By dying in 1918, Debussy unintentionally located himself at a turning-point of history. The war still had more than seven months to run and, in March, was by no means settled in its outcome. But years have a numerical force independent of months, and in any case the artistic antennae were already out – had been out for some time – feeling for the war’s end and its aftermath. The previous May Debussy had attended Satie’s ballet Parade but had pointedly failed to mention it in his congratulatory letter to Diaghilev, partly no doubt because of his recent feud with Satie, but perhaps also because he sensed something in the piece – with its surreal fragments of modern life reimagined as a vulgar circus performance – that foretold his demise. Within weeks of his death, a little book came out – not much more than a pamphlet – that would have told him the same story in words of not many syllables; it was written by the author of the scenario of Parade, twenty-eight-year-old Jean Cocteau. The pamphlet was called Le Coq et l’Arlequin, and while punning with approval on its author’s name (‘the cock says Cocteau twice and lives on his farm’), it identified Harlequin with fuzzy nocturnal romanticism and proceeded to dismiss, with or without qualification, the music that he, Cocteau, chose to associate with that image. ‘The nightingale’, it said, ‘sings badly.’1

Debussy was a prime target, along with Wagner, Schoenberg (‘blackboard music’), other assorted Germans, with some cautious side-swipes at Stravinsky. The pamphlet’s unequivocal hero is Satie. ‘Satie’, it announced, ‘teaches the greatest audacity of our time: to be simple.’

As the war dragged on, the romantic past, with its epic symphonies and grand operas, its Xanadus and Ozymandiuses, not to mention its octopuses, seemed to recede further and further into irrelevance. ‘Enough of clouds,’ said Cocteau, ‘waves, aquaria, of ondines and perfumes of the night; we need a music on solid ground, a music of every day. Enough of hammocks and garlands and gondolas! I want someone to build me a music I can live in like a house.’3 Musical Impressionism, he alleged, was merely a backlash (contre-coup) from Wagner. Pelléas was ‘still music to listen to with your head in your hands. All music to be listened to head in hands is suspect. Wagner is the prototype of music to be heard through the hands.’4 And what was it that would sweep Impressionism away? It was ‘a certain American dance that I saw at the Casino de Paris’. And there follows a description of an American band made up of banjos and ‘large nickel pipes’ and a ‘noise barman’ in evening dress with a battery of bells, metal bars, planks and motorbike horns, to which a M. Pilcer and a Miss Gaby Deslys danced a kind of wild pre-Charleston Charleston.5 Cocteau’s account of this experience is curiously reminiscent of Debussy’s account of the Annamite Theatre; but Cocteau also seems unaware how interesting and suggestive Debussy would himself have found his American band, and that he might well have turned it into a prelude.

Cocteau turned out to be both a trendsetter and a prophet. His ‘music I can live in like a house’ became the pattern for Satie’s Musique d’ameublement (‘Furniture Music’), an arty term for background music, one example of which, Tapisserie en fer forgé (‘Wrought-Iron Tapestry’), was meant ‘to be played in a vestibule’, and another, Carrelage phonique (‘Sonic Tiling’) could be played ‘at a lunch or a marriage signing’. More generally, Cocteau was in effect predicting the 1920s rejection of excessive solemnity in the arts, its preference for fun over reflection, and its return to the superficial virtues of classicism, its clarity and simplicity and its sense of order. Cocteau himself published a set of essays in 1926 under the somewhat schoolmasterly title Rappel à l’ordre, the ‘Recall to Order’. Debussy would certainly have taken no interest in the studied silliness and vacuity of Musique d’ameublement; in any case most of his music would have been inaudible at a 1920s lunch. But as for the classicising tendency of the best 1920s music, his own late works were tending that way, and there is no reason to suppose that, had he survived, he would not have exploited this new atmosphere at least as well and productively as Ravel did in his string sonatas and piano concertos. On the other hand, the intended purveyors of Cocteau’s ‘everyday music’, the group of young composers he fostered as Les Six, were all admirers of Debussy, did not truly see themselves as a group, and soon shuffled off the ill-fitting fancy dress that their patron had designed for them.

It would be another thirty years before Debussy’s intellectual prestige fully recovered from the timing of his death. His music remained generally popular, especially the main keyboard works, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La Mer. But it would have been thought eccentric to place him in the very front rank of composers. One of the reasons for this comes out in an article by the critic Ernest Newman published in the New Witness soon after the composer’s death. Newman is discussing the issue of form in Debussy’s music, and after excoriating what he calls ‘the invincible feeble-mindedness [of the Russian Five] wherever form was concerned’, he turns on Debussy and invites us ‘to recognise frankly that the constructive sense of Debussy also, so far as the larger forms are concerned, was no more than that of a child … For my own part, much as I admire the imaginative qualities of the best parts of Pelléas, I have never been able to see it, so far as regards its form, as anything but a confession of artistic bankruptcy.’6

The giveaway here is the phrase ‘so far as the larger forms are concerned’. A specialist in Wagner and to this day his greatest biographer, Newman is incapable of separating the concept of form from the concept of forms. For him German music remains the touchstone and musical form will always be judged in terms of the specific formal types and processes it perfected. He is not ready for the idea that form is an idea sui generis, which emerges as an organic part of the creative process (even though this is by and large how it emerges in Wagner). And he fails completely to reckon with the fact that the Russian Five and Debussy were consciously seeking routes away from the German tradition. Typically, he denounces Boris Godunov as ‘merely a collection of fragments that the architect has dumped down near each other on the same plot of earth’,7 a description that he might just as well have applied to King Lear or The Winter’s Tale. The idea that there might be different ways of creating beautiful and satisfying aesthetic objects seems not to have entered his head.

