Debussy, the Man I Knew

by GEORGE COPELAND

1

IT HAS been said — and is, I fear, something of an aphorism — that two careers may run in a parallel direction; then suddenly, without premonition or intent, may swerve to meet each other, though the moment of intersection be but brief.

This was, in fact, the manner of my meeting with Claude Debussy a few years prior to World War I, when this composer’s genius for the creation of new images, new styles, and new techniques was at flood tide, and when he himself was enjoying the unwilling honor of being the most talked-of man in the musical world of his time. He was by way of being a “genius,” a mere “noise-maker”; an “ Impressionist,”a “Symbolist,”a “Modernist"; a “libertine” and a “recluse” —all at one and the same time.

Not unlike the speck of glass from the evil mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story, this accretion of unfruitful criticism had penetrated even into the fastness of Boston, Massachusetts, where I had then attained recognition as pianist. It had finally built up in what would now be termed my subconscious an implacable resistance to precisely such a meeting as did finally take place —a meeting which contributed immeasurably both to my personal experience and to my musical maturity.

One morning in the winter of 1905, I had just come down to breakfast when the doorbell rang and my manservant brought in with my mail a flurry of powdered snow and a roll of music addressed in an unfamiliar, feminine hand and bearing a French postmark. As there seemed to be no name or accompanying note, I laid the sheets aside and gave myself up to the enjoyment of various letters and the pungent aroma of steaming Spanish coffee.

It was not until later that I really looked at the sheets of music. At first my mood was simply one of idle curiosity as I explored a few bars on the piano, but with every moment my excitement grew more intense. As a man will sometimes come upon an unknown place and feel instinctively that he has been there before, so I became conscious of a strange awareness. These totally new forms, requiring obviously new techniques and new concepts, appeared as something I had known long ago in a dream — something I had long awaited and which had awaited me with inevitable rapprochement. I spent the rest of the day playing over and over these two pieces of music by a composer whose works were totally unknown to me; and I wrote to J. Durand in Paris for additional compositions of Claude Debussy. Curiously enough, I have never been able to discover who did me the favor of sending the original manuscripts.

In the days that followed, my whole thought and imagination centered on this music which had created for me a complete new world of sound. The following spring, in a series of concerts in Chickering Hall in Boston, I introduced this hitherto unknown composer to America. It remains a tribute to the good sense and artistic appreciation of Bostonians that his music was a complete and instantaneous success.

Six years passed by. By this time, I had entirely identified myself with this new music; yet I had experienced no wish to make contact with the man whose genius had produced it. In 1911 I went to Europe to give a series of concerts in Rome, in Milan, in Florence, and in Vienna.

Spring was merging into summer, and days were growing sultry, when I reached Paris. I made no effort to get in touch with my friends, thinking that they had fled Paris for a more temperate climate. So it was with amazement that I heard my name spoken and, turning, came face to face with an old friend of my mother’s, Señora d’Alvarez, whom I certainly expected to be in her villa in the Andalusian hills.

“But, Nina! Whatever are you doing in Paris?” I exclaimed.

“And you, George? I have been hearing splendid things of your concert tour. Of course, you are spending much time with M. Debussy,” my friend stated.

“But no,” I replied impatiently. “I have never met M. Debussy. I do not wish to.” I added my reasons.

“But this is frightful!” Nina exclaimed in distressed unbelief. “You must meet him! I know him personally, and can assure you that none of these things you have heard are true. I will call him tonight and arrange for a meeting tomorrow morning — but absolutely! It is incredible that you, who have introduced his enchanting music in your country, should be here in Paris and not know him. It is too absurd!”

“But, Nina,” I argued, “I do not wish to meet M. Debussy. Suppose our personalities were to clash. Suppose I did not like him! From what one hears, he must be something of an aesthete, and you know I do not like the type. I might even find him completely unsympathetic — then I could never play his music again. No, it is better that we do not meet! Besides, I leave for Le Havre at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, so it is in any case quite impossible.” We argued back and forth. My friend continued to be insistent, and I to be adamant.

