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Scan 63
Grove's Dictionary of music and musicians, 1927
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1Deacon was an excellent pianist and often appeared as accompanist at the Monday Popular Concerts (St. James's Hall).
3DEANE, THOMAS, Mus.D. (b. latter half of 17th cent.), organist at Warwick and Coventry. He composed a service and other church music, and in 1703 the instrumental music for Oldmixon's tragedy 'The Governor of Cyprus.' He is said to have been the first to perform a sonata of Corelli in England in 1709. Compositions by him for the violin are contained in 'The Division Violin.' He graduated as Doctor of Music at Oxford, July 9, 1731.
5W. H. H.
7DEBAIN, ALEXANDRE FRANÇOIS (b. Paris, 1809; d. there, Nov. 1877), a keyed instrument maker, originally a foreman in a piano-forte factory. In 1834 he established a factory of his own, and distinguished himself by the invention of several musical instruments, amongst others the Harmonium, or 'orgue expressif,' patented 1842, Antiphonel (1846) and Harmonicorde (1851). His death involved the disappearance of the factory, but the mark of his instruments is now in the hands of the firm of Chaperon, Paris. (See HARMONIUM.)
9BIBL.—CONSTANT PIERRE, Les Facteurs d'instruments de musique; les luthiers et la facture instrumentale (1893).
11M. L. P.
13DEBORAH, an oratorio by Handel, the words by Humphreys; completed Feb. 21, 1733; first performed at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, Mar. 17, 1733; revived by the Sacred Harmonic Society, Nov. 15, 1843.
15DEBRNOV, pseudonym of SRB, Josef (q.v.).
17DE BUSNE, see BUSNOIS.
19DEBUSSY, CLAUDE ACHILLE (b. St. Germain-en-Laye, Aug. 22, 1862; d. Paris, Mar. 26, 1918), the most influential French composer of his generation and the founder of modern musical impressionism.
21Debussy's family circle, of the normal bourgeois type, was in no way specially musical, and he showed no capacity for music until he was 10 years old, when his future interests, uncertain though they still were, found a first recogniser in Mme. Mantet, the mother-in-law of Verlaine, with whose poetry he was afterwards so intimately associated. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1873, and remained there for eleven years, studying the piano with Marmontel and theoretical subjects with Guiraud (his chief composition master), Lavignac, Massenet and Durand. For a long while the routine work was distasteful to him, though from time to time he won various prizes and medals for piano, for accompaniment, and for counterpoint and fugue: he finally, in 1884, obtained the highest honour in the Conservatoire's gift, the Grand Prix de Rome (for which he had been proxime accessit the previous year), with the cantata 'L'Enfant prodigue.'
23Already, in 1879,1 Debussy had widened his interests by a summer's residence at Moscow with the family of an engineer. A residence of considerable duration in Italy was required of the holders of the Prix de Rome, and Debussy duly undertook it; but, the prescribed course once completed, he returned to Paris and settled down to the composer's career to which (apart from occasional journalistic activities) he confined himself for the remainder of his life. Of a very retiring disposition, he never held any official appointments and rarely appeared in public, whether as conductor or as pianist: he was seen in the London concert world twice, conducting the Queen's Hall Orchestra on Feb. 1, 1908, in his 'L'Après-midi d'un faune' and 'La Mer,' and on Feb. 27, 1909, in the former of these works and the three 'Nocturnes.' Towards the end of his life he suffered much from ill-health, and composed very little.
25Roughly speaking, we can distinguish three successive periods in Debussy's compositions: first, the period of immaturity up to about 1890, then some twenty years of mature work, and then a few final years of uncertainty mixed with decline; though, indeed, the early immaturity varies very much. The song 'Nuit d'étoiles,' Debussy's earliest surviving composition, is a vigorous bit of work for a boy of 14, but its commonplaces are of a curiously Teutonic tinge; 'L'Enfant prodigue,' eight years later, is certainly very French, but it cannot rank as more than a dexterous eclectic exploitation of some of the obvious fashions of the moment: but half-way between we find such songs as 'Mandoline,' which says a new thing with great charm, and the still more significant 'L'Ombre des arbres dans la rivière,' which speaks its composer's mature idiom though not indeed yet using it to any specially noteworthy end; while there is an anecdote that, some two years before the Prix de Rome was won, Debussy submitted a score (now apparently lost) based on Banville's Diane aux bois to his teacher Guiraud, who, while expressing strong personal interest, discouraged revolutionary ideas as temporarily unwise. Student days being past, Debussy felt freer to follow personal inclinations; but he was still not sure of his paths. Most of the numerous piano pieces up to 1890 are only instrumental versions of the facile graces of the airs of Azael and Lia in 'L'Enfant prodigue,' nor is there any advance as yet in pianistic technique: but there is no trace whatever left of the prize cantata in the two works of 1887 which, as prize-winner, he submitted to the members of the Institute. One, a setting for female voices and orchestra of
271 This is the date given in the essay on Debussy in Jean-Aubry's La Musique et les nations (1922). The authorities differ, some (including Jean-Aubry himself in an essay of 1909) dating the journey to Russia after that to Italy.
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