On consecutive days in January 1908 two momentous things happened to Debussy. On the 19th he conducted an orchestra in concert for the first time in his life, and on the 20th he married Emma Bardac. No doubt it was Emma who dragged him to the registry office in order to regularise their domestic situation. She, like Gaby Dupont before her, must have suffered from the pursed lips and raised eyebrows of the people one met – or who walked past one – at concerts or theatres or art galleries, and she had the added concern of a young daughter who needed to be legitimised, in an age when illegitimacy still counted against the mother as well as the child. If Debussy had died she would have had no claim on his intellectual property. His rich mistress when they met, she would have ended up as his impoverished common-law widow, and poor, clever Chouchou could have been cast out, ostracised, socially abandoned – or so Emma probably feared.

The conducting debut was similarly a marriage of convenience. Edouard Colonne had programmed La Mer for the 12th – his first attempt at the piece – in the full expectation, one imagines, that it would be just another item in his repertoire. Then the unthinkable happened at rehearsal: his own orchestra proved unable to play the work, and he was forced to withdraw it from the programme. Instead he invited Debussy to step up to the rostrum at the Châtelet on the following two Sundays and somehow manage, from the depths of what he himself called his ‘candid inexperience’, something that had proved beyond the orchestra’s experienced and usually competent founder. Curiously enough, the orchestra seems to have responded well, and Debussy, though shaking in his shoes, had the gratifying sensation, as he told Segalen, of ‘feeling truly at the heart of [my] own music … When it “sounds” properly, you seem yourself to become an instrument in the total sonority, unleashed on the sole authority of gestures from the little baton.’1 The audience evidently shared his delight and roared their approval. ‘For a length of time impossible to tell,’ Willy wrote,

there were howls of wild enthusiasm, the clatter of colliding palms, demented cries of encore. Debussy traversed the forest of desks ten times to return to the prompt box to show his warm gratitude; the occasional whistle, violent and energetic as a station-master’s signal to a departing train, would start up the triumphal procession all over again, reviving the zeal of tired biceps and smarting hands. To satisfy these delirious melomanes, the conqueror had to be brought back one last time from the staircase he was descending, already in his overcoat and the bowler hat, which, in our modern costume, fulfils the role of the laurel wreath of old.2

This was his debut by chance, but it was not inconsistent with his actual plans. He was already booked to conduct in London a fortnight later, and in Rome and Milan in April, or so he had informed Durand. In the event, the Italian dates fell through, but he duly conducted La Mer and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune at the Queen’s Hall on 1 February. Victor Segalen, who was in London at the time, sent his wife a revealing account of the composer in rehearsal. Debussy had grumbled at having to conduct on only a single rehearsal, and Henry Wood, whose orchestra it was, had arranged for extra sectionals in a side hall. In the morning, Debussy rehearsed the brass, the woodwind and the percussion.

Not surprisingly, Debussy was invited back a year later, in February 1909, when he conducted the same orchestra in the same hall, this time in the Nocturnes and the Après-midi d’un faune. On this occasion, Wood had prepared the orchestra in advance, and that may have been the cause of a curious incident during the second nocturne, Fêtes, when Debussy got in a muddle over a tempo change, rapped the lectern with his baton for a restart, rapped a second time, and then (Wood recalled), ‘the most extraordinary thing happened. The orchestra refused to stop. It really was an amazing situation. Here was a famous composer directing a work of his own and, having got into difficulties, was asking the orchestra to stop, and was being met with refusal.’ Debussy, Wood thought, ‘quite candidly, was not a good conductor, even of his own works.’ But the audience, who must have realised that something had happened, ‘because it was so evident that he had tried to stop the orchestra’, did something very English, and ‘recorded their appreciation to such an extent that he was compelled to repeat the movement’.4

To do him justice, Debussy scarcely regarded himself as a conductor, and accepted conducting dates mainly because, as ever, he needed the money, but perhaps also because he was tired of hearing his music mangled by conductors who were unwilling or unable to adapt to the new aesthetic that his mature works represented. There had reportedly been a symbolic confrontation with Chevillard at a rehearsal for the first complete performance of the Nocturnes back in October 1901. Hearing a faint voice from the back of the auditorium, Chevillard had stopped the orchestra and waited: ‘Je voudrais cela plus flou. – Plus vite? – Non, plus flou. – Plus lent? – Plus flou. – Je ne sais pas ce que vous voulez dire. Reprenons, messieurs!’ (‘I’d like that more indefinite.’ – ‘Faster?’ – ‘No, more indefinite.’ – ‘Slower?’ – ‘More indefinite’ – ‘I don’t know what you mean. On we go, gentlemen!’).5 On various other occasions, Debussy was rude about Chevillard, about Colonne, even about Pierné, his old comrade at the Conservatoire and the Villa Medici, who conducted the first performance of Ibéria in February 1910. ‘The hyper-Spanish rhythm of the first movement’, he grumbled to André Caplet, ‘became “rive-gauche” under our young “Capellmeister’s” intelligent direction, and Les Parfums de la nuit crept out prudently from under a bolster, no doubt so as not to upset anyone.’ But after a rehearsal for the repeat performance a week later, things had improved, and Pierné and his orchestra had ‘consented to having fewer feet and a few more wings’.6

