The Piano Works of Claude Debussy

238 Pages·2014·2.99 MB·English

by  E. Robert Schmitz

The Piano Works of
CLAUDE
DEBUSSY
By E. Robert Schmitz
Foreword by Virgil Thomson
Dover Publication, Inc., New York
Copyright © 1950 by Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This Dover edition, first published in 1966, is an unabridged and corrected republication of the work
originally published by Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., in 1950.
This edition is published by special arrangement with Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., an affiliate of
Meredith Publishing Company.
International Standard Book Number
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-17275-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-20423
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation 21567917 2014
www.doverpublications.com

To those of my family, assistants, students, and friends who shared with me the
exalting task of fighting for ultimate sincerity in the interpretation of this
alchemy of sounds … this book is dedicated
Cathedral of Bourges (12th Century)
Examples of arches: Notre Dame de Paris
Author’s Note
This book is not intended to subtract from those which have been written about
Claude A. Debussy. Nor will it attempt to dispose of the private life and inner
thoughts of the man whom I profoundly admired. This book is solely concerned
with a part of the musical heritage he left us—that part written for the piano.
As time goes on, Debussy’s recommendations, his criticisms during the many
hours spent in his studio accompanying singers or reading piano works—these
recommendations seem to crystallize with an evergrowing and firm command as
does his music, the witness of his intent.
It is true that literary commentaries on music are dangerous procedures to the
extent that they detract from the very essence of that music which lies outside of
conceptual notions; the intrinsic value of music is in its own perfection, which
long survives both the primum mobile of its composition and its specifics of
technique. Yet, before a music can be liberated to assume its status of a pure art
form, a correct appraisal of its source and ways and means must have been
made, understood, and then discarded as having served its purpose in orientating
the listener and performer to the quality of beauty, of perfection, which this
music will thereafter spell for them.
The whole being of the listener must participate in the reception of the beauty
contained in music, but it is often necessary to stimulate the imagination by
commentaries to obtain a state of receptivity. Little by little the commentary will
pale, only the musical substance “per se” remaining in the memory.
The insistence of this book upon intellectual commentary on the works it
considers is motivated by the repeated experience of imperfect or erroneous
conceptions and perceptions of the piano works of Debussy, by both performers
and listeners.
The causes of these imperfections are multiple. Wrong, preconceived notions
of this music, built on hazy, not to say lazy, commentaries, have done untold
harm. Early criticisms, baffled by the original and daring innovations contained
in this music, either glibly pass it off with few knowing terms of little service to
the student, or belittle it in a reactionary mood of distrust, or outright envy.
Sometimes the insufficient learning, or imperfect discriminative reaction,
may establish a wrong perception which scientific and true education may help
to correct. Erroneous perception also may consist in attributing to one object the
reaction appropriate to a somewhat different object; or different objects may
stimulate the receptors in ways so nearly alike that different reactions can never
be built for them.
It can also happen that failure to integrate the complete content of a work
may result in substituting illusion for actual sensory content.
So the disturbing factors range from emotional states, biased and biasing
ideas, lack of education, or lack of discrimination. It seems then, in the face of
these elements, that commentary about Debussy, if conscientious and based on
many years of performance and study of his piano works, may not be amiss.
Literary connotations, pictures reproducing views of objects that might have
been, or actually were, sensorial stimuli to composition, can serve an end, most
particularly when coupled by melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal,
structural analysis.
It is my hope that these will rectify certain notions and complement the
intrinsic musical audition and perception of those who, through limited
experience of the world of travel or of peaceful contact with nature, through
biased and narrow musical study, or through insufficient classical schooling,
have been deprived of the multiple imaginative resources to recreate with truth
in their interpretations the colorful and genial piano literature of Debussy.
Foreword
VIRGIL THOMSON
Historically viewed, Debussy is the summit toward which, during the two
centuries since Rameau’s death, French music has risen and from which, at least
for the present, it seems to decline. Internationally viewed, as Fred Boldbeck
lately pointed out, he is to the musicians of our century everywhere what
Beethoven was to those of the nineteenth, our blinding light, our sun, our central
luminary.
So high a content of expression, of communicable meaning, in structures, at
once vast, monumental, and bold, is not to be found in any other music than that
of these two composers. Neither is so masterful a workmanship in all the musical
elements—rhythm, melody, harmony, and their offspring, orchestration—in
music that, for all its technical sophistication, speaks so directly to the heart. For
musicians and for laymen, both are in their epoch peerless. And for culture they
are classical, which is to say, basic both to pedagogy and to the repertory of
public execution. Without them music is Europe without Napoleon, Hamlet
without the Prince.
Just as Beethoven, not Bach nor Mozart, really summed up the German
temper—all emphasis and ordered planning, jollity and private meditation—so
Debussy, not Berlioz nor Bizet, encompassed most fully the French, with its
dramatic contrasts of reason and sensuality, of irony and tenderness, stiffness
and grace. From France, the home of liberty, too, came the firm freedom of
Debussy’s style and structure. Among all our musical masters, I should say,
Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet
neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional
techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy’s operation was
more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal,