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Debussy: Richard Wagner
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In 1888 and 1889, Debussy visited Bayreuth and learned about the operas of Wagner, which were highly influential in his compositional style. When he returned to Paris in 1889, he heard different types of music and started to blend light-hearted styles with the seriousness heard in Wagner in his own compositions.
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This Debussy was hardly, as Lederer dubs him, "a revolutionary." He certainly wasn't quiet. In his critical comments in Le Revue Blanche, Debussy called Wagner's music "a beautiful sunset that has been mistaken for a sunrise." And he wrote that the music of Frederick Delius was
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The Bard Music Festival will explore the part played by Debussy in the search for a distinctly French voice in music in the last quarter of the 19th century. Since 1861, Wagner had exerted a decisive influence in French art and culture. In the age of Berlioz, Beethoven’s oeuvre had done the same. Yet beginning with the generation of César Franck, the evolution of a French aesthetic was under way. Debussy’s role and place in the very factional and divisive French musical scene that included Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Dukas, Charpentier, Widor, Chabrier, Chausson, Magnard, Schmitt, d’Indy, and Massenet will be presented.
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The Preludes Book II (1912-1913) represent Debussy at the height of his powers. Triads, tritones, arpeggios, plainchant, dissonances, trills, soft ostinatos, Moorish sonorities and pentatonic scales and modal harmonies are called upon for their singular or combined effects, ranging from Indian temples to the Paris and London music-halls. The care Lerner lavishes on Feuilles mortes and Les fees sont d'esquises danseuses (after Arthur Rackham's illustration) point up his respect for Debussy's often three-part harmony, the sensitivity of the composer's demand for wisps or diminished bits of color, as in Canope. Allusions to Gottschalk, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Ravel, Stravinsky, and to the composer himself abound, all and each concentrated to a bar or measure of recognition.
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Richard Wagner