At the age of fifty, Debussy had achieved success as a composer. His music was in the repertoire of the Ballets Russes and the main Paris orchestras, he was in demand to conduct it both there and abroad, and on 23 August 1912, the day after his fiftieth birthday, he completed the initial draft of his major new Diaghilev commission. His music was argued over, and sometimes abused, in the press (probably the best an innovative composer could hope for), and was admired and imitated by younger composers. He even bore an official stamp. He had the Légion d’honneur, was on the Council of the Conservatoire and a regular juror for its competitions. His performances did not, it’s true, provoke riots, unlike that of the real pacemakers, the Stravinskys (Rite of Spring, 29 May 1913), or the Schoenbergs, Bergs and Weberns (the Vienna Skandalkonzert, 31 March 1913). It was strange but not threatening, dissonant but not noisy: it wouldn’t remotely have fitted his own witty description of The Rite of Spring as ‘savage music with all modern conveniences’.1 Instead it seemed to have struck a perfect balance between the novel and the familiar, like the best modern domestic architecture, which borrowed vernacular styles to create a sense of the new without completely disrupting the old.

Out of the public gaze, however, all was far from well. For some time Debussy had been in fragile health, ever since having to cancel concerts in Manchester and Edinburgh in March 1909 as a result of what he referred to as ‘almost daily haemorrhages’. He frequently complained of nervous exhaustion and, quite apart from the effects of overwork, the incessant worrying over detail and the pressure of unmeetable deadlines, he did not live a healthy life. He smoked and, perhaps, drank to excess, and he took almost no exercise.2 To what extent these troubles were early signs of the rectal cancer that eventually killed him has been a matter of dispute. Lesure and others have routinely assumed so, but Debussy’s most recent biographer, Eric Jensen, discussed the question with a cancer specialist and concluded that the cancer ‘would have had to spread at an astonishingly slow rate for Debussy to have continued a normal life [as he more or less did] until 1915’. On the other hand, Jensen mentions ‘substantial bleeding’ as an early indication of rectal cancer, which might seem to lend significance to the ‘almost daily haemorrhages’ of 1909.3

Emma’s health also was up and down; she too had been ill in England, and there were frequent relapses. It’s tempting here to look for psychological factors, if not actual malingering. Emma did not like her husband’s absences, and seems not to have been above exaggerating the illness and misery they brought down on her. Eventually, in July 1913, her doctor ‘strongly advised’ a season at Vichy for the waters, and, in Debussy’s opinion, she was making the most of this highly inconvenient and expensive prognosis. ‘With a nature as impressionable as hers,’ he wrote to Durand,

you will guess what this can leave behind in terms of heavy moments and thoughts unspoken by either of us. It’s intolerable and disobliging. To do battle with oneself alone is nothing! But to do battle ‘en famille’ becomes odious! Add to that the domestic demands of a former luxury, which she finds it hard to understand has now become impossible to sustain.4

Emma had put a stop to his Boston trip in 1911, and when, at the end of 1913, he went to Russia for two weeks, she evidently let him know in advance what unhappiness it would cause her. A string of telegrams from him along the way expressed, surely, her distress more than his, even though he certainly was not himself one of nature’s travellers, except of course in the mind.

Everything was made harder by their financial troubles, which, despite the fat advances from Maud Allan and Gabriele D’Annunzio, had gone steadily from bad to worse. Sometimes the shortage took extravagant forms. At one point in January 1912 Debussy asked Laloy if he knew anyone who could lend him 20,000 francs, the equivalent of his entire contract with D’Annunzio. At about the same time he borrowed 5,000 francs from Henry Russell, the director of the Boston Opera, whom he had been forced by Emma to let down, a debt he was never able to repay and had eventually to renounce. He continually took advances from Durand, sometimes against works that had little or no chance of ever seeing the light of day. His nominal debt to his publisher simply grew and grew, until on the day he died it amounted, according to Lesure, to 66,000 francs. To his eternal credit, Durand seems never to have made trouble over this money, trusting – no doubt rightly – that it would be repaid many times over by Debussy’s music. During his lifetime, however, the composer repaid him only with his (admittedly expensive) loyalty.

It was presumably to help with the exchequer (though also, he told Godet, ‘to try to rediscover the values that arbitrary judgements and capricious interpretations have falsified’5) that, towards the end of 1912, he once again took up reviewing, this time for the monthly S.I.M journal. Since his Gil Blas days he had published the occasional article and a number of interviews, but had not had a regular column. He now wrote in every issue of the journal from November 1912 to May 1913 (except, for some reason, April), then again from November to March the following season. As before, he reviewed erratically, picking up some events but not others, and in the main using his column to grind his favourite axes, which were by and large the same ones as before. Of M. Croche there is now no sign, until in the Annales politiques et littéraires of May 1913 Debussy used a short note on the Wagner centenary to refer back to the old dragon’s passing. The late M. Croche, he remembers, ‘was in the habit of calling the tetralogy [The Ring] “The A to Z of the gods”. An irreverent enough formula, but one that can nevertheless serve to emphasise that, if the Wagnerian art no longer exerts the same influence on French music, it will still be necessary to consult this admirable directory for a long time to come.’6

