The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (review)

As a publishing concept, the Cambridge Companion series of music handbooks presents an editorial challenge. Seeking on the one hand to relate basic biographical and historical information about the subject under study (topics thus far include composers, instruments, genres, and institutions) and to offer a review of the literature, it provides on the other hand a forum for new research and new critical perspectives —including those that might, in the dialectical nature of scholarship, stand at odds with established opinion. Caught, in short, between conflicting urges to summarize and innovate, the series runs the risk of falling between two stools and disappointing generalists and specialists alike.

Happily, the new Cambridge Companion to Debussy, edited by Simon Trezise, avoids this pitfall. Debussy scholars appear to be in basic agreement about the nature of the composer's achievement, with the result that even new research tends to reinforce received judgments. Such is certainly the case here, where the most novel items constitute refinements of, rather than challenges to, existing viewpoints. Not that contributors offer no difference of opinion. Debussy's unusual historical position on the cusp of nineteenth-century traditionalism and twentieth-century modernism effectively ensures that any consensus is itself somewhat elastic; accordingly, we find considerable variation over such questions as artistic influence (impressionism, symbolism, or art nouveau?) and stylistic orientation (traditionalist or modernist?). Such a range of opinion, testifying to Debussy's protean nature and appeal, lends the book a synoptic quality and makes it a useful introduction to the composer.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 ("Man, Musician and Culture") offers an introduction to the composer and his times, and begins with an admirable biographical overview, "Debussy the Man," by Robert Orledge. Traversing well-known primary and secondary sources, Orledge emphasizes the dark side of Debussy's personality and makes a persuasive case for the "sinister undercurrents that lurk beneath [the music's] surface, and which contribute so much to its mystery and profundity" (p. 23). Barbara Kelly's essay, "Debussy's Parisian Affiliations," sets up an opposition between the "radical" symbolist poets and the "conservative" musical establishment (the Conservatoire, the Société Nationale), and proposes that Debussy's involvement with both embodied a tension never completely resolved, perhaps, until his championship of early French music later in his career. The suggestion meshes well with Deirdre Donnellon's "Debussy as Musician and Critic," a survey of the prose writings and published interviews, not least because both investigations demonstrate, to a degree rarely discussed, the importance of French nationalism to Debussy's aesthetic and to his critical reception.

Part 2 ("Musical Explorations") constitutes a loose group of essays on different aspects of Debussy's music and career. David Grayson's "Debussy on Stage" discusses the composer's many dramatic projects, finished and unfinished, and usefully describes forgotten works like Zuleima and Rodrigue et Chimène in detail. Better-known works like L'enfant prodigue are engagingly placed in context—the politics surrounding the Prix de Rome are particularly interesting —and even that old war horse Pelléas et Mélisande is given a fresh reading. Roger Nichols's essay, "The Prosaic Debussy," considers the nine settings of nonmetrical texts that the composer made in the 1890s, possibly as a tune-up for Pelléas, and concludes that such verse inspired him to write freer vocal lines but also, as a counterbalancing measure, to provide less rhythmically adventurous piano parts. These roles are typically reversed in metrical settings, though Nichols demonstrates how the songs after 1904 retain much of the rhythmic flexibility gained during the decade of experimentation. In "Debussy and Expression," Nigel Simeone suggests that the traditional association of Debussy with impressionist "vagueness" has too often ignored the precision of his expressive markings, a level of notational detail that itself bears comparison with the impressionist painters' exacting technique. Simeone traces this parallel to a...