It was undoubtedly hard for Debussy to emerge from his compositional world into the glare of public performance without some sense of being misunderstood and misrepresented. Ever since June 1908 he had been preoccupied with The Fall of the House of Usher, to the extent, as he had admitted to Durand, of sometimes losing his sense of the real world. Of all his theatrical projects, this was the one that most clearly exemplified his understanding of the word ‘flou’, and his preference for wings over feet. He even for a time put it about that his two works based on Poe, for which he had just signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera House, would not be operas, supposedly ‘because I do not want to write anything which in any way resembles Pelléas’, but perhaps also because he was starting to have doubts as to how the mystery and intangibility of the Usher tale, in particular, could possibly survive the all-too-physical, all-too-tangible practicalities of the operatic stage. A year or so later he was describing the House of Usher to Caplet as ‘not exactly the house one would choose for calming one’s nerves, quite the contrary … One develops there the singular dottiness of listening to the dialogue of the stones; of expecting houses to fall down as a natural, even obligatory, phenomenon.’7 These are the remarks of an obsessive, more than a clear-headed, creative mind. And so it would prove.

Exactly how much of Usher Debussy composed in the three and a half years up to his writing to Caplet in December 1911 that ‘I’m not managing to finish the two little Poe dramas’ is far from clear. ‘It all seems to me as dreary as a vault,’ he told Caplet on that occasion. ‘For every one bar that is almost free, there are twenty that suffocate under the weight of a deaf tradition whose flabby and hypocritical influence I admit, in spite of all my efforts.’8 He had certainly drafted two different versions of the libretto, and had made a handful of musical sketches, including eighteen bars of what he told Emma would perhaps form the work’s prelude. But this was precious little to show for the intensity of his involvement, hardly anything to match the picture he painted to Durand of ‘going to sleep with [Roderick Usher and The Devil in the Belfry], and waking to the sombre melancholy of the one, or the mocking laughter of the other!’9 He had in fact, as we saw, long since abandoned the comic opera, while the sinister Fall of the House of Usher had been and continued to be pushed aside by other work, by the orchestral Images, by a ballet commission from Diaghilev, by a big new set of piano pieces that he composed in the latter part of 1909, and by a complicated and demanding theatre commission from Gabriele D’Annunzio at the end of 1910, among other, smaller projects.

However, there was more to this failure than met the cataloguing eye. There were generic difficulties in turning Poe’s tale into a stage drama, but there were also problems connected with Debussy’s own work, the clue to which was his insistence that his Usher would be a totally different kind of opera from Pelléas. He suggested to an interviewer in Budapest in December 1910 that ‘one cannot find a more complete contrast than between Poe and Maeterlinck’, and ‘I believe that it should be the aim of every artist to depart as far as possible from the nature and subject of his success.’10 Plainly, he was deceiving himself. ‘How’, Andrew Porter once asked, ‘could an opera set in an ancient castle where the air seems stifling, where the action passes into subterranean vaults, where a pale, mysterious maiden suffers, fail to recall Pelléas in subject or atmosphere?’11 Maeterlinck’s own enthusiasm for Poe is well documented. And the fact that Debussy felt it necessary to deny this obvious resemblance lends further support to the idea that Usher was for him more an obsession, perhaps to some extent a psychological retreat, than a practical creative project.

As for the generic difficulties, they hinge on the character of the tale itself and especially on the way it is told. The story is a first-person narrative with no more than a few phrases of reported speech, strong on atmosphere and situation, low on incident. At its core are the narrator’s former school friend Roderick Usher, the last in the line of the Usher family, still young but pale, sickly and neurasthenic, the product of constant inbreeding, and his cataleptic twin sister, Madeline, a mere ghostly presence early in the story, who supposedly dies in the course of it and, in typical Poe fashion, is buried alive in a vault beneath the house by Roderick and the narrator, only to extract herself noisily and bloodily from the tomb, drag herself up the castle stairway, and collapse on top of her fragile brother, killing them both. The one other vital character is the house itself, a symbol of the Usher family and an embodiment of its history and fate. ‘I know not how it was,’ the narrator confides at the start, ‘but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.’

I looked upon the scene before me – upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain – upon the bleak walls – upon the vacant eye-like windows – upon a few rank sedges – and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees – with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium – the bitter lapse into everyday life – the hideous dropping off of the veil.

The house is a continual reflection of everything about Roderick and his sister. Its dark angles and strange echoes are the dark angles and strange echoes of their consciousness. Its remote, unlit passageways are the uncharted regions of their minds. And when they collapse and disintegrate at the end of the story, the house likewise – and otherwise inexplicably – collapses and disintegrates as well.