The note encapsulates his continuing obsessions, with Wagner on the one hand, and with old French music on the other. ‘Why’, he asks the readers of the S.I.M. journal, ‘are we so indifferent to our great Rameau? To Destouches, virtually unknown? To Couperin, the most poetic of our harpsichordists, whose tender melancholy is like some adorable echo from the mysterious depths of those landscapes where Watteau’s characters grow sad.’7 He proposes the formation of a Rameau Society, but then, two months later, satirises the whole fuss about ‘precursors’. ‘According to the latest cosmogonical researches,’ he observes with mock earnestness, ‘it seems certain that the monkey was the precursor of mankind … The profession of precursor has followed a development parallel to that of music, that’s to say that the more music has been made, the more precursors there have been. If any epoch lacked them, the next epoch invented them.’8 Essentially this is a jibe at the teaching of old methods as if past composers had ever consciously applied them. For instance, the crisis in French dramatic music as he sees it is due to the fact that ‘it has wrongly interpreted the Wagnerian ideal and has tried to extract from it a formula that doesn’t suit our race. Wagner was not a good teacher of French.’9 And even his beloved Palestrina, whose music he had studied before writing the choral last act of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, has to be superseded, one feels, because of his music’s role in the teaching of counterpoint. So ‘Javanese music observes a counterpoint next to which that of Palestrina is mere child’s play.’10 In every case, he is talking about music he loves while deploring the use to which it has been put, and perhaps he is also reassuring himself that his own meticulous re-creation of musical language has not simply been a waste of time. ‘The century of aeroplanes’, he insists, no doubt with half a thought for the Futurists Pratella and Russolo, ‘has a right to its own music.’11

*

In June 1912, Debussy had attended a ceremony inaugurating a commemorative plaque to Stéphane Mallarmé on his old house in the rue de Rome. Then a few months later, early in 1913, a complete edition of the master’s verse had been published by the Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. One might reasonably suppose that it was this concatenation of events that prompted Debussy to set some of Mallarmé’s poetry to music, something he had done only once before, in the early song ‘Apparition’ of 1884.12 Or had he somehow heard on the Paris grapevine of a similar project of Ravel’s and decided to compete, or even pre-empt? In March 1913 Ravel had visited Stravinsky in Clarens to work on their joint contribution to Musorgsky’s unfinished opera Khovanshchina, which Diaghilev was presenting in his Paris season that year. Stravinsky had shown Ravel his recently completed Three Japanese Lyrics, with their faint echoes of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which Stravinsky had heard in Berlin in December, and Ravel seems to have decided there and then to compose a cycle of three Mallarmé songs accompanied by the same little band as Stravinsky’s (two flutes, two clarinets, string quartet and piano), with a view to a Paris concert that would include the two works and the Schoenberg and would ‘stir up a row’. The curious aspect of this coincidence – if coincidence it were – is that, out of the large repertoire of possibilities, Debussy chose to set two of the same poems as Ravel, ‘Soupir’ and ‘Placet futile’, even though neither poem contains anything particularly suggestive of music, apart from a metaphorical shepherd’s flute in the penultimate line of ‘Placet futile’.

Debussy completed his set of three songs with piano, ending with ‘Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé’, in July, and handed them over to Durand, who at once pointed out that the poems were in copyright and he would have to get permission for the songs’ publication from the poet’s son-in-law, Edmond Bonniot. Bonniot, however, had already granted this permission to Ravel, and refused Debussy. ‘This business of the Mallarmé family and Ravel is not very amusing,’ Debussy grumbled to Durand, ‘and anyway isn’t it strange that Ravel chose exactly the same poems as I did? It’s a case of auto-suggestion worth communicating to the Academy of Medicine.’13 But in the end it was thanks to Ravel’s intervention (or so he claimed) that Bonniot finally agreed to the publication of both sets.

The two composers’ settings have in fact relatively little in common, even allowing for the very different accompaniment. At times the differences are even stark. Both cycles begin with ‘Soupir’ (‘A Sigh’), but while Ravel imagines this as a generalised autumnal rustle of string harmonics, Debussy leaves the first and third lines of the poem completely unaccompanied and introduces any kind of external imagery only for the ‘blanc jet d’eau’, the white fountain of water, in line 5. In ‘Placet futile’ (‘Futile Petition’) the textures are less distinct, but almost every decision about prosody and metre differs, and sometimes there are such opposite choices that one almost suspects collusion. For instance, the first word of ‘Placet futile’, the invocatory ‘Princesse’, is set each time by Ravel as a rising minor sixth, by Debussy as a falling minor (later major) sixth; the futile petition itself, ‘Nommez nous’ (‘Name us’), three times reiterated, is set by Ravel always as a falling figure, by Debussy always rising. For Ravel, the poet’s insistence that he is neither her ‘bearded lapdog, nor her sweetmeat, nor her rouge, nor her fragile plaything’ is a word in her ear, soft and insinuating; for Debussy it is a moment of irritation, a wave of the arm, a gesture of impatience.

