolist gatherings, where Wagnerism dominated the discussion. However, in contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers around this time, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms.
The Deux arabesques is an example of one of Debussy's earliest works, already developing his musical language. Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement, and contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, Clair de Lune. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later more daring harmonic exploration, using the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony. Debussy was beginning to employ a single, continuous theme, breaking away from the traditional A-B-A form with its restatements and amplifications, which had been a mainstay of classical music since Haydn.
Debussy wrote one of his most famous works under the influence of Mallarmé, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, which is truly original in form and execution. In contrast to the large orchestras so favoured by late-romanticism, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing instrumental colour and timbre. Despite Mallarmé himself and colleague and friend Paul Dukas having been impressed by the piece, it was controversial at its premiere, but nevertheless established Debussy as one of the leading composers of the era.
The three Nocturnes (1899) include characteristic studies: in Nuages, using veiled harmony and texture; Fêtes, in exuberance; and Sirènes, using whole-tones. Debussy's only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in 1902, after ten years of work, and contrasted sharply with Wagnerian opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be an immediate success and immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.
La mer (1903–1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement, Jeux de vagues, proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour. The reviews were once again sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment to be less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even a step backward, with Pierre Lalo complaining "I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea". Others extolled its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colors and definite lines.
Debussy wrote much for the piano during this period. The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano (1901) uses rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music.[citation needed] His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905) combines harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: Reflets dans l'eau is a musical description of rippling water, whilst second piece Hommage à Rameau is slow and yearningly nostalgic, taking a melody from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1737 Castor et Pollux as its inspiration.
The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pagodes is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by Javanese music.
Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1908) for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, whom he nicknamed Chouchou. The suite recalls classicism — the opening piece Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum refers to Muzio Clementi's collection of instructional piano compositions Gradus ad Parnassum — as well as a new wave of American ragtime music. In the popular final piece of the suite, Golliwogg's Cakewalk, Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner by mimicking the opening bars of Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde.
The first book of Préludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy's preludes are replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Engulfed Cathedral), although since Debussy wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces, their titles were placed at the end of each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.
Larger scale works included his orchestral piece Iberia (1907), a triptych medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions which was begun as a work for two pianos, and also the music for Gabriele D'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911). A lush and dramatic work, written in only two months, it is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.
As Debussy gained in popularity, he was often engaged as a conductor throughout Europe during this period, most often performing Pelléas, La Mer, and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. He was also an occasional music critic, to supplement his conducting fees and piano lessons, writing under the pseudonym "Monsieur Croche". Debussy avoided analytical dissection and attempts to force images from music, saying "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic."
He could be caustic and witty, sometimes sloppy and ill-informed. Debussy was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, and worshipful of Chopin and Bach, the latter being acknowledged as "the one great master."
His relationship to Beethoven was a complex one; he was said to refer to him as "le vieux sourd" (the old deaf one) and adjured one young pupil never to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave." It was said that "Debussy liked Mozart, and he believed that Beethoven had terrifically profound things to say, but that he did not know how to say them, because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness."
He also admired the works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. Schubert and Mendelssohn fared much worse, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".
Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies, and the forms are far more irregular and fragmented. These chords that seemingly had no resolution were described by Debussy himself as "floating chords", and were used to set tone and mood in many of his works. The whole tone scale dominates much of Debussy's late music.
His two final volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915), interpret similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises, and include pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme, as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.
The second set of Préludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, where he uses dissonant harmonies to evoke specific moods and images. Debussy consciously gives titles to each prelude which amplify the preludes' tonal ambiguity and dissonance. He uses scales such as the whole tone scale, musical modes, and the octatonic scale in his preludes which exaggerate this tonal ambiguity, making the key of each prelude almost indistinguishable at times.
The second book of Preludes for piano represents Debussy's strong interest in the indefinite and esoteric.
Some people have claimed that Debussy structured parts of his music mathematically. Roy Howat, for instance, has published a book contending that Debussy's works are structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form.
Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence.
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