For the stage it seemed necessary to flesh out this tale in a variety of ways. The narrator, an ill-defined but essential character, had more or less to be invented from scratch, and what, in Poe, is a predestined, unmotivated descent into oblivion had to be provided with a more immediate causal logic – or so Debussy, who compiled all three versions of the libretto, evidently thought. To that end, he created from the merest hint in the story a malign family doctor, in love with Madeline (according to Roderick), but who, on finding her apparently dead one night at the foot of the stairs, himself buries her in one of the household vaults. Roderick believes the doctor to desire his death too, presumably with some idea of seizing the family property. The doctor, on the other hand, alleges an incestuous passion for his sister on Roderick’s part (‘that isn’t the way one loves a sister’), and he urges the inconvenient friend to leave, ‘before this sombre maniac creates one further victim …’

None of these motivations exist in Poe, and to some extent they coarsen the texture of his story by rendering it more concrete, more matter-of-fact, where everything in Poe hangs on the inevitable doom of tainted blood and the unhealthy air of inbreeding. Debussy may even have had this in mind when he complained to Caplet about the ‘weight of deaf tradition’: convention forever getting in the way of imagination. For whatever reason, he found it hard to get the music down on paper in any continuous form. In June 1909 he presented his wife with a page of music, eighteen bars, ‘which will perhaps be the prelude to The Fall of the House of Usher’, and a fortnight later he told Durand that he had ‘almost finished a long monologue for this poor Roderick. It’s sad enough to make the stones weep … for truly it’s a question of the influence that stones have on the morale of neurasthenics’12 (‘Old stones,’ Roderick sings, ‘pallid stones, what have you made of me?’) But how much of the monologue he actually composed at that time is very uncertain. He was working with his second libretto draft, in which Roderick’s lengthy, barely coherent outburst against his fate and that of his adored sister comes in the first scene, before the arrival of the friend, and so may have blocked progress with the actual narrative. Debussy subsequently transferred the monologue to the second scene, after the arrival of the friend and his disturbing conversation with the doctor. But that was a good deal later, possibly as late as 1916.

As for 1909 and 1910, very little music survives to provide an image of the style he was looking for early on to portray the menace and solitude of Poe’s Usher or the irrational terrors of its owner. His sketch for Emma suggests the bleak melancholy of the house itself through whole-tone harmonies that seem to hang in the air like the ‘pestilent and mystic vapour’ the narrator imagines rising out of the black tarn where he reins in his horse. But in general Debussy’s sketches, where they exist, are often so vague about crucial details such as sharps and flats that the precise harmony is partly a matter of guesswork. ‘It all feels like toil,’ he wrote to Godet at the end of 1911, ‘and the seams show! The farther I go, the more I have a horror of that studied disorder which is nothing but aural illusion. Or like the bizarre or amusing harmonies that are mere social jests … How much has first to be found, then suppressed, in order to arrive at the naked flesh of emotion … Yet pure instinct ought to warn us that the stuffs, the colours, are mere illusory façades.’13 This might almost be Roderick Usher himself talking.

On the very day in June 1909 that he gave Emma the eighteen-bar manuscript, they attended a performance by Diaghilev’s Russian company of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov (alias Ivan the Terrible), together with a short ballet called Le Festin, a more or less vacuous divertissement danced by Karsavina, Nijinsky et al., to a typical Russian salad of music by Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Musorgsky and Co. This seems to have been Debussy’s first experience of the brilliant Russian dancers who had been setting Paris alight for the previous three weeks, and it can’t be said that he was overwhelmed by it. He could admire Chaliapin as Ivan the Terrible, as he had admired him as Boris Godunov the previous year. But as for the ballet, he told the impresario Gabriel Astruc, ‘I’ve probably lost all sense of this kind of display since it bored me stiff. All the same, what an odd way of dressing people! It seems to me that we’ve got better at the Folies-Bergère.’14

It was true that, for a musician, this first Paris season of the Ballets Russes (not so-called until their second) was a disappointment. The dancers, the choreography, the stage and costume designs, pace Debussy, were by general agreement unforgettable, but the music was nothing but the same old Russian stuff, colourful and amusing in its way, but without any of the freshness or novelty of the visual spectacle. The one substantial new (at least to Paris) ballet score, Nikolay Cherepnin’s Le Pavillon d’Armide, drew from Laloy the damning observation that ‘the only extenuating circumstance one could think of in favour of such insignificant music is that after five minutes one no longer hears it’. Diaghilev was stung into action. By the end of the season, in mid-June, he had commissioned Ravel, and tried and failed to commission Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn. By mid-July he, Debussy and Laloy had met and planned an eighteenth-century ballet, eventually to be called Masques et bergamasques, for which Laloy was to write the scenario. For some reason Debussy, who had never successfully collaborated with anyone on a theatre piece, proceeded to write the scenario himself, placating Laloy with the (very) distant possibility – which had presumably been discussed between them – of an operatic setting of the Oresteia. The ballet text, which was actually printed and published in June 1910, is a complicated piece of sub-commedia dell’arte mixed with sub-Beaumarchais. But by that time Diaghilev had found the ballet composer, himself Russian, whose music would supersede the Russian salads: the twenty-seven-year-old Igor Stravinsky. Debussy never started composing Masques et bergamasques; and, unsurprisingly, nothing more was ever heard of the Oresteia.