These poems of Mallarmé are unlike anything Debussy had ever set before. In Baudelaire and Verlaine the metaphors might be elaborate and fanciful, but the sense was nearly always clear. Maeterlinck, for all his characters’ curious habitat and often odd behaviour, seldom strayed beyond the syntax and vocabulary of the suburban drawing room. If Villon and Charles d’Orléans were occasionally more opaque, theirs was merely the opacity of the antique. Mallarmé, however, in his exploration of the interface between sense and sound, will often enter a poetic world in which surface meaning is provisional, a network of double entendres, intimations, verbal patterns and grammatical ambiguities that challenge the reader, and a fortiori the composer, to extract (or impose) a single thread of interpretation, or simply to report with absolute certainty exactly what is being said. Many of his successors in these respects wrote in English: Eliot, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and others. But their writing is generally more allusive, more acquisitive, less pure – as Mallarmé would probably have said – than his, and hence, up to a point, easier to understand.

The three Mallarmé poems set by Debussy are modest examples of the genre: lyrics, one might say, viewed in a Symbolist prism, and Debussy responds to them accordingly. He sets them, that is, as scattered lyrics, but not in any particular sense as avant-garde poetry calling for a linguistic upheaval. More than usual with him, ‘Soupir’ is a montage of keyboard gestures, more or less prompted by the text line by line, while the voice rides the words in a flexible, expressive, lyrical style, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to follow the subject (‘My soul’) with a network of indirect object clauses, and make the verb (‘Rises’) wait three whole lines before clinching the sense of the image. But Debussy is not so naive as that description might suggest. The silences in the piano part are indeed waiting for the verb, which – when it comes – sets off the fountain as if it had thrown a switch. Now the music knows what the soul is doing, it can help it, with a ‘jet d’eau’ figure that ‘sighs towards the Azure’ in octaves like the ones in the Baudelaire song of that name.

Mallarmé’s ‘Placet futile’ is more lucid in its syntax if not always in its expression. The poem is a pastiche of an eighteenth-century sonnet, and its images are neoclassical: Hebe (the cup-bearer of the gods), Sèvres vases, the bearded lapdog already mentioned, the shepherd of the princess’s smiles that the poet hopes to become, and Debussy matches all this with a gentle, subtly witty pastiche of his own, modal, faintly rustic, coloured by simple chord parallels, formally transparent like the poem itself. Finally, the most ambiguous and harmonically refined of the three songs, ‘Éventail’ (‘A Fan’), is a setting of one of a pair of poems supposedly inspired by fans belonging to Mallarmé’s daughter, Geneviève; the poem’s title is ‘Autre éventail (de Mademoiselle Mallarmé)’. I say ‘supposedly’ because the imagery is by no means devoid of erotic nuance: the space that ‘quivers like a big kiss’, the ‘fierce paradise’ that ‘flows from the corner of your mouth’, etc. Admittedly it is the fan speaking, not the father, but in any case Debussy responds to these strong thoughts with harmony that at times verges on the atonal, while on the other hand much else in the song is a linear montage of figures responding, presumably, to the capricious flickings and wavings of the fan itself, ‘au pur delice, sans chemin’ (‘purely by whim, without a goal’).

Apart from a single pièce d’occasion, these songs are the last Debussy composed, and they stand somewhat apart from his most recent works for voice, the settings of Villon and Tristan l’Hermite, and the pseudo-medievalisms of D’Annunzio. Compared with his last setting of modern French verse, ‘Colloque sentimental’ in the second book of Fêtes galantes (1904), they might even seem trivial, though they make up in refinement for what they lack in weight. Above all, they are almost Debussy’s most modern-sounding music. They could not be more remote in style from the recent Stravinsky that he knew, but they surely reflect his general experience of the up-to-date in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, rather than Schoenberg, whom he knew only by repute. When, a year or two later, he suggested to Godet that Stravinsky was ‘leaning dangerously in the Schoenberg direction’, he was probably thinking of the Japanese Lyrics and The King of the Stars (which was dedicated to him). But by his own confession, he had never heard any Schoenberg, had tried to read one of his string quartets in score, but had not managed it. It was merely a certain consciousness of the way things were going that prompted the thought, and that was beginning, to an extent, to invade his own music.14

Meanwhile, with Jeux over and done with (literally so in the case of Nijinsky’s production, which was never revived), Debussy was soon involved with other theatre projects. The Laloy version of Crimen amoris, now known as Fêtes galantes, was still theoretically on the table, though somewhere towards the back of it, where in fact it stayed, apart from a page or two of sketches, until firmly abandoned in favour of The Fall of the House of Usher in 1915. Mourey’s Tristan project had long since fallen by the wayside, but he had remained a fertile source of other suggestions, one of which, a stage version of the myth of Psyche, was still in the air in 1913. Mourey had wanted Debussy to compose incidental music as long ago as 1909, but he had resisted. ‘Imagine what genius would be needed’, he said to Mourey, ‘to rejuvenate this old myth, already so exploited that it seems to me that Cupid’s wing feathers have all been pulled out by it.’15 He did nevertheless agree to compose a piece for solo flute called La Flûte de Pan, to be played in the wings as the god Pan lies dying on the stage. The task proved harder than he might have expected. Having obviously supposed that writing a short single-line piece would be the work of a day or so, he had to admit to Mourey towards the end of November that ‘I haven’t yet finished, and to tell the truth it’s simply a matter of finishing what, as everyone knows, is the very devil’.16 He did get it done, though, and the piece was duly included, as intended, in a performance of Mourey’s play at the house of the car manufacturer Louis Mors in December 1913.

