Debussy

Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul,

and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a one

appear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy is

proper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before all

time our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birth

returned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of

"Pelléas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had always

needed such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we

perhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. The

music seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but the

exquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasing

moments that we had already encountered. It seemed fashioned out of

certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffably

sad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set us

apart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, at

the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cluster of tones out of

the warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of their

stature and become ours entirely.

For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst us most fully. He is

here, in our midst, in the world of the city. There is about him none of

the unworldliness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances so

many of the other composers from us. We need not imagine him in exotic

singing robes, nor in classical garments, nor in any strange and

outmoded and picturesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is the

modern poet just because the modern civilian garb is so naturally his.

He is the normal man, living our own manner of life. We seem to know him

as we know ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified by

his poet's gift. Or, if they are not already ours, they will become so.

He seems almost ourselves as he passes through the city twilight, intent

upon some errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a road which

we ourselves have traveled. We know the room in which he lives, the

windows from which he gazes, the moments which come upon him there in

the silence of the lamp. For he has captured in his music what is

distinguished in the age's delight and tragedy. All the fine sensuality,

all the Eastern pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth of

nature, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and touch that made

men feel as though neither had been known before, are contained in it.

It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumbering

trees," the "earth of departed sunset," the "earth of the vitreous pour

of the full moon just tinged with blue." It is full of material

loveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty shells--to the somnolence

of the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to the

fall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, to

the romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the

green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's

consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again

its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth

century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of

colossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and

explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare,

the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed

as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent

hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the

unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms.

The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no

more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting

steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep

wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and

become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has

fixed the two in their confusion.

He has permeated music completely with his impressionistic sensibility.

His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. With

him impressionism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, the

music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, each

full and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts,

in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute

to the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarily

independent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, is

subordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupies

the universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. The harmonies

are not, as in other compositions, preparations. They are apparently an

end in themselves, flow in space, and then change hue, as a shimmering

stuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is

the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding,

gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase,

then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to

flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The

iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is

forever suggesting water--fountains and pools, the glistening spray and

heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of

the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His

orchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy and diaphanous in

each instrument. He makes music with flakes of light, with bright motes

of pigment. His palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet or

a Pissaro or a Renoir. His orchestra sparkles with iridescent fires,

with divided tones, with delicate violets and argents and shades of

rose. The sound of the piano, usually but the ringing of flat colored

stones, at his touch becomes fluid, velvety and dense, takes on the

properties of satins and liqueurs. The pedal washes new tint after new

tint over the keyboard. "Reflets dans l'eau" has the quality of sheeny

blue satin, of cloud pictures tumbling in gliding water. Blue fades to

green and fades back again to blue in the middle section of "Homage à

Rameau." Bright, cold moonlight slips through "Et la lune descend sur le

temple que fut"; ruddy sparks glitter in "Mouvement" with its

Petruchka-like joy; the piano is liquid and luminous and aromatic in

"Cloches à travers les feuilles."

Yet there is no uncertainty, no mistiness in his form, as there is in

that of some of the other impressionists. His music is classically firm,

classically precise and knit. His lyrical, shimmering structures are

perfectly fashioned. The line never hesitates, never becomes lost nor

involved. It proceeds directly, clearly, passing through jewels and

clots of color, and fusing them into the mass. The trajectory never

breaks. The music is always full of its proper weight and timbre. It

can be said quite without exaggeration that his best work omits nothing,

neglects nothing, that every component element is justly treated. His

little pieces occupy a space as completely as the most massive and grand

of compositions. A composition like "Nuages," the first of the three

nocturnes for orchestra, while taking but five minutes in performance,

outweighs any number of compositions that last an hour. "L'Après-midi

d'un faune" is inspired and new, marvelously, at every measure. The

three little pieces that comprise the first set of "Images" for piano

will probably outlast half of what Liszt has written for the instrument.

"Pelléas" will some day be studied for its miraculous invention, its

classical moderation and balance and truth, for its pure diction and

economical orchestration, quite as the scores of Gluck are studied

to-day.

For Debussy is, of all the artists who have made music in our time, the

most perfect. Other musicians, perhaps even some of the contemporary,

may exhibit a greater heroism, a greater staying power and

indefatigability. Nevertheless, in his sphere he is every inch as

perfect a workman as the greatest. Within his limits he was as pure a

craftsman as the great John Sebastian in his. The difference between the

two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of

their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's

perfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture

and profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously rounded

and balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing which

they could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace.

Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their gift, better

acquainted with themselves, surer of the character and limitations of

their genius. Few have been as perseverantly essential, have managed to

sustain their emotion and invention so steadily at a height. The music

of Debussy is full of purest, most delicate poesy. Perhaps only Bach and

Moussorgsky have as invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive and

final as those with which "Pelléas" is strewn, phrases that with a few

simple notes epitomize profound and exquisite emotions, and are indeed

the word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens a

prospect. There are moments when the music of "Pelléas," the fine fluid

line of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pass and vanish into

one another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe vast darkling

forms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments of

human intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The

tenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art.

