The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, and: Claude Debussy As I Knew Him and Other Writings by Arthur Hartmann (review)

The Cambridge Companions to Music, representing up-to-date scholarship on the composers they treat, are a valuable resource for their intended audience: the general, informed reader, and the spectrum of professional music students and practitioners. And the Companions are not mere Reader's Digests, since many of the studies they contain offer invaluable new insights, although inevitably some essays are more derivative. This is admirable work for which Cambridge University Press are to be saluted. Music of course has participated in the avalanche of the Information Age, whereby intensive special studies but also much dross have appeared. If one is to get a grasp on such a quantity of material, especially if one is a general reader or non-specialized musician, volumes such as these Companions are a great help, for which I as a teacher of undergraduates and lecturer to generalists am grateful. CUP are also to be commended for keeping the price reasonable.

Especially since the 1962 centenary of his death, Debussy has been favoured by a gradual acceleration of scholarship. It was Edward Lockspeiser's timeless two-volume Debussy: His Life and Mind (1962–5) that awakened the revival of interest in Debussy's life and in critical appraisal of his music, and I agree with Simon Trezise that the future promises still more intensive developments. Gone are the days of indifference to Debussy, witnessed earlier in the twentieth century, when the conclusion that he exuded a 'vague impressionism' often marked the earliest reception of his music. He had decried that interpretation by referring to the 'new realities' he sought, but too often the misunderstanding of his impressionism continued for half a century. However, we should perhaps be forgiving: the early critics struggled with a fact of Debussy's music that can challenge even the most insightful today. How can one analyse what is constantly reinventing itself and is empirical in its self-discovery, how can one find some narrative in a life and mind fraught with ambiguities, tantalizingly spotty in documentation, and marked by reversals of attitudes? For instance, Roy Howat in Debussy in Proportion (Cambridge, 1983, pp. 6–7) offers a compelling theory of Golden Section structure, yet he finds only a single, ambiguous sentence in a letter of Debussy's to his publisher Durand that refers to numerical symmetries, and he finds no emendations of sketches along these lines. As Trezise admits in relation to Strauss and Schoenberg, whose music 'we can disentangle rather more easily . . . the intellectual properties of Debussy's music are located on a different plane to these contemporaries of his, and it is a plane we are still prone to tackle with less confidence, if we are even able to tackle it at all' (p. 2). He acknowledges that it might be concluded that Debussy is the quintessential postmodernist and post-structuralist, the composer who most completely eschews a historical narrative while creating a supremely cogent yet sensual expression, one composition at a time. Trezise and the other essayists in the Cambridge Companion to Debussy view this dilemma as a stimulating springboard for discussing elements of the man and his idiom.

The collection begins with three essays on 'Man, Musician, and Culture'. In 'Debussy the Man', Robert Orledge sums up the current, revisionist assessment of Debussy's character while offering an overview of his life. However, one must read much more than this to view the kaleidoscope of Debussy's changeable character, which for Orledge is downright devious and immoral. He quotes and expounds almost fixatedly concerning Debussy's malaise and inconstancies in his baffling efforts to relate to women and the professional world. He cites...