In considering the value of Debussy’s message,i.e., the content
of his music, the animus and predilection of the hearer have
to be taken into account. For his music is so intensely subjec-
tive and intimate that you like it or not, as the case may be.
Many persons, however, become very fond of it, when they have
accustomed themselves to its peculiar idiom. The charge that
there is in Debussy no melody of a purely musical nature, as
some critics have asserted,[298] seems to the writer too sweep-
ing and not supported by the inner evidence. It may be granted
that Debussy’s melodic line is very fluid and elastic, like Wag-
ner’s “continuous melody,” not definitely sectionalized by bal-
anced phrases or set cadences. But it surely has its own right to
existence—music being pre-eminently the art of freedom—and
let us remember that Nature herself has melting outlines, shad-
owy vistas and subtle rhythms. Debussy, in fact, is the poet
of the “indefinite” and the “suggestive” and his music has had
a great influence in freeing expression from scholastic bonds.
Even from the standpoint of the popular conception of “tune” it
is difficult to see what objection can be made to the following
melodies:
[Music:L’isle joyeuse]
[Music:Poissons d’or]
[Music:Cortège]
[Footnote 298: See the 2d volume ofGreat Composersby D.G.
Mason and also the essay on Debussy inContemporary Com-
posersby the same author.]
It cannot be denied that such an individual style as Debussy’s
is liable to manneristic treatment, though whether he should
be called “the prince of mannerists"[299] is decidedly open to
debate. Some critics feel that he has over-used the whole-tone
scale and it must be confessed, he has a rather affected fondness
for a formula of block-like chords,e.g.
[Music:Danse sacrée]
[Footnote 299: According to Ernest Newman in a well-known
article in the Musical Times (London).]
But these, after all, are but “spots on the sun.” To sum up our
conclusions: the following merits in Debussy’s music, it seems
to me, cannot be gainsaid. He has widened incalculably the