Syrinx, as the piece was renamed when published in 1927 (presumably to avoid confusion with the first of the Chansons de Bilitis), is an immaculate realisation of Debussy’s ideas about arabesque. The decorative line remains melodic throughout, avoiding bravura and implied counterpoint almost entirely. Nor does it make much use of the flute’s upper register. Like the flute solo in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, it leans constantly towards the instrument’s lower octave, with its husky, erotic colouring and, like that work, it makes suggestive play with chromatic lines in which flats (or sharps) and naturals alternate: for instance at the start, B flat followed by A natural, B natural, then A flat, a kind of sinuous curve that breathes sensuality. In its context, and as the only music heard all evening, Syrinx must have created an atmosphere out of all proportion to its scale. Its subsequent history as an exam piece and the subject of analytical papers (not to mention as blueprint for a seemingly endless succession of solo flute pieces at festivals of modern music) is one of the less amiable consequences of Debussy’s adoption as a hero of the post-war French musical avant-garde.

Much of Debussy’s time since Jeux had in fact been taken up with a theatre piece of a very different kind, a ‘ballet for children’ called La Boîte à joujoux (‘The Toybox’), based on a children’s illustrated book of that name by André Hellé. Hellé had contacted the composer with the ballet idea back in February, and Debussy, with little Chouchou constantly in his mind and under his gaze, had immediately pricked up his ears. After signing a contract with Durand in July, he entered into the work’s spirit more wholeheartedly than he had ever done before with a proposal from outside. He told his publisher that he was ‘snatching secrets from Chouchou’s old dolls, and learning to play the drum, with La Boîte à joujoux in mind’, and he wrote to Hellé enthusing about his designs (‘Do I have to send them back? Despite my regret at doing so!’17). By 7 August he had almost finished the first tableau, or so he told Hellé, and on the 11th he wrote to Durand that he was ‘constantly in La Boîte à joujoux’. ‘I’ve tried’, he assured Durand a little later, ‘to be clear and even “amusing”, without pose, and without needless acrobatics.’18 By the end of October the piano score was complete, and all that remained, apart from the orchestration, was to decide who would perform it: whether it would be puppets, as Debussy initially preferred, or children, as Hellé wanted, or common-or-garden ballet dancers, as eventually happened when the work had its belated premiere, almost two years after Debussy’s death, at the Théâtre Lyrique du Vaudeville in Paris.

Anyone who has seen Hellé’s colourful and witty illustrations, especially of animals and various toy characters and objects – soldiers, dolls, ships, windmills, etc. – will have some feeling of what Debussy was aiming at when he complained to Hellé that ‘my music doesn’t have the charming simplicity of outline that your drawings have’.19 To an interviewer he called the simplicity ‘enfantine’, which means ‘childish’ but without the English term’s pejorative undertones. And he gave a sketch of the plot that catches the mood.

A cardboard soldier falls in love with a doll; he tries to reveal it to her; but the pretty girl deceives him with a polichinelle. The soldier finds out and horrible things result: a fight between wooden soldiers and polichinelles. To cut a long story short, the pretty doll’s admirer is badly wounded in the battle. The doll looks after him and … it all ends happily.20

Originally there were three tableaux: ‘The Toyshop’, ‘The Battlefield’, ‘Sheep Farm for Sale’ (some editions divide the third tableau, making a fourth: ‘Happy Ever After – Epilogue’). In the first we meet various toys, including an elephant who dances to what Debussy calls ‘an old Hindu chant that to this day serves to tame elephants. It is built on the scale of “five o’clock in the morning”, so has to be in five-four time’;21 also an English soldier, who marches about to the tune of Debussy’s piano piece, ‘The Little Nigar’. The pretty doll dances a waltz (somewhat in the genre of the ballerina’s waltzes in Petrushka), drops a flower at the cardboard soldier’s feet, but then goes off with the polichinelle. At the start of Tableau II the doll and the polichinelle are canoodling, but soon a platoon of toy soldiers marches in to the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’s Faust, followed by a band of polichinelles, and there is a battle, at the end of which the soldier, still with the flower, lies wounded, and is tended to by the pretty doll. Tableau III is introduced by a fragment of the nursery rhyme, ‘Il était une bergère’, and the curtain rises on a dilapidated sheep farm with a for-sale board; the soldier has his arm in a sling, the pretty doll buys two sheep off a passing shepherd and two geese off a goose-girl, and suddenly, to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, the scene changes and we are twenty years on, soldier and doll have been fruitful, have multiplied, grown fat, and bought a comfortable chalet, and the polichinelle is the local policeman. But alas all games come to an end, and in the Epilogue the toys are all back in their box and, as the curtain falls, the cardboard soldier pokes his head out and salutes.

