Debussy: The Resurrected Pan

I

SO MUCH has been said and written about Debussy that there would appear to be nothing to add that is not already known. There was a time, and it seems not so long ago, when this name aroused hot passions and violent controversy. Now this is in the past; the works of Debussy have been numbered among the classics and their worth indisputably acknowledged.

Study of his works naturally followed their acknowledgment. The importance of his achievements in the matter of form has been more or less thoroughly scrutinized. Those new riches that Debussy has brought into the art of music have been analyzed and classified, and that which only a short while ago was a matter of controversy has become an accepted truth which young musical aspirants acquire in the schoolroom. For this reason we are not going to speak here of the formal values of Debussy or of his professional musical importance, but rather of that side of his creative art which has up to now remained in the background — that is to say, of the inner, mystical meaning of his music to which critical literature has paid scarcely any attention.

This inner meaning, which we cannot term other than mystic, is after all of paramount importance in Debussy’s music. Failure to understand it means also failure to understand the purely formal — that is to say, the professionally technical — importance of all he did. Throwing light on his artistic ideology also brings into relief the technique of his composition and can make his music understandable even to those who have up to the present remained indifferent to it or who still oppose it with some inner resistance.

Let us first remember that Debussy is now also dear to us because his music has become for us a memory of the world in which it originated. If we recollect that the appearance of this music was in the full sense of the word a discovery of a new world, some kind of new promised land of which, before Debussy, we could only have a vague intimation and which he presented to us as an amazing reality, we are saddened by the thought that this world has ceased to exist and that we can no longer say we live in it. Whether the world in which we now live is better or worse is another matter, but there can be no question of the fact that it is not the same.

The riches of the world that was discovered by Debussy are enormous, but they are now squandered, exhausted. This is, of course, in line with the fate of our whole culture. We have to admit, however, that with the changed world not a new name has appeared in music equal in importance to that of Debussy — that is to say, not one which would have brought to music the sharpness and novelty of form with its equivalent in depth of inner contents. What was, then, this ideological rôle of Debussy and what was the mystic meaning of his creative art?

II

In broaching this subject let us draw a distant historical parallel. There is an analogy between what Raphael did in art in the period of the Italian Renaissance and what was done by Debussy in music in the twentieth century. From this point of view one might say that the period of Debussy is the period of the latest musical renaissance after the confusion and darkness of the last decades of the nineteenth century. There is, of course, a difference: the titanic creative forces which gave birth to the humanism of the Italian Renaissance found expression in Debussy’s music in the extreme of fragile refinement, and we now see his world as through the broken mirror of contemporary man. As a consequence this new world (as well as the whole new culture) proved to be so unstable and short-lived that it remained with us for barely a few decades, whereas Raphael’s humanism survived and nurtured humanity with its sap for centuries.

In what, then, can be found the parallel between Debussy and Raphael? It lies in the fact that, if it be allowed that Raphael brought heaven back to earth, then Debussy did something of a similar nature in music. Let us revert to the past. Pope Julius II undertakes archæological excavations and in so doing resurrects the ancient gods. The consequences are astounding. The official church of the time had become ossified, immersed in worldliness and triviality and turned into a stronghold of worldly power only. It had lost heaven and built its prosperity solely on the visible, — on force, on temporal power and authority, — declaring itself to be the supreme power of the world. Artists could find here no basis for either creative work or inspiration. The revival of the ancient world produced an unheard-of revolution in fundamental principles. Confronted with the mystery of antiquity, Raphael turned to the creation of new inhabitants of the heavens, his Madonnas, finding beautiful forms for their incarnation no longer in abstract scholastic canons, but in life itself, in living women, his contemporaries. The Sistine Madonna may be said to be a symbol of this new spirit. Standing in the clouds, she is opening a door into the heavens, into a new world, where the free inspiration of the artist, liberated from all chains, can live and breathe. Debussy likewise, in the twentieth century, longed for an ‘open door’ to give access to the winds from the spaciousness of the beyond, which, while sweeping away the stale atmosphere suffocating the music of his time, would clear for it a new path.

The first creative door ‘to the world beyond ‘ was for Debussy the deification and revival of nature and of its elements. Water, air, sky, and earth — these are the elements of which his music was created. After this, higher and now invisible entities were revealed to him. The earth harbors gnomes; the air, sylphs and elves which are in a way related to birds and butterflies. Water conceals nymphs and undines; fire, salamanders — that is to say, sylphs of a higher order. Debussy lives in this childlike fairy-tale world and is happy. Man, to him, was the crystal which reflected the whole of God’s world, the entire universe and all the wonder it contained. Debussy himself was this magic crystal in which was reflected Pan’s multicolored and multivoiced hymn of nature. Literally every one of his works contains voices from this world of Pan.