That evening, as I was dressing to go out for dinner, my telephone rang, and Nina’s voice informed me that she had rung up M. Debussy, and that I had an appointment to go to his house in the Avenue du Bois at eleven o’clock the following morning. “I will call for you, George, and take you there myself!” With as good grace as I could summon, I capitulated.

2

I WAS still feeling somewhat resentful of the situation into which my friend had plunged me, when, punctually at eleven, we were shown into M. Debussy’s salon. The room itself constituted my first surprise. It was very long, very formal, and very well kept, whereas I had expected to find myself in an entirely Bohemian ménage. A moment later the door opened and I received a second shock.

As I have said before, I had entertained a preconceived notion of my host as being thin, nervous, effete, with the unhealthy look of the habitué of Paris night spots — and, most certainly, untidy and careless in matters of dress; in short, a typical denizen of Montmartre. To my amazement, I found myself rising to face a tall, dark, heavily built man, impeccably dressed, who gave the impression of relaxed, almost feline strength, and who had the most penetrating black eyes I have ever encountered — like two pieces of shiny black jet.

Señora d’Alvarez made the introductions: “This, M. Debussy, is M. George Copeland, the pianist, who has introduced your beautiful music to America.”

“Vaiment!” was the laconic reply, and with a brief glance in my direction M. Debussy crossed the long length of the room and seated himself on a stiff green sofa at the far end. Apparently he was as undesirous of meeting me as I had been of meeting him; and although he must have been aware of the fact through J. Durand, his publisher, he appeared completely indifferent as to whether his music was played in America or not.

As conversation at that distance was impossible, I suggested to Señora d’Alvarez that perhaps we should leave.

“Nonsense!” she retorted. “You must play for him.”

“But he hasn’t asked me to play,” I replied angrily. “Perhaps he doesn’t even wish to hear me.”

“Of course he does! Go and ask him,” Nina replied in an impatient whisper.

So I rose and, feeling as awkward as any schoolboy, crossed to where he was sitting bolt upright on the sofa. “Would you like me to play for you, M. Debussy?” I asked cautiously.

The composer eyed me calmly. “Mais oui,” he replied. I waited, but there was no further comment.

“Shall I play you some Spanish music?” I asked, as this was one of the things I specialized in.

“Spanish music!” he exclaimed in surprise. “Mais non! Why should you play me Spanish music? It does not interest me at all.” Then, lowering his voice, as if thinking aloud, he continued: “No, the only music that interests me is Bach’s and my own. Après tout, Bach has said all that there is to say in music — the rest of us only say it in different forms!”

The piano, at the far end of the room, was draped with a silk scarf held in place by a heavy cloisonné vase. I asked permission to move the vase, so that I might open the piano cover.

“Absolument non!” he replied with obvious annoyance. “Do not touch it! I never permit that anyone should open my piano. As it is, everyone plays my music too loud.”

Sensing the futility of argument, I seated myself and played through the shorter piano music — Reflets dans I’Ean, La Cathédrale Engloutie, Suite Bergamasque, L’Ile Joyeuse, Pagodes, Hommage à Rameau, Poissons d’Or, Voiles, the Dance of Puck.

M. Debussy had risen shortly after I began playing, and had seated himself close to the piano. When I came to the closing bars of Reflets dans l’Eau, he got up from his chair in apparent excitement and, pointing a long finger, exclaimed: “Why did you play the last two bars as you did?”

“I don’t know—” I was puzzled. “Perhaps because that is the way I feel them.”

“It’s funny,” he said reflectively, “that’s not the way I feel them.” But when I said, “Then I will interpret them as you intended,” his reply was a definite “No, no! Go on playing them just as you do.” He made no further comment until I had finished and had risen from the piano. Then, with an audible sigh, he said simply, “I never pay compliments. I can only say that I have never dreamed that I would hear my music played like that in my lifetime.” In that brief moment, our relationship had undergone a sharp metamorphosis.

Señora d’Alvarez and I left almost immediately, but as I took my leave M. Debussy asked me to come again at eleven the following morning. In a daze I consented, and on reaching my hotel I immediately called the steamship line and canceled my passage.