In Jeux the action, though apparently trivial, was integrated, and invited a continuous, non-episodic kind of music. La Boîte à joujoux is obviously a very different affair: an anecdotal story ballet in the tradition of Giselle or Coppelia, written for children (to enjoy, if not perform), but to some degree tongue in cheek, scattered with more or less ironic quotations that would fly well over most children’s heads. There are admittedly also folk songs, nursery rhymes, a fragment of our old friend ‘Dodo, l’enfant do’ and a handful of leitmotifs – a fanfare for the soldier, a graceful waltz theme for the doll, a menacing, discordant theme for the polichinelle – that children will recognise instantly. Here and there are faint reminders of Petrushka, not only in the three central characters (compare Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Moor), but in the type, if not the style, of music Debussy attaches to them. Yet, as a whole, the music is as French as Hellé’s drawings, colourful, witty and stylish, concise, never exaggerated, absurd but never vulgar. It hardly adds up to one of Debussy’s greatest works, but it certainly deserves more performance than it gets, and the only sad thing about it is that, as with Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and Khamma, he orchestrated only part of it himself – an extremely small part in this case – and the rest was scored, very skilfully, after his death by the long-suffering Caplet.

One other theatre project reared its head towards the end of 1913 but soon sank under the weight of outside events. This was a ballet called Le Palais du silence, which was commissioned by the director of the Alhambra Theatre in London, André Charlot, as part of one of those curious mixed Edwardian revues that combined popular music-hall turns with more serious semi-classical items. This particular revue was aptly titled Not Likely!

The Palace of Silence is in Formosa, where Prince Hong-Lo, dumb from birth, has imposed silence on his entire realm, the penalty for speaking being death. Unfortunately for him (and her), he has fallen in love with a captive princess turned slave-girl, No-Ja-Li, who, not surprisingly, is less than entirely happy at the restriction on speech, while Hong-Lo is inhibited by his affliction from declaring himself. Somehow this impasse is resolved and the scenario, by Georges de Feure, ends happily. But Debussy never managed to compose more than a few brief stretches of the supposedly twenty-minute score. In November he merrily signed a contract that gave him a desperately needed 10,000 francs on signature and promised a further 10,000 on delivery and 5,000 on first performance. But in December he was travelling to Russia on a two-week conducting tour; there were other conducting trips, to Rome and Amsterdam, in February, and though he seems to have worked on the score a certain amount during January, by April (with the performance scheduled for early May) it had become apparent that the deadline could not be met. Instead he gave Charlot his early Printemps, one of his Rome envois, orchestrated by Henri Busser. And when Charlot returned to the idea of what was now called No-Ja-Li in October 1914, Debussy declined to have anything to do with it, ‘until the fate of France is decided, since she can neither laugh nor cry while so many of our men are heroically getting themselves smashed up’.22

Robert Orledge is no doubt right that the oriental setting, complete with masks and gamelan orchestra, was in theory right up Debussy’s street. But in practice it looks as if he may have struggled to escape from the conventional musical ping-pong of parallel fourths and pentatonic melodies, in the manner of Pagodes. In any case this kind of orientalism was less à la mode in 1913 than it had been in the 1880s when, again according to Orledge, the scenario was probably written, or even in 1903, when Pagodes was. As usual with Debussy’s aborted theatre projects, one senses a lack of real engagement, an initial willingness exposed by his infallible artistic instinct.23

Russia was by far the most distant land that he ever visited, and on this, his third trip, he went under something of a cloud created by his own equivocations. He had been invited separately by the conductors Alexander Ziloti and Serge Koussevitzky, each of whom had his own orchestra; he had agreed to appear for Ziloti, but then for some reason stood him up in favour of Koussevitzky. Ziloti himself was in no doubt as to Debussy’s motive. ‘Since he “sells himself” like a street girl on the Nevsky Prospect,’ he grumbled to Stravinsky (of all people), ‘and has gone where they gave him the most money, forgetting that I have played all his new things, and Koussevitzky none of them, then there’s nothing more to be said.’24 To Debussy himself he had been not much less direct.

I must admit that your decision has dealt a huge blow to my morale and it’s one of the biggest disillusions of my artistic life. First you promised to come to me, then you refused for lack of time to make such a long voyage, then you made the same promise to Koussevitzky, then, knowing this would upset me, you refused to come at all so as not to ‘offend’ either of us, and then you have definitively accepted Koussevitzky, while proposing to come to me afterwards (!!!). So, you have decided, after first giving me your word, to hand the great honour of your visit to Koussevitzky, and leave the ‘offence’ to me. It’s not good when any particular person doesn’t keep his word, but when it’s done by a musician like you, it’s ‘lèse-genius’: you’ve forgotten that if noblesse oblige, all the more does génie oblige.25

It was true that it was mainly because of the money that Debussy went to Russia at all, and perhaps if Ziloti had had sight of his bank statements or his begging letters he might have been slightly less censorious about his motives. But it was also true that Debussy could be as pragmatic in his professional dealings as he had sometimes been with the women in his life. On the other hand, his treatment of working musicians seems to have been exemplary, and the concerts were an unmitigated triumph with both orchestra and audiences. He conducted two enormous (identical) programmes of his own music, one in St Petersburg on 10 December, one in Moscow on the 13th, and after the Moscow concert the players wrote him a moving, plainly sincere (not ‘official’) thank you:

Illustrious Maître, we have long been impatiently awaiting the moment when you would come and conduct your works, we have long anticipated the joy we would experience exploring with you the captivating charm of everything you have created, and our expectations have not been disappointed … We have lived with you through days that will never leave our memory, and that will remain with us as a festival, as a radiation of light that will forever illuminate our musical careers.26

Somewhat less appreciative of his Russian trip was his wife, Emma, who – to judge by his replies – wrote to him in a bitterly resentful tone, accusing him of neglecting her in favour of his music, of not loving her, of deserting her, etc., etc. It is not clear that she ever enquired about Russia or the Russians, nor did he vouchsafe much of that kind of information. ‘Your letter’, he wrote from St Petersburg after his concert there, ‘gave me so much misery that I’ve waited till now to reply.’

