and church music. His unpublished letters to his sister Emma give information about
Liszt as a teacher, as do the lecture notes of a talk he gave to the Manchester branch of
the Incorporated Society of Musicians. William Dayas did not survive into the recording
era.
DEBUSSY
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was a French composer and pianist and, together with
Maurice Ravel, is considered one of the most prominent figures in the field of
impressionist music. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French
composers but was also a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth
century.
Debussy’s music defines the transition from late romantic music to twentieth century
modernist music. In French literary circles the style of this period was known as
symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an
active cultural participant.
Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language, largely
independent of Wagner’s style, coloured in part from the dreamy, sometimes morbid,
romanticism of the symbolist movement. His ‘Suite Bergamasque’ (1890) recalled
rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and contained his most popular piece ‘Clair
de lune’. His String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring,
harmonic exploration. In the quartet he used the Phrygian mode and whole-tone scales
which create a sense of floating, ethereal harmony. Debussy was beginning to use a
single continuous theme and to break away from the ternary forms which had been a
mainstay of classical music since Haydn.
Debussy wrote a number of pieces for piano. His set entitled ‘Pour le Piano’ (1901) used
rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music. His
evocative ‘Estampes’ for piano (1903) gave impressions of exotic locations. Debussy
had come into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris ‘Exposition
Universelle’, and ‘Pagodes’, one of the ‘Estampes’, is the directly inspired result, aiming
for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by Javanese music.
Debussy’s first volume of ‘Images pour Piano’ (1904-1905) combined harmonic
innovation with poetic suggestion. ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, for example, is a musical
description of rippling water while ‘Hommage à Rameau’ is slow and yearningly
nostalgic.
Debussy wrote his famous ‘Children’s Corner Suite’ (1909) for his daughter Claude-
Emma, whom he nicknamed ‘Chou-chou’. In the opening piece, ‘Doctor Gradus ad
Parnassum’, Debussy satirises Clementi’s piano studies, while in ‘Minstrels’ he hints at
early jazz idioms, and in the Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ he pokes pokes fun at Wagner by
mimicking the opening bars of Wagner’s Prelude to ‘Tristan and Isolde’.