Review by Choice Review
One hundred years after Claude Debussy's death, Walsh (emer., Cardiff Univ., UK) presents a fresh look at the life and music of the early French modernist composer, whose music challenged the compositional norms of his time. Debussy: A Painter in Sound offers much more than what one might expect of a typical biography of this timeless composer. Walsh juxtaposes the complicated, often tortuous private life of Debussy with his grand importance in French culture and society, interspersing throughout analyses of musical works. The author offers valuable new perspectives on the composer's life, and at the same time provides historical context for Debussy's works and their harmonic language, artistic ethos, and creative interplay of music and poetry. Photographs of Debussy and his contemporaries provide a fascinating visual glimpse into his life. Students, performers, scholars, and music aficionados will welcome this new resource on Debussy. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Jacqueline Jean Leary-Warsaw, The Catholic University of America
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
In 1890, the 28-year-old Claude Debussy felt forced to write the archetypal starving-artist letter to a friend. "Forgive me, but could you lend me 20 francs until the end of the month." he pleaded. "I'm very ashamed at writing to you, but I'm desperately hungry," Yhgis was teh same Debussy who within the next dozen years would produce some of the most radically original, influential and popular of all European art music. Hungry he may well have been (according to another friend, the composer could afford neither to eat nor to clothe himself), but "desperate" is a word almost impossible to associate with this most fastidious and discriminating of composers. Perhaps, as Stephen Walsh muses in his new biographical study, "Debussy: A Painter in Sound," he was merely resorting to his skills as "an adept borrower." Money and the practical necessities of life would remain a lifelong torment for him, an artist forever locked into his own internal world of sounds and images. His was a creative voice so subtle and so thankfully free of histrionics and emotional excess that he is for us by now the quintessential French composer. Yet in gauging the seismic shifts in the evolution of Western classical music, convention tends to consign him to the much too confining role of "Impressionist." His achievement, especially when one considers the mediocrity into which French music had declined in the years before his birth, was sui generis miraculous. And it is all the more impressive for having been wrought in an era when the imposing figure of Richard Wagner cast an almost suffocating spell not only upon music, but on almost all aspects of European culture. Born in 1862, Debussy came of age around the time of the 1882 premiere of "Parsifal." A superb pianist - "He had a soft, deep touch which evoked full, rich, many-shaded sonorities," according to one friend - Debussy played all the major Wagner operas at the keyboard, and in his 20 s he made a modest income accompanying lectures about "The Ring" for amateur listeners. Eventually he grew to become the anti-Wagner. Where the German master's expressive world is that of titanic wills in collision and of greed, redemption and the agon of scorching human passions, the Frenchman's voice is that of the natural world, of water and wind, of light and shadow, and of the most subtle gradations of sonority and color. "Debussy's music never bullies," Walsh says. Whereas Wagner's default position is loud - not just acoustically loud, but emotionally and psychologically loud - Debussy's is soft. Perhaps because of this natural intimacy of voice and its aversion to theatricality and exhibitionism (think Richard Strauss's "Elektra" or Gustav Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand"), Debussy's importance is easy to overlook. This book reminds us just how astonishing the radicalism of this composer's creations really is. Walsh, whose two-volume biography of Stravinsky brought both human scale and deep musical understanding to that composer's long and complex life, treats Debussy both as a creature of his own time and as a harbinger of 20th-century modernism. His France was the France of la Belle Époque; of the Eiffel Tower, the Folies Bergere and the Dreyfus Affair; of Impressionist painting, Mallarmé's poetry and the novels of Proust. His life story is bracketed on the one end by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and on the other by the Great War. He died, yet again under financial duress, in 1918 just months before the Armistice after suffering years of an excruciating rectal cancer. He was a notoriously stubborn man, a perfectionist indifferent to deadlines. "I write solely for myself, and other people's impatience doesn't concern me," Debussy responded when queried about delivering on time. As a youth he was unwilling to yield to the rigid orthodoxies of French musical education. His