Claude Debussy 🎼🎶🇫🇷

Debussy

Marking the 157th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s, born in 1862

Debussy’s portrait as a young man

In 1884 a young Claude Debussy won the prestigious composition prize Prix de Rome, which entailed a residence programme at Villa Medici in Rome, where this portrait was painted and is currently exhibited. The stifling environment at the French Academy of Rome was strengthening his resolution to follow his own ways for artistic expression: “I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!”.

Claude Debussy is revered as a musical genius and one of the most influential composers of the late nineteenth century. His works have a timeless quality thanks to his incorporation of exotic and sensual orchestrations with classical structures. Some of Debussy’s most popular compositions include Pégase, Enigma, Danse des cygnes, Clair de lune and La Mer. Child prodigy, Debussy studied music at the age of five and became one of the greatest French composers. His distinguished style earned him fame in France and abroad.

Debussy was a musical innovator and, just like an impressionist painter, his music and works express his modulated feelings. She tried to express inner emotions in her music through the sensitivity of an interpreter, which many musicians have attempted to achieve since Debussy’s time. Known for com coming melodies of distinctive beauty, Debussy is best known for his piano works only as La Mer and Enigma. In addition to solo piano works, he has also composed songs with words that tell stories or express feelings. Some of his most famous songs include Chanson de Miène et de Mairée (Song of the maiden and her castle) and La Mer (The sea), which depicts the goddess of the sea holding her horse under the sea while contemplating her future love interest.

Debussy’s music was initially criticised by his contemporaries and the public when he first introduced his compositions to France at the age of 27. However, he persevered with his creative efforts despite criticism from critics who thought he was overestimating elegance in his works. When he was forty-one, Debussy realised how popular some of his compositions had become among French listeners. This is how Debussy began his career as a composer-impresario: he began promoting contemporary French music by giving concerts with the works of fellow composers such as Gabriel Fauré and Paul Dukas. Many famous musicians have performed Debussy’s pieces including pianists Alfred Rodrigues, Nicolas Rousset, Jacques Delphine Richard; violinists Alfred Rosier; cellists Pierre Renaudel; singers Jean Louis Bertrand; opera sopranos Sylvie Jourdel; mezzosopranos Leontyne Price.

His music is associated in my mind with the paintings of his contemporaries in Paris and the freshness of their brushstrokes. His innovation in music is similar to what the impressionists brought to the world of visual art but he was not comfortable with the description of his music as impressionist. Indeed, as the impressionist painters he found in nature a major source of inspiration for his music and likewise he felt no particular attraction to academic rules about artistic expression.

One of my favourite compositions by Debussy is this piano piece, Claire de lune – Moonlight, the third movement of his Suite bergamasque, he composed around 1890, around the age of 28.