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Debussy: Music
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Gabriel Faure and Debussy were good friends and they influenced each other. Faure was ... one of the compositional professors of Ravel. Much of Debussy's music contains unresolved chords. This is also shown in Eric Satie's music. They were influenced by one another as well. As a student, Debussy initially saw Wagner as the future of music from his musical dramas.
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Like most of Debussy's works, La Mer stirred up great controversy at its onset. Debussy's was revolutionary in that he took a radical approach to harmony, melody, rhythm, and form. His music had a lyricality, a fluidity which was to transfigure 20th century music. In La Mer, Debussy began the so-called "impressionist" use of harmonies, which according to critic Arnold Schoenberg, "served the colouristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures." In La Mer, chord modulations, and progressions become more fluid, more subtle than ever before. Debussy's extended tonality enabled rapid shifting and movement, while retaining precise musical and technical basis. Rhythm patterns were irregular, giving way to almost free-form measures, losing the feeling of a strict barline.
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Debussy created floating harmonies and a fluidity of rhythm and color that were new to Western music. His orchestral compositions include Prelude a L'Apres-midi d'un faune, the orchestral Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images. Piano works include Pour le Piano, Suite Bergamasque, and numerous delightful preludes. He ... wrote the opera Pelleas et Melisande, the ballet Jeux, several chamber works, songs, choral music, and cantatas. Debussy died of cancer at age fifty-six.
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In reaction to Wagner and his highly elaborate late-romantic operas, Debussy wrote the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which would be his only finished opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. Pelléas, with its rule of understatement and deceptively simple declamation... brought an entirely new tone to opera but an unrepeatable one. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.
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Debussy completed his Prelude in the summer of 1894. He had originally planned to write a "Prelude, Interlude, et Paraphrase Finale pour L'Après-midi dun Faune" but abandoned the second and third parts while they were still fragmentary sketches. The music was based on a poem by Mallarmé published in 1876 but it must be said that it avoids a direct depiction of the poem. Mallarmé was enthusiastic about the score and is quoted by Debussy as having said, "This music prolongs the emotion of my poem and fixes the scene much more vividly than colour could have done". The opening mood is set by a solo flute answered by a languid horn motif. This initial characterisation conjures up an impression of a gently simmering heat-haze. The overall structure is loose, playing on light, colour and an ever subtly changing palette of textures to achieve its magical effect - the antique cymbals at the end proving a particularly felicitous touch.
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While Debussy and Ravel are often linked together under the Impressionistic banner, Debussy was much more the pioneer, the original. Ravel's lush orchestral textures and opulent vocal lines have links to such 19th century Russian masters as Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. Debussy's delicate harmonies, wafts of instrumental and vocal color, and austere theatricality are the mark of a creative master! In no small manner, Debussy reinvented French music!
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