teachers scolded him for his willful bucking of the rules while still acknowledging his keen ear and his exceptional sensitivity to sound and musical gesture. A classmate described him seated at the piano when class was over "producing monstrous successions of weird, barbarous chords - that is to say, chords that were not classified in the official treatises of the Conservatoire." These provocations turned out to be much more than mere student hubris. Rather, they were the genesis of his greatest contribution to classical music: the liberation of harmony from the straitjacket of tonic-dominant attraction. Conventional tonal music, whether it's a Bach fugue or a Beatles song, is bound together by the magnetic attraction of chords, which, reduced to their essence, function as question-and-answer, the "grammar" of music, as it were. If we think of the first two phrases of the song "Happy Birthday," we experience the first as the "question," and the second as the "answer." Almost every familiar musical motto obeys that polarity. What Debussy did was to pull apart the epoxy-strength attachment those chords share and allow them to float, not entirely free from each other, but in a more polyvalent, even ambiguous relation to each other. The result, especially when combined with his use of whole-tone scales, produced a music that felt exceptionally free of the angst and highly charged emotionalism of most of the Romantic repertoire. No surprise, then, that so many of his signature pieces embody or evoke nature, and that, as with many of the Impressionist paintings by his contemporaries, there are often no humans in the frame. A Debussy title is more often than not an image of a natural event: a warm sirocco moving across a plain; a seascape at dawn or at noon; dead leaves rustling in the breeze; early morning mists; moonlight reflecting off the surface of an old ruin. Walsh's subtitle, "A Painter in Sound," amplifies those features that Debussy's aesthetic shared with seminal 19thcentury painters, not only his French countrymen, but also the American James McNeill Whistler and the Englishman J. M. W. Türner, who may have had the most in common with his painterly approach to composing. "Lit from behind," Debussy's description of what struck him about the scoring of "Parsifal," is an apt way to understand his delicately luminous treatment of the orchestra in works like "La Mer," "Prelude a lapres-midi dun faune," "Trois Nocturnes" and especially his enigmatic late ballet "Jeux," a work written in 1913 that languished in obscurity until it was championed a half-century later by Pierre Boulez, who found in it an entirely new invention of "irreversible" musical form. The young Debussy's penchant for unorthodox harmonies was given an unexpected shock stimulant when he encountered a Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. He described his delight with this strange and wonderful music as containing "every nuance, even those one can no longer name, in which tonic and dominant were no longer anything but empty ghosts for use on naughty little children." He responded to these exotic sounds in evocative piano pieces like "Pagodes," which imitate the sonorous and stately movement of that music from a faraway culture he could only imagine in his mind's eye. Debussy revitalized and radicalized almost every musical form he wrote in. He composed songs to texts by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and other French poets throughout his life. His one full-length opera, the epochal "Pelléas et Mélisande," that moody chiaroscuro drama of spiritual impotence, made him, at the age of 40, suddenly famous. His catalog of orchestra works is small but canonic. "La Mer" and "Faune" in particular enjoy a popularity that has never diminished. But the true revelation of his imaginative range rests with his piano music. Here, in piece after piece, most no longer than a few minutes, his pictorial and sensorial powers were truly liberated. "It seems that in contact with the piano Debussy could write freely, exploring the implications of his unique idThis iom in a completely uninhibited way," Walsh writes. Two books of "Preludes," each with a cryptic title affixed to the final bar, range from slow, graceful dances to sultry nocturnal serenades to images of footsteps in snow, gardens in the rain, and to the evocation of a mythic underwater cathedral. These alternate with witty, puckish character sketches and the occasional virtuoso breakout piece that explodes like dazzling fireworks in the night sky. It is said of Debussy that he "orchestrated with the pedal down." In other words, he made the orchestra resonate with the same sense of depth and glow that one obtains by playing with the sustain pedal engaged, allowing the tones to decay naturally rather than arbitrarily cutting them off. Hence his sound world echoes and shimmers and vibrates, expanding outward like the rippling waves of a pool when a pebble has been dropped into it, an image that he sought to depict in another