I remained in Paris, in close daily association with Claude Debussy, for the next four months. Then I returned to America, and never saw him again. The First World War was soon to intervene. M. Debussy was deeply disturbed and saddened by these events, and died on March 25, 1918, after a long and tortured illness.

Looking in retrospect over those months in Paris, I am impressed by the fact that, outwardly quiet and uneventful, possessing even a certain formality of pattern, the days were actually fraught with an intense inner excitement. Our completely divergent personalities seemed able to strike a spark, like two pieces of polished steel.

Every morning I would arrive at the same hour, and we would spend the day together in almost elemental companionship, reading, or playing music — sometimes not exchanging a single word throughout an entire morning. If, in his reading, Debussy happened upon something provocative, or something which he thought would interest me, he would rise from his chair and point to it in silence. It was his belief that conversation was unnecessary unless there was something essential that one wanted to say. I did not miss the conventional chatter.

One of the basic factors in Claude Debussy’s genius was, I think, his ability to eliminate the obvious, the unnecessary, and the trivial, and in this way to conserve much vitality. He was in no wise a misanthrope, for he was deeply attached to his friends, but he was not at all interested in the nature of man. He believed that only a few arrive at any sort of maturity, and he avoided the fool and the commonplace. He achieved in his music (with only a few exceptions) an almost complete elimination of personal equations, regarding himself (the musician) as a species of sounding board held up to nature. To this end, he had to keep himself free from interference; and he indubitably heard sounds that other people have never heard.

We spent long afternoons walking in the Bois, in Fontainebleau, or making little excursions into the suburbs. It was of one of these last autumn afternoons that he wrote, under his pen name of “M. Croche”: “From the tranquil angelus, enjoining the fields to slumber, emanated a gentle, persuasive influence, lulling one’s senses to complete repose. The sun was setting solitary, and not a single peasant thought of placing himself in a photographic attitude in the foreground. Men and beasts were returning peacefully homeward, having accomplished their unassuming tasks which possess a special dignity, since they solicit neither approbation nor disapproval. . . . Perhaps, I never loved music so well as at this time. . . .” Claude Debussy had, in addition to his musical genius, an excellent and thorough critical ability, and a decidedly tart humor.

Debussy’s study was an extremely simple room, containing one or two good pictures and those jade animals and pieces of Chinese pottery that were, apparently, his one personal extravagance, and about the acquisition of which his biographers have told many tales, real or invented. The room had a Pleyel upright piano, at which he worked on manuscripts which he was composing, as well as on those which required further polishing. He was a slow and extremely meticulous composer, working over each phrase again and again, and seldom completely satisfying himself with the result. Pélleas et Mélisande, alone, occupied ten of his most productive years.

I spoke to him of my desire to transcribe some of his orchestral things for the piano — music which I felt to be essentially pianistic. He was at first skeptical, but finally he agreed, and was in complete accord with the result. He was particularly delighted with my piano version of L’Aprèsmidi d’un Faune, agreeing with me that in the orchestral rendering, which called for different instruments, the continuity of the procession of episodes was disturbed. This has always seemed to me the loveliest, the most remote and essentially Debussyan, of all his music, possessing, as it does, a terrible antiquity, translating into sound a voluptuous sense that is in no wise physical.

3

IN ORDER to come to an understanding of Claude Debussy’s genius, it is necessary to touch upon, however briefly, the influence which became “the destiny which shaped his end”: namely, the cult of Symbolism, which had created a second Renaissance in France and, to a certain extent, in England and America.

An outcrop of the Parnassians, the Symbolist creed formulated an effectual unification of the arts, which were felt to fertilize and supplement each other. In America, James Whistler, following the example of the French painters, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, and others, took music for the background of his paintings. Debussy, in turn, used the verse of Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Louÿs, Baudelaire, Banville, and Villon as the inspiration for his many songs and piano and orchestral pieces. He found in the American, Edgar Allan Poe, in Shakespeare and in Maeterlinck, the background for his longer compositions; and in Rossetti, the English Pre-Raphaelite, that of La Demoiselle Élue.

