Debussy's Late Style (review)

Debussy's Late Style amply demonstrates the enriched hearing that can emerge from an approach to Debussy's works of 1914-18 in the light of the nationalistic debates of war-torn France. Wheeldon draws deftly on a wide range of cultural-historical and literary-critical sources, graciously incorporating the contributions of many French music specialists along the way. Her flexible analyses supplement attention to pitch syntax with a fine ear for topical expression, timbre, and intertextual echoes. As a whole, her book shows an admirable determination to meld historical rigour and analytical imagination in order to derive maximum insight from the contextual hints that have come down to us with this music.

The same determination brings some familiar perils: the seductive clarity of Wheeldon's cultural-historical formulations occasionally threatens to impede, rather than enhance, nuanced appreciation of Debussy's music. Her opening gambit gives a premonitory hint of the admixture to follow. Glancing to Edward Said's definition of 'two types of artistic lateness' and questioning the adequacy of either in this case, Wheeldon lets 'lateness' fade to a mere artefact of history: 'Debussy's artistic responses to the First World War result in works that can be drawn together, not by a monolithic musical aesthetic or language, but by the shared pressures and concerns of their unique context' (p. 3). In other words, there is no 'late style' in Debussy's music, just a 'late context' in which he wrote. This strangely hollow invocation of 'style' prefigures a problem that becomes more vivid as Wheeldon's focus shifts, in turn, from blatantly 'occasional' wartime works in chapter 2 to the 'more abstract issues of heritage and legacy' (p. 55) she sees in the Études in chapter 3, to the even more abstract—or more obliquely worldly—last chamber sonatas in chapter 4. (A fifth chapter turns to reception.) As the book progresses, the meticulously researched context-based account suffers more and more from the absence of any equally rich appreciation of Debussy's 'style', as the congeries of influences and idiosyncratic inflections that render each work a distinctive product of an individual compositional imagination.

The earliest chapters best demonstrate Wheeldon's critical acuity. Her concern with the relationship between public and private musical utterance leads her, for example, to a startlingly nuanced discussion of the Berceuse héroïque Debussy wrote for a 1915 collection in honour of occupied Belgium, whose 'clarion calls' and quotations of the Belgian anthem might seem like the crudest propaganda. But after noting a narrative 'dismantling' at the reprise, Wheeldon argues that in the ending, 'by blending together two (perhaps three) of his musical topics, Debussy takes a further step in denuding them of their extra-musical associations. As a result, the final summation of ideas becomes difficult to interpret within the wartime program' (p. 26). Suggesting that these complexities go some way towards explaining why Debussy could comment, after the orchestral premiere, that this rather slight work 'was not understood' (p. 30), Wheeldon turns similar interpretative energies to more substantial material in the two-piano triptych En blanc et noir (1915), whose central piece traces an even more blatant narrative. While it is harder to find new subtleties here, Wheeldon just about convinces in her discernment of 'a more muted, ambivalent tone' (p. 53) than we might expect. Still, the best aspect of this discussion is the evidence it gives of a judicious sense of hermeneutic limits: 'the ambiguity of meaning in the outer movements should also signal the possibility that an overarching occasion may simply not exist' (p. 46).

More problematic susceptibilities, however, inflect the same chapter's discussion of two other 'occasional' pieces in the light of Kenneth E. Silver's distinction between 'rootless, dreamy, cosmopolitan, exotic' pre-war art and the 'victorious, masterful, hierarchical, rooted, measured' art created during the war (p. 9) (Esprit de Corps:The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton, 1989), p. 29). While this...