piano piece, "Reflets dans l'eau." It is not easy to write meaningfully about music without resorting to technical terminology, and the list of those authors who can find accessible language to convey its subtleties to the nonspecialist is depressingly short. Walsh is a deep reader of Debussy's music with an uncommon ability to translate complex details into words that are precise yet evocative and that are refreshingly free of academic jargon. His discussion of "Pelléas" is exemplary in this sense, focusing on the composer's treatment of text, particularly in his determination to make the vocal lines reflect the contours of everyday speech. How this adoption of extreme simplicity of utterance contrasts with Germanic vocal writing Walsh underscores by wryly quipping, "Only the clinically insane talk in the jagged lines of Parsifal and Kundry ... or of the patently disturbed heroines of Strauss's 'Salome' or Schoenberg's 'Erwartung.'" The women in Debussy's life suffered from his difficult, at times depressive personality. While acknowledging the composer's "unsatisfactory treatment" of them, Walsh is hard put to find reasons any of them are quite deserving of the great composer's (or our) respect, often referring to them in cringeworthy descriptions. One soprano with whom the composer was involved Walsh refers to as "a bird of the air in need of a perch." Gaby Dupont, Debussy's first serious love, had been "a not particularly stylish cocotte." Lilly Texier, Debussy's first wife, is "sexy but intellectually limited," while Maud Allan, the Canadian dancer who commissioned "Khamma," his "dance legend," "was a new kind of fish in Debussy's aquarium": "He had never written music" for a woman "of doubtful reputation." And his second wife, Emma Bardac, who endured unimaginable stress during their years of marriage, was, when they first met, in Walsh's words, "an attractive, well-kept 40-yearold" who "had no qualms about making herself available... to one of France's leading composers." Even worse, he analyzes the composer's behavior by applying the old-school "genius card" myth, to wit, that behind this bad treatment "lay the instinctive feeling - which ordinary men usually manage to suppress - that emotional ties are a nuisance unless kept firmly in the drawer marked 'when I need them.' " Walsh's study is focused on the music, less so on the historical and cultural setting. As an exposition of this unique and original music it does great service to the composer. Nonetheless, a casual classical music fan may find it daunting, as most of it is devoted to analyses of a lifetime of compositions. Reading the discussions of the various works without having the printed music and a recording at hand will limit understanding of the brilliance of Walsh's insights. Nor is this, quite frankly, as entertaining a read as the author's Stravinsky biography. But then, Stravinsky, the ultimate cosmopolitan bon vivant, lived a life outwardly far more exciting and colorful, becoming a virtual superstar celebrity in his old age. Debussy, a nearrecluse who had only a small circle of friends, hated to travel, preferring the solitude of his piano and, as he said only half in jest to a friend, his small "75-centimeter table for writing things that have without fail to revolutionize the world." book reminds us just how astonishing the radicalism of this composer's creations really is. JOHN ADAMS'S newest work, "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?," will receive its world premiere performed by the pianist Yuja Wang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudáméi in March 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 25, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In Fryderyk Chopin (2018), Alan Walker gave us a life and times. In Schumann (2018), Judith Chernaik presented a life and works. In the equally outstanding Debussy, Walsh offers yet another kind of book about a composer, a work-life with just enough extramusical detail to claim being a biography. More than most other composers a singularly nose-to-the-grindstone professional fellowship Debussy lived music. He did not come from a musical or well-to-do family, studied at the Conservatoire de Paris by dint of virtuosity on the piano, wasn't otherwise well educated, and lived with his parents until he was pushing 30. Very early, however, he transformed a disinclination to discipline into determination to re-create composition, which led him to dump concert pianism and concentrate on writing music. To realize his musical radicalism, Debussy became a perfectionist, spending as much time as he needed to meet his own standards. Fortunately, from early on, his music was popular with concertgoers if not with the musical establishment, enabling him to maintain, often precariously, the comfortable, cultured lifestyle he desired. Walsh discusses nearly every one of Debussy's compositions and points out their innovations and their narratives, so to speak and speak pertinently, for Debussy was as concerned with literature as any great musician ever has been.