Remembering Debussy in Interwar France: Authority, Musicology, and Legacy

This article examines the role Claude Debussy’s supporters and biographers played in shaping the legacy of France’s chef-d’école during the interwar period. The biographies, articles, and commemorative efforts of critics and musicologists such as Émile Vuillermoz, Henry Prunières, and Léon Vallas reveal the extent to which Debussy became a contested symbol of French achievement both at home and abroad. Henry Prunières and Léon Vallas had much in common: both were trained and published musicologists who founded and directed music journals; they organized concert series and were active commentators of contemporary music. Yet they disagreed violently about the value of newly published early works of Debussy and battled over issues of musical influence and ‘borrowings’ in a bitter exchange in France’s foremost music journal, La Revue musicale, after the publication of Vallas’s populist biography, Claude Debussy et son temps (1932). The question of authority is central to debates concerning how Debussy’s life should be constructed and his music understood for posterity. Drawing on documents from Vallas’s and Prunières’s archives, the article shows that the interwar period in France was crucial for laying the foundation of Debussy biography and establishing an understanding of the composer’s significance as a prized treasure of the patrimoine, which persists today, 150 years after his birth. It concludes by arguing that the questions, debates, and methods that preoccupied early Debussy scholars and journalists concerning the value of great musical figures and the place of music in society still pertain today, both within the discipline of musicology and beyond.