[2], Debussy wrote "We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed in many respects the ideals to which the Impressionist … For three months, Debussy attended rehearsals practically every day. [129], Debussy opined that Chopin was "the greatest of them all, for through the piano he discovered everything";[130] he professed his "respectful gratitude" for Chopin's piano music. He began composing it around 1890, at the age of 28, but significantly revised it just before its 1905 publication. Saint-Saëns had been a member of the Institut since 1881: Debussy never became one. [109] Although Debussy said that anyone using the term (whether about painting or music) was an imbecile,[113] some Debussy scholars have taken a less absolutist line. [118] Lesure takes a similar view, endorsing Howat's conclusions while not taking a view on Debussy's conscious intentions. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. [51] On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly Debussy attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest with a revolver;[51][n 11] she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life. [64] The vocal score was published in early May, and the full orchestral score in 1904. Debussy began piano lessons there at the age of seven with an Italian violinist in … Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was one of the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is regarded as the founder of musical impressionism. [84] He also had a fierce enemy at this period in the form of Camille Saint-Saëns, who in a letter to Fauré condemned Debussy's En blanc et noir: "It's incredible, and the door of the Institut [de France] must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities." Taruskin writes that some have seen this as a reference to the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, both born Jewish. Claude Debussy was born into a poor family in France in 1862, but his obvious gift at the piano sent him to the Paris Conservatory at age 11. I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas! He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. 4.5 out of 5 stars 24. According to Pierre Louÿs, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone can do beyond Tristan'," although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, appearing at the turning of a bar". Reti concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality". [46] The engagement was broken off, and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including Ernest Chausson, hitherto one of his strongest supporters. – although he also conceded, "I feel free because I have been through the mill, and I don't write in the fugal style because I know it. A small number of works, including the early La Damoiselle élue and the late Le Martyre de saint Sébastien have important parts for chorus. In 1910 Gustav Mahler conducted the Nocturnes and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune in New York in successive months. Debussy was an influential composer of the late 19/ early 20th centuries, creating works of sheer beauty that obscured their technical innovation. [10], In 1870, to escape the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Debussy's pregnant mother took him and his sister Adèle to their paternal aunt's home in Cannes, where they remained until the following year. [99] The academic and journalist Stephen Walsh calls Pelléas et Mélisande (begun 1893, staged 1902) "a key work for the 20th century". [2] In 1912 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a new ballet score, Jeux. He responded positively to Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies,[2] and was briefly influenced by them,[37] but, unlike some other French composers of his generation, he concluded that there was no future in attempting to adopt and develop Wagner's style. [2] In the music of Palestrina, Debussy found what he called "a perfect whiteness", and he felt that although Palestrina's musical forms had a "strict manner", they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers. It achieved only a temporary respite, and occasioned him considerable frustration ("There are mornings when the effort of dressing seems like one of the twelve labours of Hercules"). [156] Boulez also discovered Debussy's music at a young age and said that it gave him his first sense of what modernity in music could mean. In 2018, to mark the centenary of the composer's death, Warner Classics, with contributions from other companies, issued a 33-CD set that is claimed to include all the music Debussy wrote. In the same year, Debussy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, from which he was to die nine years later. $18.99. "[110], Debussy strongly objected to the use of the word "Impressionism" for his (or anybody else's) music,[n 14] but it has continually been attached to him since the assessors at the Conservatoire first applied it, opprobriously, to his early work Printemps. His father was a salesman and kept a china shop. "[88] In 1988 the composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers wrote of Debussy: Because of, rather than in spite of, his preoccupation with chords in themselves, he deprived music of the sense of harmonic progression, broke down three centuries' dominance of harmonic tonality, and showed how the melodic conceptions of tonality typical of primitive folk-music and of medieval music might be relevant to the twentieth century"[89]. [87] In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy's early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Fauré;[94] in a 2007 book about the piano works, Margery Halford observes that Two Arabesques (1888–1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of Debussy's later style" but are not harmonically innovative. His father, Manuel-Achille Debussy, owned a china shop there; his mother, Victorine Manoury Debussy, was a seamstress. [93] The reviews were sharply divided. The 1904 and 1913 sets have been transferred to compact disc. Marmontel said of him "A charming child, a truly artistic temperament; much can be expected of him".