This is what he says himself: —

La musique est un total de forces eparses; on en a fait une chanson spéculative! J’aime mieux les quelques notes de la flute du berger égyptien, il collabore au paysage et entend des harmonies ignorées de vos traités. . . . Les musiciens n’ecoutent que la musique écrite par des mains adroites, jamais celle qui est inscrite dans la nature. Voir le jour se lever est plus utile que d’entendre la ‘Symphonie Pastorale.’ . . . N’écoutez les conseils de personne, sinon du vent qui passe et nous raconte l’histoire du monde.

[Music is a summing up of elemental forces; but musicians have made of it a purely theoretical song! I prefer the few, simple notes of an Egyptian shepherd’s flute, for he belongs to the landscape and detects harmonies unknown to your learned treatises. . . . Musicians listen only to music composed by skillful hands, and are deaf to nature’s own music. Seeing the day dawn is more profitable than hearing the ' Pastoral Symphony.’ . . . Hearken unto no man’s counsel, but only to the wind which sings of the world and all its wonders.]

III

It has been charged that Debussy’s music expresses nothing but an aimless play of sound tones. This is of course wrong, but it is the secret of his music that actually it not only ‘expresses nothing,’ but it simply does not exist for those who hear it, if their attitude toward it at the moment of listening is not one of active awareness. This is the reason its execution is so difficult. The mystic essence of this music lies in the fact that it becomes a reality only inasmuch as there is created within the performers and the audience that state of mind which called these sounds into existence.

The same can be said of the antireligiousness of Debussy. He was antireligious in the commonly accepted meaning of this concept. But Debussy’s atheism was anti-religious only in the sense of the formal church tenets of any one faith. Actually, in another sense, — in the love of nature and its enthusiastic worship of which we have just spoken, — his consciousness and emotions were deeply mystical. His religion was of course pure pantheism and expressed itself in the seeking of the invisible in the visible, and of the visible in the invisible.

But again, Debussy’s pantheism should not be regarded as pure pagan idolatry. If in his young years his pantheism did contain certain pagan features, in the years of his maturity there was opened up to him through pantheism a path to another spiritual life, and the closer he approached the end of his life the deeper did these spiritual principles become. To ascertain this it is sufficient to compare his entire creative course from ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ to ‘Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien.’

Debussy’s music has a twofold aspect: it is at the same time both a recollection of antiquity and its reflection in contemporary consciousness and emotional feeling — one might say, the consciousness of a new antiquity. Whether it is his chamber compositions, piano pieces, songs, or finally his big compositions for orchestra, it is always music representing a conjuration of nature, a sound penetration into its mysteries, and a call for the resurrection of Pan. Immersed in ‘the twilight world in which people live as in all,’ this music is a continuous hymn to the resurrected Pan and at the same time sings of the emancipation of life and its awakening from stupor. Debussy’s mysticism is reality in the nonexistent, and unreality in commonplace facts of life. The essence of the visible is not in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what our soul draws from our emotions in order to evidence it in the higher consciousness. The harmony of the world, therefore, is to be found in the soul of man and not in the world’s outward manifestations. Emotions in themselves disclose to man only the physical manifestations of the world and not that harmonious order from which these manifestations are evolved. Man must find the harmonious order within himself before being able to find it again in the external world.

And so, if the essence of the universe is disclosed in the soul of man, — which aspires to the highest conception of the world, — then the soul, if it impregnates itself with nature, thereby conceives the divine, for out of the wedlock of nature and the soul there is born God. He comes to life in a man’s soul at the moment of creative action. The essence of God is love, which is mysteriously concealed in the world and is diffused throughout all creation, throughout all that exists — animate and inanimate. The problem of the pantheist is to find God in all of nature and to liberate Him within himself. Thus, if man strives to find God, through this desire for God he has found Him already. God does not exist for the human intellect, for our intellect cannot grasp Him and easily denies Him. But nature does exist for our intellect as well as for our emotions. Nature is undeniable; therefore God is in nature, and only there can He be found. The only path open to man in his search for God is through his own creative work. In his creative work man liberates God, who reposes in everything and is diffused by love in every creation. A man who strives to find God turns first of all to his inner self, concentrates on his inner world, and then listens to himself. That is all he does; if he takes this path he needs to undertake no other action. This is the essence of pantheism disclosed to us by its ardent followers.

This is why Debussy listened to himself more than he manifested himself. He built his sound world almost without acting; he just listened and contemplated. Therefrom is derived his lack of passion — not indifference or lack of feeling, but lack of passion. He has a contemplative attitude towards the world, the realization that everything in the world is temporary, everything perishes, everything passes. Debussy knows that one must not be consumed by passions. This is the reason for the absence of tragedy in his music.

Of course, Debussy grieves and grieves often over all that is fragile and perishable in this world, because he has pity for everything, — otherwise he would not be an artist, — but he remains only on the border of tragedy. Debussy’s mysticism consists in the fact that he contemplated life and death with equal calmness of soul, and in that lies his great wisdom.