Amid all these theatrical failures, he turned to his own instrument for solace, perhaps partly stimulated by a pair of bread-and-butter commissions: a tiny follow-up to the Golliwog’s Cakewalk called ‘The Little Nigar’ [sic], written for Théodore Lack’s ‘elementary piano method’, and a slightly more substantial piece, ‘Hommage à Haydn’, composed in May 1909 for a Haydn centenary issue of the S.I.M monthly bulletin, and based, by way of an arcane, Boy-Scout code, on the letters of Haydn’s name. (‘It’ll disappear in a puff of smoke,’ he told the journal’s director, Jules Écorcheville.15) Then, within the space of a couple of months, from early December 1909 to early February 1910, he composed the brilliant series of twelve piano pieces that became book one of the Préludes.

Just as with the Images, it seems that in contact with the piano Debussy could write freely, exploring the implications of his unique idiom in a completely uninhibited way, but that when it was a matter of composing for a more ‘impersonal’ medium and on a larger scale – for orchestra, with or without voices, or for the stage – he was forced to think in a more linear, syntactical, perhaps objective manner that raised issues of procedure he was increasingly reluctant to confront. When he had talked to Caplet about the twenty bars suffocated by tradition, he may well have meant the sort of music that, in every eighteenth-and nineteenth-century composer you could name, bore the structure along from one distinctive gesture to the next, that made sense of works that might otherwise disintegrate under the sheer weight of irrepressible, disconnected inventiveness: the musical details that information theorists describe with the charming term ‘redundant’. It may go against the grain to think of anything in, say, Mozart or Schubert or even Brahms as redundant. But, purely in the sense that a lot of what happens in their music is predictable, the redundant is an important, if humble, part of their language. It looks as if, at least where the House of Usher was concerned, Claude Debussy – the lifelong enemy of rules – was now in rebellion against redundancy.

All but three of the Préludes are dated, and for all but one of those nine the implication is that they were each composed in a single day. The undated exceptions include two of the biggest pieces: Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest and La Cathédrale engloutie, which would explain why they took longer to write, if not why Debussy failed to date them. As for the generic title of the set as a whole, its superficial models are obviously Bach’s ‘48’ and Chopin’s twenty-four preludes. But whereas the factor of twelve in those sets is related to the succession of keys (all twenty-four twice in Bach’s case), Debussy has no such pattern. He does maintain what amounts to a fictional abstractness by titling his preludes only at the end of each piece, though since the imagery is generally at least as specific as in the actual Images it’s hard to take seriously the idea that he was wanting the player to ignore the title until having played the piece. The real model for this kind of writing is Liszt, who often gave programmatic titles to pieces ostensibly in abstract genres, but who also, in his Années de pèlerinage, mixed quite easy pieces with pieces in a more bravura manner, as Debussy does here. One other Lisztian feature of Debussy’s preludes is that several of the titles, though graphic in appearance, come from literary sources, several of them familiar from earlier works of his. ‘Le Vent dans la plaine’, for instance, is a quotation from the eighteenth-century playwright Charles Simon Favart which Debussy had already used as epigraph to his Verlaine song ‘C’est l’extase’; ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ is a line from Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’; ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ is the title of a poem by Leconte de Lisle set by Debussy almost thirty years earlier.

Although these titles are literary, Debussy’s interest in them is mainly not. His wind in the plain doesn’t hold its breath, as Favart’s does in the next line, and his flaxen-haired girl is not, like Leconte de Lisle’s, an object of sensual fantasy. The Baudelaire quotation hints at something that has inspired Debussy before, the synaesthetic linking of the senses, in this case sound and scent, and here perhaps he does respond marginally to the poem beyond his chosen line, in the shape of Baudelaire’s next line, ‘Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige’, which seems to prompt the slow, sometimes disrupted waltz of Debussy’s prelude. But on the whole the titles are instant triggers from the visual to the musical. The first prelude, Danseuses de Delphes, was inspired – Debussy told an English admirer – by the beautiful column of that name exhibited on the landing of the grand staircase of the Louvre, a plaster copy of a stone original recently excavated by the French archaeologist Théophile Homolle at Delphi. Perhaps the sculpture was rotated so that the three female figures appeared in succession, or perhaps one could walk round it. There is certainly some feeling in the prelude of a slow circling, as of stately dancers with linked arms. But the real miracle of this piece is its harmonic concentration, the alternation of music made of soft dissonance and music made of plain triads in irrational but perfectly poised sequence. If, as the autograph suggests, the piece was written in a single day (7 December 1909), one might picture Debussy at the piano – literally or metaphorically – carefully testing each chord, each sequence, listening to the spacing and balance, the resonances, the dynamic shadings, the effect of the two pedals (not indicated, as usual). At first glance, this is not difficult music to play, but to play it well, with attention to every nuance, every painstaking detail, is a serious exercise in mental and physical control. Hearing Debussy play it, his English friend reported, ‘was like hearing a poet reciting some of his own delicate lyrics. He had a soft, deep touch which evoked full, rich, many-shaded sonorities … I have never heard more beautiful pianoforte playing.’16

