The first book of ‘Preludes’ (1910), twelve in all, proved to be Debussy’s most successful
work for piano. They are full of rich, daring and unusual harmonies and include ‘La Fille
aux Cheveux de Lin’ (‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’) and ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’
(‘The Submerged Cathedral’). Debussy wanted listeners, initially at least, to respond
intuitively to these preludes so he placed the titles at the end of each one rather than at the
beginning.
Debussy composed and conducted orchestral works, and was an occasional music critic
to supplement his fees for conducting and for giving piano lessons. He could be caustic
and witty. He was enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky, he worshiped
Bach, Mozart and Chopin, and he found Liszt and Beethoven to be geniuses who
sometimes lacked ‘taste’. Schubert and Mendelssohn fared worse; the latter he described
as a ‘facile and elegant notary’. He admired the piano works of Alkan.
In his late works, Debussy’s harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit
dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier works, he no longer
hides discords in lush harmonies, and his forms are far more irregular and fragmented.
Those of his chords which seemingly had no resolution were described by Debussy as
‘floating chords’ and these were used to set the tone and mood in many of his later works.
The whole tone scale also dominates much of Debussy’s late music.
Debussy’s two last volumes of piano works, the ‘Etudes’ (1915) provide varieties of style
and texture as pianistic exercises and include pieces that develop irregular form to an
extreme. Others are influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky as is Debussy’s suite ‘En
Blanc et Noir’ for two piano.
The second set of ‘Preludes’ for piano (1913) shows Debussy at his most avant-garde,
sometimes using dissonant harmonies to evoke moods and images, especially in his
mysterious ‘Canope’. The title refers to a burial urn which stood on Debussy’s working
desk and evoked a distant past.
Rudolph Réti pointed out these feature of Debussy’s music which established a new
concept of tonality in European music:
! glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from the occasional
absence of tonality;! frequent use of parallel chords which are in essence not harmonies at all, but
rather chordal melodies or enriched unisons;! bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;! use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales; and! unprepared modulations without any harmonic bridge.