The great enigma
Of all the musical modernists, Debussy is the most elusive. “He’s someone you can never nail down,” says the French music expert Roger Nichols, “and in 50 years I’ve still not cracked it.” Nichols, who will join the pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet for an all-day exploration of the composer’s piano music in March, places Debussy at a key point in the late 19th century. “He comes at the moment when the romantic movement is showing signs of wear and tear and something new is likely to happen — but what? And I think he is the great what.” The flautist Emmanuel Pahud adds: “Of all composers, Debussy is the one who is hardest to define with words, because his music is so much between notes — between instruments, between lines.”
The I Word
Don’t say it — or if you do, be prepared to back it up. Debussy’s gauzy, improvisatory-sounding soundscapes — think his symphonic poem La Mer, or the dappled effects in his intricate piano works — and his rise to prominence at a similar time to painters such as Monet and Pissarro have encouraged audiences and critics to think of him as an impressionist. “It’s a false track,” insists Nichols, “Debussy had no truck with that form at all. Once, when talking about Turner, he said it was a term used by imbeciles to describe the painter’s art. The idea that ‘impressionism’ is the beginning and the end of him is absolutely rubbish.”
The pianist Stephen Hough is more conciliatory. “If you look at a Monet painting and listen to Debussy at the same time, it’s not forcing things to see the connection in the aesthetic. When the harmony has no function within the structure, it’s just there for its own beauty — that’s something you can get from impressionist painters too; when there’s a wash that you think is gorgeous but doesn’t have a particular relationship to the subject of the painting.”
Follow the dancing faun
Debussy’s quiet revolution began with Prélude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, representing, as the composer put it “the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon” and later set to a ballet performed and choreographed by Nijinsky and presented by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Pierre Boulez said that “modern music was awakened” by the piece — staking a lot on just ten minutes of music. For Nichols, it’s the very freedom of the work, its unpredictability, that gives it its power. “The very beginning gives it away. The solo flute plays something quite extraordinary, a tritone between a C-sharp and a G, which isn’t supposed to exist in ‘polite music’, and then there’s a bar of silence, as though the music itself is astonished about what it’s just done.” The conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who will celebrate Debussy with a concert series at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, describes L’apres-midi as a “little nothing, which says so much. It’s a silent revolution”. For Pahud the piece inspires nightmares, even though the opening solo part amounts to only about 20 seconds unaccompanied. “Every time I have to play it with an orchestra I’m terrified. The conductor is no help. You’re naked, left on your own. It’s a very lonely moment in the life of a flute player.”
Scandal on stage
Where Debussy merely hinted at what the faun might be getting up to in his lazy afternoon, Diaghilev and Nijinsky’s on-stage concoction went farther, the dancer finishing his solo with a gesture for the faun in which he appeared to be pleasuring himself. A classic Parisian scandale erupted, pre-empting by a year the notorious “riot” that followed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “It’s fair to say they understood the work,” says Nichols of the ballet’s creators. “It’s not just a hot afternoon for the faun — there are things going on in the shrubbery, but it wasn’t explicit enough to offend anyone until Diaghilev came along.” Debussy, however, who rarely collaborated amicably, found the choreography repulsive.
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Anyone for tennis?
Yet this wouldn’t be Debussy’s last flirtation with dance. Two weeks before The Rite of Spring, Debussy worked again with Nijinsky on what must be the world’s only tennis ballet, Jeux (“Games”), an equally radical work depicting a man and two women not just, well, playing tennis, but indulging in other, more suggestive sorts of games. According to Millicent Hodson, who has successfully resuscitated the ballet in Nijinsky’s choreography, the watershed work didn’t just break sexual taboos — the piece’s climax also anticipated the carnage of the First World War. “When the music breaks into 2/4 time from its variations on the waltz, the trio march as though to their doom. ” It is, she contends, “the first anti-war ballet”.
Truth in beauty
What Debussy hated in Nijinsky’s gawky dancers he also tried to leave out of his music: arguably his entire oeuvre represents a restless search for the beautiful. “He wrote about standing and watching the clouds for hours, and while doing it he said his hands just by themselves came into a prayer position. It shows an absolute need for him to find the beauty in both life and music,” says Grazinyte-Tyla. The result is an alluring paradox: an utterly fastidious composer trying to express the inexpressible. “He was asked by one critic why he hadn’t resolved a chord. His answer was, ‘Why should I resolve it? It’s beautiful like this’; It was a nonsense for him to follow rules that didn’t have anything to do with what he found beautiful.”
The Marmite opera
For every devotee of Debussy’s only completed opera, the enigmatic, symbolist tragedy Pelléas et Mélisande (premiered in 1902) there’s someone who loathes it, a fact acknowledged by a renowned interpreter of Mélisande, the soprano Barbara Hannigan. “It upset a lot of people at the time, and it still does — there are many people who really don’t like this opera.” She reels off a list of skills that you need to pull it off, as a singer-actor — “modesty, mystery, secrecy, holding back” — none traditional in this most show-offy of art-forms. The fulcrum for the opera’s under-statement is Mélisande herself, who never reveals who or what she is, despite the men in her life asking her continuously. “She basically has three lines,” says Hannigan. “ ‘Yes’, ‘No’, and ‘I don’t know’. But the meaning of these, the way she answers, and the timing in which she responds, is extraordinary.” Pelléas is Pahud’s desert-island Debussy work. “When Pelléas says ‘je t’aime’ to Melisande, there’s something close to silence in the orchestra — it’s like the noise ashes make just before they glow and die. This intensity, like something being consumed from the inside, is how Debussy makes so much room for his hero to speak about love.”
Clair de Lune — it’s OK
Also known as the third movement of the Suite Bergamasque (but not by many), this is the piece that every piano pupil will bash through and has featured in movies as contrasting as Oceans Eleven, Atonement and one of the instalments of Twilight, as well as any number of sappy arrangements that are piped into hotel lobbies. “The sort of thing young ladies can play without upsetting anybody or themselves,” is how Nichols describes it, but Hough disagrees. “I didn’t learn it when I was young, but only later, at the insistence of my partner, who told me it would make a beautiful encore. And now I’m beginning a whole evening with it. People love to hear it.”
The best of the Debussy year
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● Stephen Hough’s Debussy: Piano Music is out now on Hyperion. He plays Debussy, Schumann and Beethoven at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (April 5) and at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool (June 9)
● One hundred years to the day since the death of Debussy, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet teams up with Roger Nichols in a day-long exploration of the composer’s piano music at Milton Court, London EC2 (March 25). Bavouzet’s Debussy: Complete Piano Works is available as a box-set on Chandos
● Emmanuel Pahud is one of the performers on a new 33-CD box set, Claude Debussy: The Complete Works released by Warner Classics, including six world premiere recordings. Out now
● Steven Osborne plays Series 2 of Images at the Wigmore Hall, London W1 (March 3)
● Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla leads the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the Debussy Festival at various venues in Birmingham (cbso.co.uk, March 16-18 and 23-25). She will also conduct a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at Symphony Hall (June 23)
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● François-Xavier Roth conducts four anniversary concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London EC2 (January 21, January 25, March 25, March 28)
● Stefan Herheim directs Pelléas et Mélisande at the Glyndebourne Festival, conducted by Robin Ticciati (opens June 30)