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Scan 64
Grove's Dictionary of music and musicians, 1927
14 lines. Read by computer on 4 September 2026. Printed page 28. See the scan on archive.org.
1portions of Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, was accepted by them, though with serious qualms; but they definitely rejected as unplayable the 'Printemps' symphonic suite, less polished but still more unusual, and forecasting in many technical details the orchestral masterpieces of the succeeding years.
3With the five Baudelaire songs (1890) Debussy entered on his mature period. It was not one of fixation—in some fields his development went on, in others it fell back a little: but all through there is the same masterful technique, specialised indeed, but as solidly founded as any composition technique, even of the greatest men, has ever been. The chief landmarks for the first ten years are the string quartet in G minor, the 'L'Après-midi d'un faune' prelude and the three 'Nocturnes' for orchestra, and the 'Chansons de Bilitis'; for the latter ten years, the opera 'Pelléas et Mélisande,' the orchestral suite 'La Mer,' the best of the Verlaine songs and the settings, both solo and choral, of the poems of Villon and Charles duc d'Orléans, and such piano pieces as the 'Estampes' and 'Images' and the first set of Preludes. The dividing-line may perhaps best be drawn between the two sets of Preludes,1 and then come the few final years of mixed achievement, showing at times some of the old certainty and also some tentative exploration of new fields, but, in the main, evidences of a stiffening mind and failing powers.
5Debussy's piano music has probably done most towards the wide extension of his fame among the generality of music-lovers; and it is indeed, in its mature forms, very typical of his genius. Technically he is the inventor (so far as any individual can claim such a title) of a new pianism; he demands from both the fingers and the feet of his interpreters (as well as from their rhythmical sense) all sorts of refinements previously unexploited, and his influence has been amazingly fertile—no composer in musical history has taught the pianist more new and permanently valuable things. The non-technical influence is less steady. Not infrequently, as for example in 'Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut' or 'Brouillards' or 'Feux d'artifice,' Debussy seems merely to brood on problems of harmony and colour in, so to speak, an intellectual vacuum, and most (though not indeed all) of the Studies—his latest piano works—seem musically overmuch concerned with the narrow matter in hand. But the outstanding things—'La Soirée dans Grenade,' 'Reflets dans l'eau,' 'Poissons d'or,' 'The snow is dancing,' 'The little shepherd,' 'Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses,' 'Bruyères,' and the masterpieces that form a good two-thirds of the first set of Preludes and reach their climax in the noble 'La Cathédrale engloutie'—show how versatile his imagination at its best could be. It is not indeed ('Bruyères' and 'La Cathédrale engloutie' apart) large-scale work for the pianist accustomed to deal with the emotional and intellectual tasks set him by the older classics; it is rather, to speak analogously, a gallery of beautiful sketches ready for him to paint with all the subtlest colours at his command. The word atmosphere is now continually on our lips in talking either of performance or of the music performed; it is to Debussy, wellnigh exclusively, that we owe the conception.
7Debussy's finest other instrumental work—the orchestral 'L'Après-midi d'un faune,' 'Nuages' and 'Fêtes,' and the string quartet (in its first three movements)—dates from the decade before the outstanding piano pieces and took the lead in establishing his reputation; here again he taught performers a new technique that now serves them every day, and a new outlook on very beautiful and (for the moment) very strange things. Later on he seems to have taken more lively interest in other departments—though 'Iberia' is a notably brilliant amplification of the moods of 'La Soirée dans Grenade': 'La Mer' seems like a rather tired version of ideas more freshly expressed in the 'Nocturnes,' and in the latest chamber music, in spite of the dignity of the first movement of the violoncello sonata and the quiet charm of much of the sonata for flute, viola and harp, it is often, as André Suarès says,2 'la douleur qui parle.' In 1912 the fashion of the moment induced Debussy to write for the Russian Ballet; 'Jeux' is a lengthy work with rather larger structures than he normally employed, but musically it comes to little.
9In his songs (always duets for voice and piano on level terms) Debussy is rather less of a definite innovator, conditioned as he is by the particular words and by the general literary culture always very powerful with French composers. We can see three separate stages of what may be called the very high-class sentimental song in 'Romance' (1887), 'Green' (1903 or earlier) and 'Je tremble en voyant ton visage' (1910); only the last of these has, in every bar, the perfectly mature harmonic framework, but all—very beautiful songs in their several ways—have the same kind of emotional outlook, which they share in common with much other French work. The most individual of his 'love songs' are probably the first two of the 'Chansons de Bilitis,' the very sensitive 'La Flûte de Pan' and the passionate 'La Chevelure'; but other types of words generally produce more purely personal moods. From the Baudelaire and
111 According to Jean-Aubry, the second set dates, like the first, from 1910; but they were not published till 1913.
132 Supplement to La Revue musicale (Dec. 1920): Suarès's lengthy essay has been separately reprinted.
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