And tenderness, after all, is the most intense of all emotions.

A thousand years of culture live in this fineness. In these perfect

gestures, in this grace, this certainty of choice, this justice of

values, this simple, profound, delicate language, there live on thirty

generations of gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames who

developed the arts of life in the mild and fruitful valleys of "the

pleasant land of France" speak here. The gentle sunlight and gentle

shadow, the mild winters and mild summers of the Ile de France, the

plentiful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine, contributed

to making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. The

instruction and cultivation of the classic and French poets and

thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and

Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the gardens and

galleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century

Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches

sight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In every

one of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "String

Quartet" and "Pelléas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plus

que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded and

developed by the fertile, tranquil soil of France.

And in his art, the gods of classical antiquity live again. Debussy is

much more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the

old Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in the body,

warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed by

them during centuries into demoniacal and hellish forms, is free and

pure and sweet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads and

goddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Après-midi d'un faune" and "Sirènes."

They once wandered through the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdened

men with their golden sensuality, and bewitched them with the thought of

"the breast of the nymph in the brake." For they are full of the wonder

and sweetness of the flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed not

in closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shameful pall of the

night, but out in the warm, sunny open, amid grasses and scents and the

buzzing of insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of clouds. The

Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. It

moves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of

spider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sight

and touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Après-midi d'un

faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the

drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the

horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot

herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts and

thighs. The Lento movement of "Ibéria" is like some drowsy, disheveled

gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full of the goodness of the flesh, is

like some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirènes,"

something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body,

is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinking

tides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the

aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene herself, with her

galaxy of tritons and naiads, approached earth's shores once more.

If any musical task is to be considered as having been accomplished, it

is that of Debussy. For he wrote the one book that every great artist

writes. He established a style irrefragably, made musical impressionism

as legitimate a thing as any of the great styles. That he had more to

make than that one contribution is doubtful. His art underwent no

radical changes. His style was mature already in the Quartet and in

"Proses lyriques," and had its climax in "Pelléas," its orchestral

deployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Ibéria," its pianistic

expression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever the

refinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien,"

Debussy never really transgressed the limits set for him by his first

great works. And so, even if his long illness caused the deterioration,

the hardening, the formularization, so evident in his most recent work,

the sonatas, the "Epigrammes," "En blanc et noir," and the "Berceuse

héroïque," and deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor his

death actually robbed us of some radical development which we might

reasonably have expected. The chief that he had to give he had given.

What his age had demanded of him, an art that it might hold far from the

glare and tumult, an art into which it could retreat, an art which could

compensate it for a life become too cruel and demanding, he had

produced. He had essentially fulfilled himself.

The fact that "Pelléas" is the most eloquent of all Debussy's works and

his eternal sign does not, then, signify that he did not grow during the

remainder of his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-drama

the fullest expression of his genius, decreed that he should be living

most completely at the moment he composed it. The very fact that in it

Debussy was composing music for the theater made it certain that his

artistic sense would produce itself at its mightiest in the work. For it

entailed the statement of his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it was

music conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so full of the

French classical genius, would through contact with the spoken word,

through study of its essential quality, be aided and compelled to a

complete realization of a fundamentally French idiom. And then

Maeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a unique

auxiliary. It, too, is full of the sense of the shadowiness of things

that weighed upon Debussy, has not a little of the accent of the time.

This "vieille et triste légende de la forêt" is alive with images, such

as the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lost

amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneath

Mélisande's casement, Mélisande's hair that falls farther than her arms

can reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults and

breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle of

the child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy's

imagination. But, above all, it was the figure of Mélisande herself that

made him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For that

figure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation of

his ideal image. The music is all Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman.

It is she that the music reveals from the moment Mélisande rises from

among the rocks shrouded in the mystery of her golden hair. It is she

the music limns from the very beginning of the work. The entire score is

but what a man might feel toward a woman that was his, and yet, like all

women, strange and mysterious and unknown to him. The music is like the

stripping of some perfect flower, petal upon petal. There are moments

when it is all that lies between two people, and is the fullness of

their knowledge. It is the perfect sign of an experience.

And so, since Debussy's art could have no second climax, it was in the

order of things that the works succeeding upon his masterpiece should

be relatively less important. Nevertheless, the ensuing poems and songs

and piano-pieces, with the exception of those written during those years

when Debussy could have said with Rameau, his master, "From day to day

my taste improves. But I have lost all my genius," are by little less

perfect and astounding pieces of work. His music is like the peaks of a

mountain range, of which one of the first and nearest is the highest,

while the others appear scarcely less high. And they are some of the

bluest, the loveliest, the most shining that stretch through the region

of modern music. It will be long before humankind has exhausted their

beauty.