By comparison, the second prelude, Voiles, is a curiously doctrinaire piece, a pair of entirely whole-tone episodes framing a pentatonic middle section that could almost be a remnant of the gamelan music of Pagodes. The title might mean ‘Sails’, or it might mean ‘Veils’ (like the ones shed by Salome in Strauss’s opera or deployed with coloured lighting by the American dancer Loïe Fuller). But the music has a sinister edge, provided by the bass ostinato B flats and the curious floating metre, that seems to contradict both meanings. The B flats are an echo of Danseuses de Delphes, which is in that key, and they continue into Le Vent dans la plaine, supporting the windy sextuplets that blow on and off throughout the prelude. Once again the challenge of this tricky piece of mild virtuosity is to play it softly enough, ‘as lightly as possible’, Debussy indicates, and in fact the only markings above piano are the sudden fortes halfway through, violent gusts that, like real wind, blow your hat off, subside at once just long enough for you to retrieve it, then blow it off again. The effect is stunning, but hard to control.

With the fourth prelude, Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (‘The sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air’), we are back with the supreme refinement of Danseuses de Delphes, except that here it is the intangible, not the sculptural, that rotates in the air, and this has an impact on Debussy’s harmony and, no less intriguingly, his form that takes us into new realms bordering, perhaps, on the regions he was trying to imagine for The Fall of the House of Usher. Time and again the music is disorientated by the chromatic chord sequences (starting in bar 3) that effectively liquidate the harmony, and with it any clear, simple sense of form: magical sounds and scents that teach the brain new logics. The form breaks down into a kind of montage of brief images, at first apparently incoherent, then reconstructed through repetition and the forming of new connections. It again reminds one of Debussy’s remark about the twenty suffocated bars. In this prelude there is not a single bar remotely stifled by tradition, convention or any other concept imposed from outside. Risks are taken, assessed, listened to. At the piano he could bring this off; he was in his element. In other media he could not, yet, quite make it work, at least to his own satisfaction.

Impressionism or Symbolism? In this music the question is once again exposed as meaningless. The sounds are sounds and the perfumes are absent. Without the title, we could have no conception of the subject matter of the fourth prelude. Voiles, with its blurring whole tones – especially in the final bars, where Debussy supplies a rare pedal marking that ensures a wash of harmony – could loosely be compared to any one of the countless Impressionist seascapes with sailing boats (Paul Roberts opts for Whistler and Degas), though the sinister undertow of low B flats suggests a more mysterious agenda while failing to identify it.17 The fifth prelude, Les Collines d’Anacapri (‘The Hills of Anacapri’), might or might not be an impression of that part of the island of Capri, which Debussy probably never visited.18 One theory, offered guardedly by no less an authority than Roy Howat in the Foreword to the Collected Edition, is that the piece was inspired by the label on a bottle of Anacapri wine (presumably with a picture of the landscape). It includes bells, two popular songs, a tarantella and, unexpectedly, a habanera, and has the vividness and colouristic brilliance of a Derain or Matisse painting of the seaside village of Collioure.19 In complete contrast, Des pas sur la neige (‘Footprints on the snow’) is an intensely concentrated piece dominated by a single two-note, snap-rhythm motif, an image as haunting and relentless as the tap-tap of Blind Pew’s stick in Treasure Island. ‘This rhythm’, Debussy instructs, ‘must have the sonorous value of the depths of a sad, frozen landscape’ – another piece of implied synaesthesia that can, perhaps, be felt rather than explained. But here, as at times in Pelléas et Mélisande (notably the grotto and dungeon scenes), the symbolic idea is unmistakable. The figure stands for some obsessive fear or other; fragments of lyrical melody, ‘expressive and sorrowful’, overlay it like a lament, but cannot allay it. Music, as Debussy had told Durand, ‘is a matter of colours and rhythmicised time’,20 and in Des pas sur la neige the idea of time being stretched out and probed for its hidden content is almost palpable. In a sense, the music gets nowhere; it is a time capsule in which we experience extension, then step out, like the soldier in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat, exactly as and where we were when we stepped in, but with knowledge that was not previously ours.

In different ways these first six preludes show Debussy deploying a method of assembly that reflects the harmonic revolution his music has been quietly carrying through ever since the early Verlaine songs. Uninterested in the old grammar, but fascinated by the structure and variability of its elements, he shines a torch on them, examines them from different angles, rotates them, repeats them, arranges them in arbitrary-seeming ways, like pictures hung – but tastefully, scrupulously hung – in a gallery. There is about all this an empirical, anti-doctrinal genius, a refusal to be bullied by history or its debris, that is without precedent in Western music since Monteverdi. It perhaps explains why he fussed so much over the detail of his work, ignoring contracts and schedules and promises; everything depended on his own sensibility, and he could not – would not – fall back on traditional best practice to help him over awkward joins or moments of failing inspiration.