She had written (we know, because he quotes it back at her): ‘I don’t know how I will manage not to go on resenting your music’, to which he replied:

First, as between you and music, if there’s anyone who could be jealous, it’s music! And if I continue to make it and love it, it’s because I’m indebted to it – this music that you treat so badly – for having got to know you, love you, and so forth!28

The ‘so forth’ wrote more sweetly, and Debussy replied in kind. ‘It’s very sad to be deprived for so many days of seeing your pretty little Chouchou face, of hearing your songs, your outbursts of laughter, and lastly all that noise that sometimes makes you an unbearable little person, but most often a charming one.’ And he added, ‘Be nice to your poor little Maman; do everything you can to stop her getting too upset.’29

*

For various reasons 1914 would be a frustratingly unproductive year for Debussy. Early on there were the abortive theatre projects, Fêtes galantes – still theoretically alive though soon abandoned – and No-Ja-Li, which he effectively gave up in April, supposedly telling Charles Koechlin, ‘You compose it and I’ll sign it.’ There were concerts: in Rome and Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and of course Paris. His health was poor, and he was in low spirits. His mother, too, was ill, apparently dying. To Godet, in July, he mentioned an accident, which had had ‘the most tiresome consequences: flu; shingles, which attacks the nerves frightfully; in the end, for four and a half months I’ve done precisely nothing! Naturally these things cause miserable domestic worries and times when one can hardly see any way out but suicide.’

Then, early in August, there came the ultimate depressant for the world at large.

For Debussy, the outbreak of war merely aggravated a mood that had been bearing down on him for several months. ‘You know I lack sang-froid,’ he told Durand, ‘still less the military spirit – having never had occasion to handle a gun; add to that my memories of 1870, which prevent me from giving way to enthusiasm.’ He felt small and useless. He envied Satie, he said, who was ‘seriously involved, as a corporal, in the defence of Paris’. ‘My age and military aptitudes make me at most good for guarding a palisade.’31 Then there was Emma, beside herself with terror since both her son, Raoul, and her daughter Dolly’s husband were in the army and off to the front. Her fears were, after all, perfectly justified. In the first month of fighting the Germans advanced far into France and more than a hundred thousand French soldiers died. At the start of September, with the German army at Senlis, a mere twenty-five miles north of Paris, the French government abandoned the capital and installed itself at Bordeaux. Not surprisingly, many Parisians also left, and the Debussys, too, packed their bags and took the train to Angers, far to the west on the River Loire.

Debussy himself had not wanted to go; the journey, he informed Durand, had been expensive and disagreeable, and although barely two months earlier he had told his publisher that he was hating Paris more and more, the truth was that he preferred it to anywhere else. In Angers the decent hotels were completely full, and they had to put up in what he called ‘a sort of inn for cattle merchants, distinguished by its absolute disdain for any kind of comfort and by its not very nice bugs’.32 By the beginning of October they were back in Paris, and the Germans, having destroyed Leuven and its historic university library, had been held back at the Marne. The ruthlessness of their advance and the barbarous behaviour of their troops had created general horror, but for musicians it had an additional nuance, in view of the nature of their repertoire. ‘I think we’ll pay dearly’, Debussy wrote to his former pupil Nicolas Coronio, ‘for the right not to love the art of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg.’

As regards Beethoven, it’s just been happily discovered that he was Flemish! As for Wagner, there will be exaggeration! He will retain the glory of having gathered centuries of music into a formula. That’s quite something, and only a German could have attempted it. Our mistake was to try for too long to follow in his footsteps … In other respects, our generation will hardly be able to change its tastes, any more than its forms! What may be curious and contain a few surprises is what the generation that has made the war – in a word, the generation that has ‘marched – will do and think’. French art has a score to settle, just as serious as the other! It has had its Rheims Cathedral for longer …33

Despite all these woes, personal and public, he managed to work on one significant piece over the terrible summer months. It was not a completely new work, but a series of extensions of half a dozen of the short pieces he had composed in 1900 for the tableaux vivants staging of Louÿs’s Bilitis poems. He had planned to compose the pieces up into an orchestral suite under the title Six Épigraphes antiques, but, as he remarked sadly to Durant, ‘the times are hard, and life for me is harder still’, and he never got beyond the version for piano duet that has come down to us.34

Each epigraph takes one of the twelve movements of the musique de scène and, on a reading of the relevant poem, extends it from the (on average) forty-five or fifty seconds of the original to a two-or three-minute keyboard piece. I am merely speculating that Debussy read each poem before composing the music. Neither he nor practically anyone else has ever said so, and the pieces are certainly not programme music.35 But it would have been odd of him not to, and there is some internal evidence. For instance, the first epigraph, ‘Pour invoquer Pan’, based on the piece that accompanied Louÿs’s ‘Chant pastoral’, seems to respond to the poem’s form, with its final repeat of the opening line, and its swifter music for Selenis running in search of grasshoppers and its winding music for Bilitis spinning. In No. 4, ‘Pour la danseuse aux crotales’, the piano (primo) sounds the ‘crotales’ (antique, small cymbals) as a sudden gesture, exactly as in the poem. On the other hand, the final epigraph, ‘Pour remercier la pluie du matin’, keeps the image of the morning rain almost throughout, though the poem abandons it after two verses, and the return, at the end, of the music of the first epigraph is a device from the musique de scène, not from the poem.

