Biography of Claude Debussy

The love of women and music

22 August 1862
March 25, 1918
Claude-Achille Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France). Coming from a wealthy family of sellers of porcelain, only ten he entered the Paris Conservatoire (will remain there until 1884) to study music composition with Giraud and piano under Marmontel. At eighteen, he began a secret affair with the wife of a Parisian lawyer, Blanche Vesnier: a relationship that will last eight years and that will shut down with the transfer of the musician in Rome. After winning, thanks to the operatic stage "L'Enfant prodige", the "Prix de Rome", remains in the Italian capital until 1887. During this period his style as a composer is influenced by listening to Gamelan of Java. The cantata "La damoiselle elected", dating back to 1888, Cinq poemes de Baudelaire "and" made in the year following, reflected echoes of Wagner, while other works of the same period (especially the Arias composed from poems of his friend Verlaine, as "Fetes galantes", "Trois melodies" and "Ariettes oubliees") sporting whimsical style.
Meanwhile, in 1889 Debussy began a relationship with Gabrielle Dupont, a tailor's daughter who lives with him in the 17th arrondissement. Their story will end nine years later when the musician will bond to Rosalie Texier, Gabrielle's friend with whom he married in 1899. The separation will bring the former partner of Claude to attempt suicide. Among the most important orchestral works by Debussy at this time it is worth to point out the three "Nocturnes" created in 1899: studies with all veiled, complete movements and exuberant shortcuts, highlighting the creativity of French artist. A more symphonic, instead, is in "La mer", created in the early 1900s, with a central part, called "Jeux de vagues", which proceeds through a wide variety of shades and an immediacy.
Meanwhile the artist goes into crisis with his wife Rosalie, however this was very well-liked by his friends and colleagues. What Debussy complains that the spouse is a lack of culture, and a musical sensibility totally absent. In 1904, so Claude comes in contact with the wife of the banker Sigismond Bardac Emma, whose son is a pupil of the musician. Bright and elegant, refined woman and respected singer, Emma becomes the object of desire of Debussy, which she writes "l'Isle joyeuse", and leaves his wife. She also, like the Dupont, tries to commit suicide: who in the Place de la Concorde, it shoots but survives, although he will live the rest of their lives with the bullet embedded in a vertebra. The incident, in any case, elicits scandal in Paris at the time, to the point that Debussy and Emma, meanwhile got pregnant by him, they flee in secrecy in England: the 1905.
Staying at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, spend happy days, with Debussy, which has the possibility to enter into "La Mer". In autumn, returning to Paris to give birth to her daughter Claude-Emm. In 1904 is published "Images pour piano", his first volume that invokes shades new for its time: just think of the influence of Jean-Philippe Rameau or track "Reflets dans l'eau". Meanwhile, Debussy begins to associate the music of his orchestral pieces to Visual impressions from Spain and from the East. You can tell from the volume "Estampes", for example, composed in 1903, within which there are tracks like "Pagodes" evoking Eastern scents without too many mysteries: in "La soirée dans Grenade", the Spanish atmosphere is vivid and fascinating. Not to forget one of the most famous compositions, the "Children's corner suite for piano by Debussy for Chou-Chou, as he was nicknamed his beloved daughter: Here you can see Oriental touches. In "Golliwogg's Cake-walk", however, it is impossible not to see a major jazz influence.
In 1912 the "Images", related in a slight, with the "Iberia", the larger work, which in turn represents a triptych, with Spanish allusions. In 1913 sees the light ballet "Jeux", within which there are plots and strange harmonies in ways that you shall release from the musical Union. Around the same time, there are numerous stage works: from yellow-written about Gabriele D'Annunzio-text "Le martyre de St. Sebastien," at the ballet "La boite à joujoux" and "Khamma": they, however, are not completely orchestrated by Debussy, although in "Martyre" modal atmosphere rarely seen in other pieces. Later, the musician is dedicated to many piano pieces. The last volume of "Etudes" is from 1915, and plays piano, including textures and styles as varied as irregularly shaped exercises and songs influenced by the work of Igor Stravinsky. The "Trois poemes de Mallarmé" are the last group of music, while the "Sonata for flute, viola and harp" is a classical verlainiano. Debussy died of rectal cancer on 25 March of 1918 in Paris, during the first world war, even as the Germany army bombards the town.
Precisely because of the emergency situation in France, Debussy is not accorded the State funeral: the procession of his coffin develops between roads and destroyed by war. Buried in the Cimetière de Passy, the artist dies at the end of the Belle epoque: death couldn't be more symbolic. Considered both in France and in the rest of the world between the main transalpine composers, Claude Debussy was a star of musical Impressionism (along with Maurice Ravel): However, he always refused that definition to his works. From a stylistic point of view, Debussy's music is characterized by international influence (Mussorgsky, especially for anti-academism, and Chopin, for fantasy to pianoforte), and national, by Franck, Faure by Gounod in Massenet. Anti-Wagnerian like almost all his countrymen, you are actually very similar to the work of the German composer, mainly for the conception of the opening of the musical discourse: it in Wagner results in infinite melody connected to tonal harmony; in Debussy, instead, results in small pictures that renew themselves continually, and in any event independent of each other under an autonomous harmonic language from extra gimmicks such as the whole tone scale-tonal. In it the alternation of semitone and tone prevents the presence of tensiodistensionali relations.
In other words, the style of the French composer sways in a eclectic between romanticism and neoclassicism, as for example the use of Baroque forms such as "suite bergamasque". Neoclassicism in turn achieves a synthesis between modernism and classical aesthetics by virtue of an innovative and dynamic counterpoint with attention, not pompous music, laced, aiming at brevity aphoristically as symbolists and Impressionists. Not least, then, the pursuit of innovation-by Debussy-the exoticism, and a preference for tonal color on the melodic line, with bright sound and a very complex rhythmic patterns, the fluttuoso, in any case, seems to reinvent the way of approaching the piano. Among the most famous compositions for orchestra by Claude Debussy are, besides those already mentioned, the "Première rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre" and "Marche éscossaise sur un thème populaire". As regards the Chamber music, instead, are especially "Syrinx pour flute solo" and "Rhapsodie pour saxophone et piano".
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.