Now and then he would make an ironic comment on his own idiosyncratic way of working. In the ninth prelude, La Sérénade interrompue (‘The Interrupted Serenade’), a guitarist solemnly tunes up, practises a few Spanish twiddles, then launches into a keening song on two notes, only for the girl to slam her shutters closed (in a different key). Nothing daunted, the guitarist strikes up again, somewhat more enterprisingly, but is again interrupted, this time by another, distant singer and by the early morning music, Le Matin d’un jour de fête, from Ibéria (a reference that would have been lost on anyone looking over Debussy’s shoulder in January 1910 as Ibéria was not performed until February).21 The guitarist resumes, crossly at first, but then wanders off, mildly disgruntled.

At other times, Debussy could graft his method on to the narrative styles of Romantic music. Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest (‘What the West Wind saw’), prelude no. 7, is a more or less candid parody of Liszt, especially Orage, in the first set of Années de pèlerinage, with which Paul Roberts has found clear thematic connections. But Roberts also points out that Debussy’s prelude, though frightening in its violence and virtuosity, is devoid of the pathos in Liszt’s parallel between the wild elements and human suffering. ‘Debussy’s West Wind’, he notes, ‘never sees the valley of despair experienced by Liszt’s Obermann.’22 The clue to this lies in Debussy’s own actual source, a story by Hans Christian Andersen called The Garden of Eden, in which a prince wandering in the forest comes across an old lady roasting a stag who turns out to be the mother of the four winds. Each wind comes home and tells what he has seen that day. When the West Wind appears, he turns out to be no gentle zephyr but a wild man in a slouch hat brandishing a mahogany club. He comes, he says, ‘from the wildernesses of the forest, where the thorny lianas make a fence from one tree to the next, where the water snake lies in the wet growth and human beings seem not to be wanted’.

I looked at the deep river, where it was dashing down from the rocks and turning into spray to carry the rainbow. I saw the wild buffalo try to swim the river, but the stream hurried him down with it. Drifting with a flock of wild ducks which flew up in the air when they came to the waterfall; but the buffalo had to go down it. I liked that, and I blew such a gale that the oldest trees sailed off and turned to chips … I turned somersaults over the savannahs, I patted the wild horses and shook down cocoanuts. Yes, yes, I’ve plenty of stories to tell, but one mustn’t tell everything one knows.23

The diametrical opposite to this spectacular piece is the next prelude, La Fille aux cheveux de lin, which is both technically and stylistically the simplest piece in the book. Apart from the title, as we saw, Leconte de Lisle’s poem (one of his ‘Chansons écossaises’) is largely irrelevant to the tender, unstrained lyricism of Debussy’s prelude, which more than anything recalls the Schumann of Träumerei, even if some of its chord parallels belong, in their uninsistent way, to a later vocabulary than his. This pretty Scottish lass tells no story, is without coquetry, does not pose. She is Annie Laurie without the promise. Or, in Debussy’s own book, she is sister to the little shepherd in Children’s Corner; where he was ‘very sweet and delicately expressive’, she is ‘very calm and sweetly expressive’. But where the shepherd dances as well as piping, his flaxen-haired sister only sings, and where he cadences brightly, with textbook perfect cadences, her endings are yieldingly plagal, like amens.

Two preludes later, in La Cathédrale engloutie (‘The Sunken Cathedral’), we are back with the bells, not now of Anacapri, but of the ancient Breton city of Ys, which, according to legend, sank into the sea but will rise out of it again when the city of Paris is engulfed. It is also said that, on calm days on the Britanny coast, you can hear the bells of the cathedral of Ys ringing out from beneath the waves. Debussy may have come across this legend in detail in the opera Le Roi d’Ys by Édouard Lalo, a composer he admired, or he may have read about it in Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse. But he ignored the elaborate tale of the origins of the city and the circumstances of its inundation. The prelude starts with the bells, heard softly through ‘une brume doucement sonore’ (‘a gently sonorous mist’), but soon we hear also the sounds of the cathedral organ, distantly at first, swelling in volume as the city rises from the sea, then finally contracting as it sinks back beneath the waves.

In concept, the piece could hardly be more basic, but its effect, oddly enough, depends on certain advanced aspects of Debussy’s style. For instance, though coloured for much of its length by big, full-handed chords, it contains very little harmony in the conventional sense. The chords are mainly parallel triads, as if Captain Nemo were seated at the underwater organ with all the stops out and doubling the melody with rigid hands. The bells likewise start as parallel chords, but with open fifths, which lends them a colour similar to that at the start of Les Collines d’Anacapri, but fuller because the chords are sounded rather than merely an effect of pedalling. Later the bells are enriched by dissonance, like real bells with their rogue overtones. At bottom, the whole prelude is a majestic study in the synaesthesia of water and reverberation, the swell of the ocean as seen and heard, the boom of waves on rock, and the hidden mysteries of the sea itself.