Writers of prose as well as of poetry regarded the vowels as having the sound of individual instruments, and they developed therefrom a form of conscious literary orchestration — a sort of “colored hearing.” Mallarmé declared that “perfumes, colors and sounds correspond to each other,”and said that he never attended a concert without perceiving “in the obscure sublimity of the music, the outline of one of my poems.”The outstanding characteristic of the Symbolist movement lay in the fact that it evoked, rather than described; reflected, rather than stated.

It is not the purpose of this article to consider in detail the various influences that contributed to the development of Claude Debussy’s genius; nor to catalogue his music; nor even to define the differences between the Impressionist and Symbolist movements. It is enough to state that his genius was emphatically and unquestionably the product of the latter, and that it arose primarily from the need to re-establish a music that was essentially French in character, and which was to be “in direct spiritual conflict with Teutonic vehemence, dogmatism, and flat-toned persistent elaboration.”Landormy declared that, prior to Debussy, music had become (because of the Germanic influence) an art “sans élévation, sans poésie, et sans nuances.”

Throughout these months of constant companionship and collaboration, Claude Debussy would, not infrequently, inject into some current discussion his reaction to, or estimation of, other composers. Among his contemporaries, he was most fond of d’Indy, Chausson, and Ravel, although he thought the last of these too lush in his orchestrations. He admired César Franck greatly, describing him affectionately as “a man without guile, and full of trustful candor.” Whatever Franck “borrowed from Life,” said Debussy, “he restored to Art with modesty verging on self-effacement.”

Debussy spoke of Scarlatti as “an inexcusably forgotten composer,” whose Passion of St. John he described as “a little chef-d’œuvre of primitive refinement and beauty, in which the style of the choral music is seemingly of pale gold, like those lovely backgrounds to the profiles of the Virgins in the frescoes of his period.”

On the other hand, he ridiculed Grieg, whose music he described as “a pink bon-bon stuffed with snow”; and of Saint-Saëns he exclaimed: “I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that his name is Saint-Saëns!”

Debussy liked Mozart, and he believed that Beethoven had terrifically profound things to say, but that he did not know how to say them, because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness.

He came to hate Wagner as much as he had first admired him, describing his music as “strange, beautiful, seductive, and impure” — remarking of a performance of Das Rheingold, “ It took two hours, and one hesitated between a desire to go away and the desire to go to sleep!” Debussy himself wished to write an opera on the theme of Tristan and Isolde, which would be in exact style variance with the Wagnerian version. How much of this he completed, we do not as yet know.

Perhaps the composer whom he most admired, and upon whom, if at all, he most consciously patterned his music, was Rameau, whose genius, compounded of delicacy, charm, and restraint, he regarded as being in the true French tradition. It is probable that Rameau opened for him, if only a crack, the door which led to that other-dimensional music of which Claude Debussy became the high priest, and which he discovered and explored so extensively.

4

IF ONE were called upon to describe sunlight, one could only do so by elaborating on its effects or by placing it in direct juxtaposition with darkness; and so one must pause before attempting to define this new music of Claude Debussy in all its tonal attributes, modal developments, and techniques.

It is not enough to say that this music was in direct contradiction to the formalism and incessant restatement of the Germanic period, of which the current Wagnerian cult became, to Debussy, a sort of caricature. It went far beyond this, and became an artistic path-breaking on the threshold of a new world, opening up fresh vistas of sound experimentation and of sensuous hearing.

Musically, Debussy felt himself to be a kind of auditory “sensitive.” He not only heard sounds that no other ear was able to register, but he found a way of expressing things that are not customarily said. He had an almost fanatical conviction that a musical score does not begin with the composer, but that it emerges out of space, through centuries of time, passes before him, and goes on, fading into the distance (as it came) with no sense of finality.