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Walsh (Stravinsky) uses the musical compositions of French composer Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918) as a framework to tell the story of his short life in this richly descriptive biography. Debussy was often referred to as an impressionist composer, as he was influenced by the works of impressionist artists Claude Monet and StAcphane MallarmAc, and Walsh gives a thorough history of Debussy's artistic growth. Working against a rigid, conservative musical tradition, Debussy nevertheless created a radical body of work where visual expression or "painting in sound" was paramount. Walsh writes accessibly about his music: "''Le SoirAce dans Greande' is a street scene; atmosphere with passersby. The C sharp ostinato at the start hangs expectantly in the air and soon a distant voice intones one of those laments." In the chapter "Songs for Marie," Walsh describes the affair Debussy had with Marie-Rosalie Texier, who would later become his wife and for whom he wrote several songs in which "one can hear her voice almost as if she were in the room singing them." Throughout, Walsh wonderfully underscores Debussy's importance as a composer. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Most classical music aficionados would agree that Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is one of the world's greatest composers. Walsh (emeritus professor of music, Cardiff Univ.) likens Debussy to a "painter," though, curiously, he makes more references here to literature than painting. A central theme of this work is Debussy's rebellion against established musical forms, specifically, those of the Paris Conservatoire, which he attended. With detailed descriptions of Debussy's compositions, the author leads us through the evolution of his music to impressionism (a term Debussy rejected) and beyond. His recounting of the musician's personal life reveals a touchy individual who made frequent use of friends, especially women, without much regard for their well-being in his quest to perfect his work. Walsh's language is frequently quite technical; one would almost have to know what he's writing about to understand him properly. Unlike other biographies this year (e.g., of Chopin, Schumann, and Beethoven), this work, despite its detailed text and numerous references, provides no musical examples. -VERDICT Though the book shines a welcome light on the composer, his music, and his times, it is best suited for specialists and classically trained pianists. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/18.]-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A musicologist offers a sensuous portrait of an iconic composer.Drawing on many fine studies of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Walsh (Emeritus, Music/Cardiff Univ.; Musorgsky and His Circle, 2013, etc.) focuses on the composer's musicdaring and often misunderstoodto create a perceptive and authoritative new biography. A precociously gifted pianist, Debussy had achieved near-adult virtuosity by the age of 10, though he lacked "practical, or even moral, discipline," rebelling against the narrow teachings at the Paris Conservatoire and the "rabid vocationalism of the average music student." By the time he was 17, he decided to abandon the goal of becoming a concert pianist and, instead, become a composer. In 1885, he pursued that goal in Rome, where, again, he bristled against the "hated specifications and stereotyped criteria" at the Academy. His assessors deemed his compositions strange: He was preoccupied, they believed, with "the bizarre, the incomprehensible, the unperformable," and warned him to "be on guard against that vague impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in works of art." Undaunted, over the next few years, he honed a unique style, "subtle and resonant," inspired by "the astoundingly rich and suggestive imagery" of poems of Verlaine and Baudelaire. Walsh sees 1890 as a breakthrough year for Debussy, in which he met the Symbolist poet Stphane Mallarm, who invited him to write incidental music for a stage performance. Mallarm, writes the author, "opened doorsthat would broaden his literary and artistic horizons." Soon, he mastered orchestral music. Walsh praises Nuages for its "refined juxtapositions of colours, melodic, harmonic and instrumental" and Ftes, for its "deftness and athleticism." The ambitious Le Mer, Walsh writes, most clearly reflects Debussy's "inflexibly meticulous, hyper-perfectionist approach to composition." Perennially in debt and embroiled in domestic problems, Debussy felt, he explained, an "invincible need to escape into myself," unable to abide "strict observance of traditions, laws, and other obstacles." He was dedicated to creating, and redefining, beauty, and as Walsh amply demonstrates, he brilliantly succeeded.A richly detailed life of a modernist master. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