After these solemnities, the last two preludes are lighter character sketches. La Danse de Puck is a deft portrait of Shakespeare’s ‘merry wanderer of the night’, perhaps inspired, as Howat suggests, by Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Puck as a naughty little boy with a sparkler, though Debussy had himself described the character more vividly, some years earlier in connection with Weber’s Oberon, as ‘equally adept at suddenly descending to the ground as in vanishing into space with a flap of his wings’,24 an image that suggests Ravel’s more dangerous and brilliant Scarbo, the final movement of Gaspard de la nuit. Debussy’s piece opens with seventeen straight bars of highly ornamented melodic arabesque, unaccompanied, then continues, mainly, as a series of accompanied variants on this idea. Minstrels, the final prelude of the twelve, reflects from a slightly different angle the circus and music-hall obsessions of French art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the clown as counter-image of the self-absorption of Romanticism, with a certain tinge of Baudelaire’s nostalgie de la boue. The piece is a skilful montage of musical tricks, like a song-and-dance routine by a cabaret artiste or the blacked-up clowns that Debussy is supposed to have watched performing outside his hotel in Eastbourne in 1905. As with his other montage pieces, and no doubt like the clowns, Debussy binds everything together by repetition and skilful timing. The art of the entertainer, he seems to tell us, is brevity and surprise, and Minstrels is a perfect throwaway ending to this wonderfully varied procession of musical landscapes, portraits and vignettes.

Did Debussy intend the Préludes to be performed as a cycle? He certainly never did so himself, and there is no outside evidence that he thought of them in that way, rather than as a book of pieces from which to select. The first time any of them were played in public was in May 1910, the month of their publication, when the composer himself played Danseuses de Delphes, Voiles, La Cathédrale engloutie, and La Danse de Puck in an S.I.M. concert; and subsequent performances in his lifetime seem all to have been of groups or individual preludes. However, as lovers of late Bach know, performance practice and the abstract process of composition can be very different things, and there is good internal evidence that Debussy worked out the first book of Préludes as a continuum while never supposing they would be played that way. For a start the pattern of contrasts is telling: Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest preceded by the very still Des pas sur la neige and followed by the gentle La Fille aux cheveux de lin; the grandiose Cathédrale engloutie framed by the comedy of La Sérénade interrompue and La Danse de Puck; Minstrels as a coup de grâce comparable to Beethoven’s Op. 135 or the Rossinian coda to his hyper-serious Op. 95 Quartet. Then there is the matter of key sequence: Danseuses de Delphes in B flat followed by Voiles with a B flat bass pedal; Le Vent dans la plaine on, if not in, B flat; Les Sons et les parfums hitting B flat ostentatiously in its first bar; then later Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest in F sharp minor followed by La Fille aux cheveux de lin in G flat (the same note) major, and La Sérénade interrompue with G flat prominent in its first bar. These connections might be a matter of compositional accident (the exact order of composition being sometimes unknown), or they might not. In any case all they suggest is that Debussy had internal integration in mind, but not necessarily that he saw it as desirable in performance.

Somehow, while engrossed in this project, he also managed to produce an eight-minute piece for clarinet and piano, optimistically titled First Rhapsody for B flat clarinet and piano, as a test piece for the Conservatoire exams that had so tormented him in his own time as a student. At the age of forty-seven he might still preserve his Croche-like distaste for the rules and processes of Conservatoire life, but he no longer breathed fire at the mere mention of them. Early in 1909 he had even accepted Fauré’s invitation to become a member of the institution’s governing Council, and, presumably as a consequence, soon found himself in the unaccustomed role of jury member, initially for the female voice trials, next for woodwind, and in November for piano. His Clarinet Rhapsody is an attractive but well-behaved piece that gives the instrument a few necessary flourishes, but is mainly lyrical in tone and typically on the soft side of mezzo-forte in dynamics. Its test is as much of musicianship as of virtuosity, and when in July 1910 Debussy sat on the jury for the clarinet exam (for which he had also composed the sight-reading test) he noted that ‘one of the participants, Vandercruyssen, played [the rhapsody] by heart and like a great musician. The others were tidy and mediocre.’25

When he was composing with the intensity of this particular midwinter, Debussy cannot have been the easiest of living companions, and at some point early in 1910 matters between him and Emma threatened to come to a head. ‘My life’, he wrote to Durand at the end of March, ‘is still in the same sad mess’, and three months later:

Those around me insist on not understanding that I have never been able to live in the reality of things and people, from which comes this invincible need to escape into myself, into experiences that seem inexplicable because I reveal there a person nobody knows, and which is perhaps the best of me! Besides, an artist is by definition someone accustomed to dreaming and who lives among phantoms … How can they want this same person to be able to conduct himself in daily life in strict observance of traditions, laws, and other obstacles placed in his way by a cowardly and hypocritical world? In the end I live in memory and regret, a sad pair of companions! But they are more faithful than joy and happiness.26