Musically, the epigraphs build on the slightly wan charm of the original pieces in the harmonically enriched context of Debussy’s later music. But they are not all enriched. ‘Pour invoquer Pan’ is entirely diatonic in the Dorian mode (that is, no sharps or flats except in the key signature), a model of cool antiquity; however, the second piece, ‘Pour un tombeau sans nom’, stays with the pure whole-tone colouring of the original only for as long as it quotes it, but then switches dramatically into more dissonant music for (perhaps) Bilitis’s shiver of horror when Mnasidika shows her ‘the tomb of my mother’s lover’. No. 3, ‘Pour que la nuit soit propice’, also derives from whole-tone material in the original, but then moves on through a range of contrasting ideas that seem to reflect Bilitis’s journey (in Louÿs’s poem ‘Chant’), down into the plain, beside the river, along the white road to the city of Sardis and its great palace (‘night’ is not mentioned). The crotale dancer then leads to the fifth piece, ‘Pour l’Égyptienne’, the most remote of the six from its supposed source, and tonally the most remote as well, in E flat minor, with chromatic swirls and suitably exotic scales for the Egyptian courtesans, who sit motionless, their hands on their knees, speak bad Greek but do not understand the Lydian tongue of Bilitis and her friends.

Composing these pieces for piano, Debussy is often converting harp and celesta music, and one can hear the twang and tinkle of those instruments and the swirl of the flutes in his delicate writing for piano. One could almost wish, though, that he had composed the Épigraphes antiques for the original Bilitis ensemble, and perhaps it was some intimation of that possibility that led him a year or so later to write his Sonata for flute, viola and harp, which has an antique flavour of its own. One thing that can safely be said about these duet pieces is that they are not war music; anti-war perhaps, but really music that inhabits a world where war is not so much as spoken of or even thought. The naked-by-preference Bilitis in uniform is an image as ludicrous as Parsifal on ice. But Debussy had his own way with oxymoron, and the one other piece he composed in 1914 was a short march for piano with the improbable title Berceuse héroique (Heroic Lullaby), commissioned by the London Daily Telegraph for a volume called King Albert’s Book, in honour of the king of Belgium, the first country to be invaded by the Germans in August 1914. Debussy based his piece on the Belgian national anthem, ‘La Brabançonne’, quoting it literally at one point, and borrowing its solemn, somewhat plodding tempo for his own march in (yet again) E flat minor. But he wrote without enthusiasm, finding the task (he told Godet) ‘very hard, all the more because “La Brabançonne” pours no heroism into the hearts of those not brought up with it’.36

His own heart, he knew, was short on heroism of the virile kind, and in any case at fifty-two he was too old to fight. There was a sort of heroic virtue in the way he composed his music, meticulously and without compromise. But even that seemed now to be failing him. To Godet he confessed to ‘having gone for months no longer knowing what music was …’

In his case, ‘mathematics’ meant editing Chopin’s piano music as part of a new edition of classical works that Durand had set in train in October 1914 as a Gallic counterblast to the heavily footnoted German editions, which were in any case unobtainable on account of the war. Curiously enough, he seems to have undertaken this work willingly and in a truly critical spirit. Years before, he had praised Chopin’s ‘elegance, his facility at “finding” at each step marvellous flowers, with an air of saying: “This is of no importance, and if you like we’ll pass on to something else.”’38 Now he notes the problem of deciding between the variant autograph manuscripts of certain works of Chopin, and prefers to adhere to proof copies corrected in the composer’s own hand. More to the point, perhaps, will have been the impact on his own piano music of this prolonged contact with music that he regarded as ‘among the most beautiful that has ever been written’. Among the works he was editing were the two books of studies, Op. 10 and Op. 25, and almost as soon as he had finished editing the Chopin he was embarking on a set of twelve studies – études – of his own. It seems obvious that his twelve were prompted, if not directly inspired, by Chopin’s twenty-four, even though it turns out he had sketched music that went into the ninth étude, Pour les notes répétées, as well as an abandoned version of Pour les arpèges composés on the train to Angers back in September. The sketches are fragmentary and not yet expressly for études.39

He and Emma were both constantly ill. In February he had flu, was coughing ‘enough to break the heart of old oak trees’, and felt, he told Durand, ‘like a little village after a visit by the Boches’.40 Victorine, his mother, was in the final stages of her long illness and died on 23 March, at the age of seventy-eight. Chouchou had had chickenpox, but by June was a picture of good health, like a peony, her father said. This year she got her way about the seaside – or was it the sea that got its way with the Debussys? In any case, off they went to Pourville on 12 July and, avoiding the hotels and their horrid patrons, stayed in a quiet villa with a garden lent them by friends and appropriately named Mon Coin (‘My Retreat’). Pourville, Debussy told his conductor friend Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, ‘hasn’t changed. The sea is still in the same place, the calm is extraordinary … The people are confident in their ugliness: thieves for sure, but the home-baked bread is excellent.’41 But a few days later the sea ‘is agitated, wants to encroach on the land and bite the rocks, and has tantrums like a little girl, odd for a person of such importance’.42

The admirable thing is the garden … it’s unkempt and hasn’t that proud orderedness of gardens designed by Le Nôtre, but its wildness is well behaved, very nice for those who have no ambition to play at Robinson Crusoe. When you get to the top, you discover a fine extent of sea, enough for you to imagine more – I mean, the infinite sea!43

They hardly dared open a newspaper. ‘I think of that youth of France, stupidly mown down by the merchants of culture – culture of which we have lost forever the glory it ought to bring to our patrimony.’

And now they’re talking of an intervention by the Japanese. Why not by the Martians, while they’re about it? All this can only increase the self-importance of the Boches, who – God knows – don’t need it. And what a terrible reckoning-up afterwards! Why so many guests to eat a cake that isn’t yet cooked?44

To Pourville he brought with him his first completely new work of any substance since La Boîte à joujoux, a two-piano suite called Caprices en blanc et noir, a title apparently inspired by the appearance of the keyboard itself, and by extension the restricted tone colours of the piano. Before leaving Paris he had signed a contract with Durand which included movement titles: ‘Qui reste à sa place’ (from Capulet’s call to the dance in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette), ‘Prince porté des serfs Eolus’ (from Villon’s ‘Ballade contre les ennemis de la France’),45 and ‘Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain’ (the first line of a poem by Charles d’Orléans that Debussy had set as a chorus in 1898). In the end the titles were abandoned, then reappeared as part of longer epigraphs at the head of each movement. But the music itself was suddenly flowing, and within less than a fortnight of his arriving at Mon Coin, the suite, now called simply En blanc et noir, was finished – fifteen minutes of music composed in barely a month.

Out of the blue, it announces a new phase in Debussy’s work. Not only is it his first multi-movement piano work since Pour le piano, but the individual movements are structured in a way that refer back, not to the image idea that has dominated his music since at least the turn of the century, but beyond, to the classical sonata tradition of evolving and contrasting themes presented as a balanced discourse. Debussy told Godet not to worry his head over hidden meanings in En blanc et noir. ‘These pieces’, he said, ‘aim to derive their colour, their emotion, purely from the piano – along the lines of the “greys” of Velázquez.’46 The exuberant first movement is, most strikingly, a rhythmic study, but with varied themes and textures worked into a kind of trace sonata form, a point one would not bother to make if it were not indicative of a specific change in Debussy’s attitude to his material. Exactly as in a conventional sonata movement, one is aware of a process of contrast and resolution. The piece is in triple time throughout, but this is disguised at first by the way the arpeggios force their way across the barlines into what amounts to quadruple time, then into a slow three (across two bars – so-called hemiola), so that when the metric fog finally clears and we realise the piece is a quick waltz, we at the same time register a change in the formal texture – a new moment. Debussy then proceeds to play with this metric conflict with superb energy and control. Not a trace here of the ‘builder of gloomy towers’ of a year ago. This is a music of pure release, bright morning after dark night.

In the second movement, however, night returns, and so, to some extent, do ideas beyond the pure black and white of the keyboard. We may choose to read the epigraph to the first movement (‘He who stays put, and does not dance …’) as a slight on those who, like Debussy himself, were taking no part in the war; there is no support for this in the music. But the epigraph to the slow movement, as well as its dedication to Durand’s nephew Jacques Charlot, who had died in March leading his men into battle, relates directly to the music’s content. The piece is openly an image of war: it has threatening military noises, fanfares, sinister marches (the enemy), a joyous march (our chaps); it has fragments of the ‘Marseillaise’ and of other similar tunes that might or might not be patriotic songs, and most famously and prominently of all it has the Lutheran chorale ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Herr’ (‘A Stronghold Sure is our God’), treated – somewhat ambivalently – as an image of German culture on the march. Debussy had trouble with this movement, mainly over the issue of how much of the chorale to include. ‘It was getting too black,’ he told Durand, ‘and almost as tragic as a Goya Capricho.’ He altered this aspect two or three times, but eventually declared himself happy with the piece. ‘It is’, he said, ‘perhaps the most original [trouvé].’47

The finale reverts to the coruscating abstraction of the first movement, with little obvious reference to its Charles d’Orléans superscription, except perhaps to the wit of the whole poem, which accuses winter of being nothing but snow, wind, rain and ice, and wants it sent into exile (perhaps to England, where the poem’s author spent twenty-four years as a prisoner of war). Here the writing for two pianos is of exceptional verve and brilliance, with great variety of texture, but also some lovely melody that at times, oddly, recalls Fauré. Although the harmony, in all three movements of En blanc et noir, hardly goes beyond what Debussy had already established as his personal vocabulary (even the bitonal treatment of the fanfares and chorale in the second movement has a precedent in La Boîte à joujoux), there is a freedom of utterance here that proclaims the mastery of the mature genius, who, even as his body is giving out, can still hit mental targets that, in Schopenhauer’s wonderful image, others can’t even see.