Debussy's Letters to Inghelbrecht: The Story of a Musical Friendship (review)

Le martyre de Saint Sébastien brought Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht into Debussy's orbit. Inghelbrecht was appointed chorus master for the premiere in 1911 and he subsequently prepared an orchestral version of the work in close collaboration with Debussy, which Inghelbrecht conducted on 14 and 17 June 1912 (p. 4). This was the year that witnessed the beginning of a modest but nevertheless interesting correspondence between the two men that continued until 1917. The surviving material is published complete in this volume with annotations by Margaret Cobb, a short biography of Inghelbrecht, and translations by Richard Miller facing the original French. On Debussy's side there are twenty-seven letters and four postcards; on Inghelbrecht's just one letter; a few supplementary letters to and from others. The Debussy-Inghelbrecht letters belonged to Inghelbrecht's widow, who gave them to Cobb late in her life, in recognition no doubt of her tireless efforts on behalf of both composer and conductor. Hence the present publication.

Volumes devoted to just one of Debussy's many correspondents such as this one now exist as a subset of François Lesure, Denis Herlin, and Georges Liébert's magisterial and magnificent 2,330-page volume of letters, Correspondance, 1872–1918, (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). It will be years before the implications of this sudden abundance of material, much of it previously unpublished, are fully understood and interpreted. The Inghelbrecht volume is indeed a subset of it, for all the letters and postcards appear in the 2005 edition, albeit with fewer annotations and, naturally, no English translation. Correspondance makes us appreciate that Debussy's letters were a continuous vent for the composer, especially in his last years. He was sorely afflicted in these declining years with creative, health, and material worries, so many of his correspondents sampled only intermittent moments in a complex inner life, plus, inevitably, the more prosaic odds and ends, such as plans for meetings, invitations to tea (very important in the Debussy household), how Debussy is getting on in his chosen summer-holiday residence, and so on. The continuum is much more easily appreciated in the larger volume where in the period of just a few days there may be several letters, all or some partaking of shared concerns and offering continuations or adumbrations of others. The letters filed under the name Inghelbrecht give only the most fragmented sense of Debussy's state of mind and sometimes barely hint at the nature of their relationship.

That a close and eventually informal friendship did exist between Debussy and Inghelbrecht is clear, but Debussy rarely goes beyond his quizzical, somewhat detached and ironic stance in his letters to him. The most forthright of them is arguably that of 27 July 1916, written from Debussy's home in Paris, 80, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. His daughter 'Chouchou' has whooping cough, there is noise from the railway that ran close to his street, and he concludes: "If I don't go mad, it is because a compassionate god is watching over me.... But, I have had enough, enough, enough!" (p. 83) Taken by itself, with only a pair of annotations by Cobb, one relating to Debussy's desire not to be disturbed and the other to the train tracks, Debussy still gives little away here, and Cobb provides no other context for the concluding outburst. If we look at more of Debussy's correspondence clustered around this date, we begin to appreciate the nightmare his life had become; Inghelbrecht gains only the briefest glimpse of it. In several letters he refers to his rectal cancer: to Durand on 3 July 1916 he describes his rectum as 'un peu trop autoritaire' (Correspondance, p. 2006). A few weeks prior to this he gives his most graphic description of the pain he is enduring to...