![]() ![]() There hadn't been music like any of these pieces before. All of these projects took years, for all of them revolutionized music. He finished a first draft in 1895 and made at least two major revisions before the premiere at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. An interest in Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande grew, however, and he abandoned the earlier opera to complete the new one. Opera attracted him, and he worked on Rodrigue et Chimène, a version of the Spanish epic El Cid. ![]() In addition to some songs and the Fantasie for piano and orchestra, he completed his only string quartet and began to take on more ambitious projects, some of which would have great consequences on his career.Īmong these were an orchestral Prélude based on Mallarmé's poem L'après-midi d'un faune (premiered 1894) and three orchestral pieces which became the Nocturnes (completed 1899, premiered 1901). He freed himself from Wagner by discovering a number of alternatives: the music of Grieg, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and Javanese and Annamite music, among them. Indeed, he once remarked that he would rather have been a painter than a musician, although he might have said it for effect. At any rate, he used his time among the Symbolists to make up for his lack of a normal education by reading voraciously and looking at pictures. He quickly reacted against most of Wagner, although one can argue that the basis of his mature style can be found in something like Wagner's Waldrauschen. Under their influence, he briefly fell under Wagner's spell, although he never was a part of the French petite Bayreuth. On his return to Paris from Rome, Debussy fell in with Symbolist circles, particularly poets and painters. However, his compositions required by the prize, the tone poem Printemps and the cantata La damoiselle élue, represent an incredible advance on L'enfant prodigue and still live in the repertory. Debussy, like Berlioz before him, competed unsucessfully for the Prix de Rome and won in 1884 for the cantata L'enfant prodigue, which sounds nothing like the Debussy we think about. He studied composition with the expatriate New Orleanian Ernest Guiraud, a quintessential French academic composer who had provided recitatives for Bizet's Carmen. At 18, he became part of the musical household of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's great patron, but he hadn't the strong ties to her that the Russian did (even if only in correspondence). He began as a pianist but failed to win a first in piano and so transferred his studies to theory and composition. Accordingly, Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten and in fact never attended regular school. The family got around this by sending the boy to live with relatives, since they recognized a very lively intelligence as well as musical talent in the child. ![]() On his early release, the government deprived him of all civil rights, which meant that Claude was denied a public education. His father had joined one of the many uprisings of Paris workers and as a result had gotten thrown in jail. One of the five great pillars of musical Modernism, Achille-Claude Debussy (AugMarch 25, 1918) was born in an outlying northwest Parisian commune. ![]()
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