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Claude Debussy
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Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was the first composer to radically break with the Romantic tradition, giving rise to the explorations of sound and form that dominated the twentieth century. In sharp contrast to the Wagnerian attention to leitmotif and development, Debussy's music deals with light, color and mood. Startling dissonances alternate with Eastern-influenced pentatonic harmonies and rich chordal textures that later influenced jazz. His non-linear structures move mysteriously from one sound-image to the next, leaving the listener on his own to find an overall unity or pattern. Scholars have found in his pieces the Golden Ratio, a common pattern in nature which gives Debussy's music its natural, organic quality. Critics dubbed Debussy's style Impressionism after the mysterious, sensuous landscapes of Monet and Cezanne.
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Borne to a family of meagre standings, Claude Debussy was borne on 22 August, 1862, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. Debussy showed talents as a pianist by the age of nine. His gift was encouraged by Mme. Mauté de Fleurville, who was associated withe Chopin. In 1873, he entered the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied the piano and composition. Further, he eventually won, in 1884, the Grand Prix de Rome withe his cantata entitled L'Enfant prodigue.
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Claude Debussy did not have an easy childhood. His father was a travelling salesman and his mother worked as a seamstress. He learned the piano when he was young and went to the Paris Conservatoire. For a time it seemed that he would become a concert pianist, but he did not do well enough in his examination. After winning an important prize, the Prix de Rome, he went to Rome for two years but he did not enjoy it. He visited Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889 to hear Wagner’s operas but he did not like them. He preferred sounds like that of the Javanese gamelan which he heard in Paris at the World Exhibition.
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At the age of eleven, Claude Debussy began his formal study at the famous Paris Conservatory of Music. For ten years, he studies music and the composition of music. Within a few years, he shocked his professors with "bizarre" harmonies that defied the rules. At the age of twenty-two, Debussy was regarded as a radical, but his cantata, The Prodigal Son won the Prix de Rome, a three-year study in Rome .
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Claude Debussy has exercised widespread influence over later generations of composers, both in his native France and elsewhere. He was trained at the Paris Conservatoire, and decided there on a career as a composer rather than as a pianist, his original intention. His highly characteristic musical language, thoroughly French in inspiration, extended the contemporary limits of harmony and form, with a remarkably delicate command of nuance, whether in piano-writing or in the handling of a relatively large orchestra.
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Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye in 1862, the eldest of five children. His father owned a china shop and his mother was a seamstress. Debussy began piano lessons when he was seven years old with an elderly Italian named Cerutti; his lessons were paid for by his aunt. In 1871, the shy awkward boy gained the attention of Mme. de Fleurville, the mother-in-law of the poet Paul Verlaine, who had been a pupil of Chopin. His talents soon became evident, and, at age eleven, Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire. During Debussy's twelve years at the Paris Conservatoire, beginning in 1872, he studied composition with Ernest Guiraud, harmony with Emile Durand, piano with Antoine-Francois Marmontel, organ with César Franck, and solfeggio with Albert Lavignac, as well as other significant figures of the era.
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Claude Debussy