Plainly there had been scenes, and at some point Emma consulted a divorce lawyer. ‘I’m still hesitating,’ she wrote. ‘I’m waiting … It will cost me so much to separate from this man who makes me suffer so inexpressibly – alas, I shall never lack reasons.’27 Her health suffered as much as her morale, and their finances were increasingly precarious. Her alimony together with the modest bequest from her uncle covered their rent and not much more, and though Debussy’s retainer from Durand kept them from starvation, his working methods were hardly such as might augment it enough to fund their bourgeois lifestyle. No wonder he tended to exaggerate progress on works such as Le Diable dans le beffroi and L’Histoire de Tristan; they were a useful source of cash advances, which he knew would never be called in. Somehow the couple kept afloat, buoyed up, perhaps, by Chouchou, who puts in ever more frequent appearances in the composer’s letters, as a sort of child muse, and a handy way of deflecting the heavy mood of reality. His letters to Emma, meanwhile, suggest that his affection for her never seriously wavered. It was just that his work meant even more to him, and that was a cross for her to bear.

The mood of suppressed anger is curiously reflected in the first of a group of three settings of the fifteenth-century gangster poet François Villon that Debussy made in May 1910. ‘False beauty that costs me so dear,’ the poet rages. ‘Coarse behaviour, hypocritical tenderness’, and so on with unremitting fury for four long verses, each one ending with the same piteous complaint, ‘Sans empirer, ung povre secourir’ – ‘to succour a poor man, without ruining him’. Of course, the boot was on the other foot in the Debussy household, but the pen as usual was in the hand of the husband. In all three songs, the Trois Ballades de François Villon, the poet’s brilliant verse brings the best out of the composer, and these are not only some of his most dazzling songs, but they are also among his cleverest and most subtly intellectual. Not only does he pick up many technical nuances in the poems, but he also refers the songs to his own recent music, including the Préludes.

The ‘Ballad of Villon to his beloved’ (‘Faulse beauté, qui tant me couste cher’) starts with an acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out, first, the poet’s own name – François – and then the name of the wretched girl – Marthe – whose ‘perfidious charm is the death of a poor heart’. Debussy’s answer to this is to refer, consciously or unconsciously, to his own Des pas sur la neige, with its trudging snap rhythm and its air of sorrowful reproach. The figure dominates the piano part, while the words are set in free Pelléas recitative, but always carefully responding to (without rigidly respecting) the poetic metre. In the same way, the accompaniment includes reprises not matched to the verse form, except for the last line of each verse, which is set always – with minor variants – to the same music. Thus Debussy echoes something of the formality of the poem, but also its vigorous, half-suppressed rage.

The other two songs present a complete contrast. The second, ‘Ballad composed by Villon at his mother’s request to pray to Our Lady’, emerges from the same world as La Fille aux cheveux de lin with a simple, tender unaccompanied melody, but quickly goes religious, with open modal harmonies and parallel chords in the archaic manner of Pelléas or the first Bilitis song, but without the sensuality. Here, too, each verse ends with a line of refrain: ‘En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir’ (‘In this faith I would live and die’), which Debussy treats like an Amen, with a plagal cadence as in the prelude, interrupted the first two times, then resolved the third time, an effect of extraordinarily touching simplicity.

Finally the ‘Ballad of the women of Paris’ is a sparkling catalogue song, like Leporello’s list of Don Giovanni’s conquests, or Hugo Wolf’s ‘Ich hab’ in Penna’. The Florentine and Venetian girls may talk nicely; Lombards, Romans, Neapolitans may make good conversation; but for repartee and backchat, for a good sharp tongue, the Parisiennes are in a class of their own. The song whizzes along from one idea to the next, somewhat in the manner of La Sérénade interrompue, each group neatly characterised (‘Have I included enough places?’ Villon asks at one point), but always, in the end, ‘Il n’est bon bec que de Paris’ to the same music, yet another refrain ending to formalise the total effect. Was this a compliment to Emma or a warning to her? The awful truth is that her Claude probably wasn’t even thinking of her.

At about the same time, or possibly somewhat later, he put together a second cycle of three songs on ancient texts, Le Promenoir des deux amants, using an existing song, ‘Auprès de cette grotte sombre’ from the Trois Chansons de France, as launching pad for two more settings of the same poet, Tristan l’Hermite. Oddly enough the old song was the original of the footprint motive in Des pas sur la neige that Debussy had just revisited in his first Villon ballade. The new settings are both short, elegant but somewhat inconsequential love songs, ballads in the romantic sense but updated in harmonic style. Here Debussy does seem to have been thinking of Emma, since he dedicated the cycle to her, thereby hopefully identifying the ‘two lovers’ of the title.

There is more substance, though, in the unlikely-sounding shape of an isolated piano piece he composed probably towards the end of 1910. La plus que lente (‘The Slower than Slow’) is a valse triste, a slow dance that inevitably packs a gently ironic punch, but is beautiful and affecting in its way. Though of prelude length, it would presumably have been out of place among the pieces collected under that title, lacking the objective character that seems to bind the actual preludes into a set. Debussy marked it ‘con morbidezza’, a piece of hyperbole that forbids what might otherwise seem a natural enough assumption – that the piece was written in memory of his father, who died in October 1910.