In this way, Debussy discovered many new sounds — sounds to represent distance and great height, as in the “looking down" in Soirée dans Grenade when one hears fragments of sound in the near, middle, and far distance, suggesting the Hatañera; sound that expresses a remote and terrible antiquity, as in L’Après-midi d’un Faune; and sounds representing the luminosity of light, the transparence of water, the stateliness of cloud motion, and darkness, like night. Strangest of all, he invented a sound to express silence — which is, in itself, complete absence of sound.

His genius seemed to lie in extracting the essence of things. Although Debussy never visited Spain, his Iberia is more Spanish than any Spanish music that has ever been written by her countrymen. Not essentially what is termed a “nature lover,” he was still able to reduce to a kind of luminous distillation the aspects of nature (moonlight, the sea, the clouds, the sun, the forest) as they affected himself in his interior life — an artistic achievement, indeed, for one who so desperately shunned sentimentality, romanticism, and the obvious!

5

IT BECAME apparent that this new epoch of sound must call into play entirely new techniques of performance. It has been said that Debussy defied all the laws of harmony; and it is certain that he outraged all precedent of accepted classical form. The principal divergence lay, however, in totally new concepts of motive and projection, as encompassed in Symbolist ideals, requiring the establishment of tonal unity, with a complete lack of emphasis on melody or theme. There must be no stressing of chords forming the harmonic framework, and no building or detachment from measure to measure. The objective is, rather, a blending of patterns, producing a fluidity and a transparency of tone which result from “clusters of chords,” arising from the basic fact that Symbolist music never asserts, nor describes a specific image, but strives only to evoke and reflect.

Debussy himself believed that to arrive at this end “the harmonies must seem to dissolve, even in the moment of emergence.” He achieved a crystal-clear, but floating, tone through complete disregard of the piano as a percussion instrument, and by a method of contacting the keys gradually with the cushions of the fingers, in an oblique, “caressing” motion, “like a cat rubbing itself against the hand that caresses it.”

The sustained sound and the transparency of tone and color timbre are induced by the almost continuous use of overlapping pedals, raising the foot a fraction from the damper pedal, and depressing it again immediately to preserve the continuity. In other words, the pedals are played in levels in order to get air under the tone; for, if tone is there, it must rest on something. Legato is played almost invariably in this way, and the arpeggios are “light and luminous,” instead of defined and aggressive as in the German manner. In his choral music, where Debussy makes use of human voices, he distributes them in exactly the same manner that he would employ the various musical instruments of an orchestra.

When I asked him why so few people were able to play his music, Debussy replied, after some reflection: “I think it is because they try to impose themselves upon the music. It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you — to be a vessel through which it passes.” The effect of this music upon the listener is comparable to that experienced when watching banked clouds form and re-form in the changing light of a hot afternoon. It evokes a procession of images, insinuated rather than seen — the shimmering reflection of a dream, only glimpsed, but never to be forgotten.

Before closing this account of my strange and unheralded meeting with Claude Debussy, man and artist, whose friendship has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, there remains still another aspect of Debussy’s music upon which I wish to touch, as it is, to me, a matter of deepest concern.

Few people, other than established musicians, are aware that there is still a considerable backlog of manuscripts, both completed and in embryo, which is as yet unpublished. Some are probably mere themes or outlines, but there are others to which he unquestionably devoted many years of creative thought.

We know that he was deeply impressed by Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Devil in the Belfry,” as translated by the indefatigable Baudelaire; and that he began operas based on both of these works. The former, especially, engaged his thoughts and energies during the years preceding his last illness. It is known that he began musical scores for two of Shakespeare’s plays, and that he had completed sections of a French version of the Tristan and Isolde theme. In addition to these longer works, there are believed to be innumerable songs and shorter piano pieces which have never been published.

Claude Debussy was survived for some years by his second wife, Mme. Bardac Debussy. It is probable that at the time of her death these manuscripts became scattered among the children and relatives of a prior marriage.

It is my sincere prayer, as it is the hope of the entire musical world, that the time will come when it may be possible to collect and edit these hitherto unpublished works, both as a valuable contribution to the musical heritage of our times and as a tribute to an artist whose work has had so abundant and lasting an influence on our Western culture.