Ravel once remarked that upon hearing Debussy’s music, he first understood what real music was.. He did find Debussy displeasing, though, not only for his philosophy when it came to human relationships but also because of Debussy’s recognition as the composer who developed Avant-Garde music, which Ravel maintained was plagiarism of his own Habanera. Nevertheless, Debussy protested his label as “Father of Impressionism in music,” and academic circles too believe that the term might be a misnomer. He dedicated Children’s Corner for piano to his daughter, whose sweetness and love would quell his depressions. Since his death, France has celebrated him as one of the most distinguished ambassadors of its culture, and his music is repeatedly heard in film and television. At the 1889 Exposition Universelle, he heard gamelan music from Java and the sometimes violent music of the Annamite Theatre of Vietnam.
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- He was the only composer to use the whole-tone scale, made up entirely of whole tones and the octave divided into six equal parts, to such an extent and with such artistry.
- String Quartet in G Minor and the orchestral prelude “L’Apres midi d’un faune,” composed between 1893 and 1894, were the first masterpieces of the new style.
- Like Stravinsky, he looked for inspiration in non-European harmonies, which he incorporated in his music, without rendering it “heathenish,” in the sense of undermining its synchronization with the physics of sound.
- A further improvisation by Debussy during this conversation included a sequence of whole tone harmonies which may have been inspired by the music of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov which was becoming known in Paris at this time.
- He made his music very different from the Romantic style, which other composers used at the time.
- His single completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (first performed in 1902), demonstrates how the Wagnerian technique could be adapted to portray subjects like the dreamy nightmarish figures of this opera who were doomed to self-destruction.
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Read more about Debussy
- Ravel once remarked that upon hearing Debussy’s music, he first understood what real music was..
- He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande.
- Its understatement and deceptively simple declamation also brought an entirely new tone to opera — but an unrepeatable one.
- It made Debussy a well-known name in France and abroad; The Times commented that the opera had “provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting, of course, those of Richard Strauss”.
- The application of the term “Impressionist” to Debussy and the music he influenced has been much debated, both during his lifetime and since.
- It was their view that Western harmony had exhausted it potentialities as a potent emotive syntax by the end of the nineteenth century.
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Another major influence on his style was the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra comprising bells, gongs, and percussions, which he became familiar with in 1889 thanks to his artistic contacts in Paris. He was the only composer to use the whole-tone scale, made up entirely of whole tones and the octave divided into six equal parts, to such an extent and with such artistry. This enabled him to convey nebulous and haunting melodies, whose textures, sensations, images, and nuances in sound were unprecedented in his time. The composer’s greatest works are built on a classical structure, such as a sonata, but they also appear to have been structured around mathematical models, as Howat observed.
Who Was Claude Debussy?A Brief Introduction
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- The course included music history and theory studies with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, but it is not certain that Debussy, who was apt to skip classes, actually attended these.
- Less individual, for good reasons, are the cantatas he wrote as set pieces for the Prix de Rome.
- Estampes for piano (1903) gives impressions of exotic locations, with further echoes of the gamelan in its pentatonic structures.
- In the music of Palestrina, Debussy found what he called “a perfect whiteness”, and he felt that although Palestrina’s musical forms had a “strict manner”, they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers.
- In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and later sketched the libretto for an opera, La chute de la maison Usher.
- He travelled to Maeterlinck’s home in Ghent in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation.
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He 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. At times these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure; elsewhere they appear to mark out other significant Casinojoy casino features of the music. In this, he was a profound influence on composers as diverse as Bartok, Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Varese. The sonatas, written during the war, seem to outline a new, more concise, almost elliptical style, perhaps due to a new vision, or just because he was in pain when he wrote them.
Biography, Fun Facts, Gallery, Quotes and Works of Claude Debussy
His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition. In his final years, he focused on chamber music, completing three of six planned sonatas for different combinations of instruments. Claude Debussy (born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25, 1918, Paris) was a French composer whose works were a seminal force in the music of the 20th century. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed in many respects the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers of his time aspired. As well as Maeterlinck for Pelléas et Mélisande, he drew on Shakespeare and Dickens for two of his Préludes for piano – “La Danse de Puck” (Book 1, 1910) and “Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.” (Book 2, 1913). He wrote incidental music for King Lear and planned an opera based on As You Like It, but abandoned that once he turned his attention to setting Maeterlinck’s play.
Top Debussy pieces
In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and later sketched the libretto for an opera, La chute de la maison Usher. Another project inspired by Poe – an operatic version of The Devil in the Belfry did not progress beyond sketches. With the advent of the First World War, Debussy became ardently patriotic in his musical opinions. A contemporary influence was Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy’s “most faithful friend” amongst French musicians. In May 1893 Debussy attended a theatrical event that was of key importance to his later career – the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, which he immediately determined to turn into an opera. He travelled to Maeterlinck’s home in Ghent in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation.