Claude Debussy
Musical

"Chabrier, Moussorgsky, Palestrina, voilà ce que j'aime" – they are what I love.

Debussy in 1893

Among French predecessors, Chabrier was an important influence on Debussy (as he was on Ravel and Poulenc); Howat has written that Chabrier's piano music such as "Sous-bois" and "Mauresque" in the Pièces pittoresques explored new sound-worlds of which Debussy made effective use 30 years later. Lesure finds traces of Gounod and Massenet in some of Debussy's early songs, and remarks that it may have been from the Russians – Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky – that Debussy acquired his taste for "ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules". Lesure also considers that Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov directly influenced Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. In the music of Palestrina, Debussy found what he called "a perfect whiteness", and he felt that although Palestrina's musical forms had a "strict manner", they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers. He drew inspiration from what he called Palestrina's "harmony created by melody", finding an arabesque -like quality in the melodic lines.

Debussy opined that Chopin was "the greatest of them all, for through the piano he discovered everything"; he professed his "respectful gratitude" for Chopin's piano music. He was torn between dedicating his own Études to Chopin or to François Couperin, whom he also admired as a model of form, seeing himself as heir to their mastery of the genre. Howat cautions against the assumption that Debussy's Ballade (1891) and Nocturne (1892) are influenced by Chopin – in Howat's view they owe more to Debussy's early Russian models – but Chopin's influence is found in other early works such as the Two arabesques (1889–1891). In 1914 the publisher A. Durand & fils began publishing scholarly new editions of the works of major composers, and Debussy undertook the supervision of the editing of Chopin's music.

Although Debussy was in no doubt of Wagner's stature, he was only briefly influenced by him in his compositions, after La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (both begun in 1887). According to Pierre Louÿs, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone can do beyond Tristan'," although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, appearing at the turning of a bar". After Debussy's short Wagnerian phase, he started to become interested in non-Western music and its unfamiliar approaches to composition. The piano piece Golliwogg's Cakewalk, from the 1908 suite Children's Corner, contains a parody of music from the introduction to Tristan, in which, in the opinion of the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, Debussy escapes the shadow of the older composer and "smilingly relativizes Wagner into insignificance".

A contemporary influence was Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy's "most faithful friend" amongst French musicians. Debussy's orchestration in 1896 of Satie's Gymnopédies (which had been written in 1887) "put their composer on the map" according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, and the Sarabande from Debussy's Pour le piano (1901) "shows that knew Satie's Trois Sarabandes at a time when only a personal friend of the composer could have known them." (They were not published until 1911). Debussy's interest in the popular music of his time is evidenced not only by the Golliwogg's Cakewalk and other piano pieces featuring rag-time, such as The Little Nigar (Debussy's spelling) (1909), but by the slow waltz La plus que lente (The more than slow), based on the style of the gipsy violinist at a Paris hotel (to whom he gave the manuscript of the piece).

In addition to the composers who influenced his own compositions, Debussy held strong views about several others. He was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, respectful of Mozart and was in awe of Bach, whom he called the "good God of music" (le Bon Dieu de la musique). His relationship to Beethoven was complex; he was said to refer to him as le vieux sourd ('the old deaf one') and asked one young pupil not to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave;" but he believed that Beethoven had profound things to say, yet did not know how to say them, "because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness." He was not in sympathy with Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".

With the advent of the First World War, Debussy became ardently patriotic in his musical opinions. Writing to Stravinsky, he asked "How could we not have foreseen that these men were plotting the destruction of our art, just as they had planned the destruction of our country?" In 1915 he complained that "since Rameau we have had no purely French tradition We tolerated overblown orchestras, tortuous forms we were about to give the seal of approval to even more suspect naturalizations when the sound of gunfire put a sudden stop to it all." Taruskin writes that some have seen this as a reference to the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, both born Jewish. In 1912 Debussy had remarked to his publisher of the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue by the (also Jewish) composer Paul Dukas, "You're right, is a masterpiece – but it's not a masterpiece of French music." On the other hand, Charles Rosen argued in a review of Taruskin's work that Debussy was instead implying "that opera was too Wagnerian, too German, to fit his ideal of French style", citing Georges Liébert, one of the editors of Debussy's collected correspondence, as an authority, saying that Debussy was not antisemitic.
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