The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (review)

Nearly a century after Claude Debussy's death, his music remains much loved and frequently performed, but nonetheless often perplexing to study. Committed to intensely personal forms of innovation while cultivating complicated roots in tradition, Debussy wrote music that still baffles as well as seduces. This is, for editor Simon Tresize and the other contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, "a satisfying mystery"; the fact that Debussy so successfully defended his compositions against "the intellectual rationalization of music" continues to serve as a tantalizing challenge to the academic community (2). Although the fourteen essays in this collection take up the challenge in a wide variety of ways, they are united in celebration of the Debussyan paradox that, as Tresize puts it, a composer "who pleased himself, who eschewed an intellectual style of composition in favor of instinct and pleasure, should have necessitated such a feast of intellectual activity" (2).

The volume opens with a three-chapter section entitled "Man, musician and culture." In "Debussy the Man," Robert Orledge reviews the major ingredients of the "prevailing melancholy" (10) that made Debussy's character as hard to decipher as his compositions: his troubled family background, his self-destructive persistence in spending beyond his means, his abrasive and manipulative attitude toward friends, his damaging reputation for affairs with married women. Barbara L. Kelly then turns to "Debussy's Parisian affiliations," mapping the evolution of Debussy's career onto the geography of fin-de-siècle Paris's musical scene. After sketching Debussy's early years at the working-class margin of Parisian cultural life, Kelly traces his path through the Conservatoire to Italy, where he spent two years as the 1884 winner of the Prix de Rome, and back to Paris, where he wove his way – often uneasily – through both private artistic circles such as Mallarmé's Mardis and official institutions such as the Opéra-Comique (which premiered Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902). Focusing next on the critical voice that emerged in the course of this trajectory, Déirdre Donnellon's essay on "Debussy as musician and critic" usefully gathers the main topics that preoccupied Debussy between 1901, when his first pieces of music criticism appeared in the Revue blanche, and 1918, when he died prematurely from cancer. Although she emphasizes that Debussy's writing on music was "hard-hitting, uncompromising, and, on occasion, deliberately inflammatory" (43), Donnellen also shows the complexity and nuance of his opinions, especially concerning Wagner, the symphonic tradition upheld by Debussy's French contemporaries, and – as World War I intensified debates about patriotism – the revitalization of French music.

In the Companion's second section, "Musical Explorations," six essays set out to chart the ways in which distinctive moments bring some of Debussy's most enduring concerns into relief. Donald Grayson's "Debussy on Stage" examines the pull that the theater exerted on Debussy's imagination, suggesting how the uncompromising intensity of this "lifelong fascination" (83) led him to abandon more theater-oriented projects (operatic settings of Banville's Diane au bois, Flaubert's Salammbô, Mendès's Rodrigue et Chimène, Poe's La Chute de la Maison Usher, and many other works of literature) than he realized (the "ode symphonique" Zuleima and most spectacularly the opera Pelléas et Mélisande). With a wonderful discussion of "The Prosaic Debussy," Roger Nichols sheds light on the composer's "prose patch" (85), the anomalous interval from 1892 to 1898 during which Debussy, despite his prevailing taste for strict verse, set only free-verse and prose texts to music. In a chapter on "Debussy and Expression," Nigel Simeone follows "clues" (101) that connect expression marks in Debussy's scores with passages in his correspondence and other writings, attempting thus to interpret the composer's "search for a precise musical evocation of an imprecise image" (103) and hence his ties to impressionism. In an effort to characterize the particular "erotic tinge" that simultaneously situates and isolates...