Review by Keith Bruce

Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh

Faber & Faber £20.00

THE centenary of the death of Claude Debussy, which falls on March 25, has proved not simply an occasion for playing his music, although there has been plenty of that, but also one for a comprehensive re-assessing of his legacy. What there is nigh-unanimous agreement on is that it is profound and considerable. His countryman Pierre Boulez believed that the musical history of the 20th century began with him (in the last decade of the 19th century to be scrupulously accurate) rather than with Stravinsky or Schoenberg or any of the other contenders.

There is rather more limited consensus on how to properly describe the ground-breaking music he wrote. Broadcaster Tom Service devoted an entertaining half an hour of Radio 3 airtime recently to comprehensively trashing the attaching of the label “impressionist” to Debussy, and very early in Stephen Walsh’s compact but dense new biography the author refers to “the tormented question” of whether or not the impressionist cap fits. Debussy himself disliked it, and Walsh comes down fairly squarely on the same side of the fence as Service – or at least believes that “impressionist” is a singularly unhelpful description – which only makes his choice of subtitle, A Painter in Sound, unnecessarily misleading.

My own recent conclusion, for what it is worth, is that “impressionist”, while it has very precise connotations in the public mind when used of visual art, is of little use at all when applied to music. It is often trotted out almost interchangeably with “pictorial” or even “programmatic” and might as easily be applied to some of the music written three centuries before Debussy as it might be of a film score of very recent vintage.

Walsh is the author of a fine two-volume biography of Stravinsky and an acclaimed book on Mussorgsky, so the time of Debussy’s activity is his hinterland. He echoes Boulez in his recognition of the composer’s crucial rejection of the conservative practices of music education in France in the late 1800s and his creation of a new template for composition that consciously ignored the established “rules” of harmony and counterpoint. Debussy was undoubtedly a rebel, but he did not have the character to be recognised as a revolutionary at the time. He mixed with a Bohemian set, but remained very bourgeois. When his private life courted disapproval he ran away to Jersey and Eastbourne, which are hardly the destinations of the adventurous traveller.

And his private life was certainly eventful, not to say utterly selfish. He abandoned partners with impunity and firearms featured in more than one of his acrimonious splits, with his first wife Lilly carrying the bullet that she intended to end her life to her eventual grave. Walsh tells the stories of Debussy’s love life with clarity but is not minded to be judgemental of his subject. Quite the contrary, it is the women who are somewhat airily dismissed, in Lilly’s case for being less than his intellectual equal, while others are judged for their promiscuity in a way he does not apply to the composer. Plus ca change, as they probably rarely say in France.

In fact Walsh is very ready to excuse Debussy almost anything, including borrowing money on false pretences, making professional promises he had no intention of keeping, and betraying friendships, on the basis that everything had to take second place to the music. In this writer’s analysis, the creative artist is almost obliged to behave badly in submission to his muse. His last partner Emma, mother of his beloved daughter Chouchou, balked at the treatment that regularly separated the family, but Walsh casts her as a selfish harpie moaning while Debussy is trying to put bread on the table.

It is at least arguable that he rarely tried so very hard. Walsh is consistently revealing on the music, even his bar-by-bar analysis of some of it – especially the piano works that include Debussy’s boldest strides into the unknown – can be heavy going at times. But crucially he is also very authoritative on the music that was never written. Far from being “lost”, as has often been suggested of other opera projects and music for freestyle dancers Maud Allan and Ida Rubinstein, Walsh is convinced that little of it ever existed. In particular he shows that Debussy’s long obsession with versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry yielded little or no actual music.

And yet a man who died of cancer at the early age of 55 still produced – in Prelude de l’apres-midi d’un faun, La Mer, Clair de Lune, and The Golliwog’s Cake Walk – some of the best-loved music in the canon, and in the opera Pelleas et Melisande a game-changing masterpiece. His early songs deserve to be heard more, and his later piano works continue to fascinate the best performers on the instrument.

Sometimes fate dealt with his output cruelly. His dance work Jeux opened the season at the new Theatre des Champs-Elysees in May 1913 and was completely overshadowed by the “riot” that greeted Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring a fortnight later. What is beyond debate a century on is that his work (alongside that of Ravel and Stravinsky) was reinventing musical composition, and that Debussy led the way. It probably has not helped his posthumous reputation that he was often quite simply not a very nice man.