Debussy’s intellectual reputation began to recover in the 1930s, but it was only after 1945 that it reached the point at which the young Pierre Boulez could ask, ‘Should we then set up a Debussy–Cézanne–Mallarmé axis as the root of all modernism? If it were not rather too chauvinistic, one could happily do so.’8 Constant Lambert had devoted a substantial section of his brilliant if idiosyncratic 1930s study of early twentieth-century music, Music Ho!, to a reassessment of Debussy that managed characteristically to belittle all the works normally regarded as masterpieces (Pelléas, ‘one of his weakest and most mannered works’; La Mer, ‘cold and detached pictorialism’; much of what came next ‘definitely inferior in quality’), and to elevate the later orchestral Images, Jeux, En blanc et noir and the trio sonata – works that were much less played – to the summit of his achievement. Lambert’s discussion of Debussy’s importance is shrewd, but his choice of masterpieces is consciously off-piste.

Curiously enough, the same perversity apparently afflicted the judgement of Boulez and Co. after the war. For Lambert the key work was the Images; for the post-war avant-garde it was Jeux. But the point about Jeux in this case was not that hardly anyone actually knew it, but that it could be taken as a case study contra Schoenberg, whom Boulez was wanting to dethrone from his position as inventor of modern music, not because he was Austro-German, and certainly not because he was Jewish, but because in Boulez’s opinion he had not taken his modernism nearly far enough. Schoenberg had evolved a technique of continuous variation of his material, a dense, uninterrupted weave in which every line participated: no differentiation between sections, no accompaniment as such, only a kind of fluctuation ‘in the course of which the various constituent elements take on a greater or lesser functional importance’.10 In fact this is Boulez’s description of Jeux, leaving Schoenberg as a might-have-been who never faced up to the consequences of his own ideas. Three or four years later Boulez clarified this account in an encyclopedia article he wrote on Debussy.

Far from being feebly fragmented, the structure is rich in invention and shimmeringly complex, and introduces a highly ductile way of thinking based on the notion of irreversible time; in order to hear it, one’s sole recourse is to submit to its development, since the constant evolution of thematic ideas rules out any question of architectural symmetry … Jeux marks the arrival of a musical form which, since it involves instantaneous self-renewal, implies a way of listening that is no less instantaneous.11

These points were elaborated in great and arcane detail by the German theorist Herbert Eimert in a twenty-page analytical article in the new-music journal Die Reihe, the ultimate platform of the post-war musical avant-garde. Thus by way of Jeux, Debussy entered the pantheon of contemporary music in its severest phase, alongside Anton Webern and, with considerable qualification, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

*

Is it possible for a creative artist to be both radical and popular? Modern art has conditioned us, on the whole, to expect the answer no to that question, but oddly enough history gives a different answer. In music, who are the great radicals before, say, the end of the First World War? Monteverdi, Haydn and Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, Musorgsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Webern and … Debussy. Of course there are other radicals: Gesualdo, Louis Couperin, C. P. E. Bach, Berwald, Glinka, Alkan, Ives, Pratella, and probably a lot more; but if these composers are not popular, or even in some cases remembered at all, the reason is probably not that they were radical but that they were minor. Only Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók and possibly Stravinsky in the ‘great’ list, and Ives among the ‘minors’, might be said to resist popularity because they are ‘difficult’. It hardly seems much of a coincidence that these five composers were all born within a decade of each other, between 1874 and 1883.

Radical movements in art are often a response to a general feeling of ossification or over-academicism in the mainstream art of the day. But they can also be a reaction to a change in the market or the audience. Monteverdi was, among other things, a symptom of the gradual secularisation of music at the end of the sixteenth century; Beethoven, like Wordsworth, responded openly to the French Revolution, but he was also part of its social consequences, the rise and enrichment of the bourgeoisie, the growth in education, expansion of public concerts, and so forth. The explosion of what we now, rather confusingly, call modernism probably had similar causes. But where Beethoven wrote enthusiastically, at least in some of his music, for post-revolutionary man – ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüdern’ – modernism devoted itself, openly or otherwise, to antagonising him.

Broadly speaking, modernists were in rebellion against everything that the educated common man stood for towards the end of the nineteenth century. They hated mass production and the suburbanisation of taste; they disliked the urge to explain and classify. So far from wanting to make clear, they wanted to make strange; where modern life was sophisticated and comfortable, they espoused the primitive and the impenetrable. Simply, they wanted to shock, as the French say, épater le bourgeois. And they apparently succeeded, although there was perhaps something ritualistic – a certain scriptedness – about the 1913 scandals, The Rite of Spring in Paris and the Schoenberg Skandalkonzert in Vienna. The bourgeoisie knew its part and played it to perfection, and modernism has never looked back. To this day Schoenberg and Webern, to a lesser extent Stravinsky and Bartók, and their many successors have successfully warded off mass bourgeois appreciation. Schoenberg may be the first ‘great’ composer in modern history whose music has not entered the repertoire almost a century and a half after his birth.

Debussy was and is a subtly different case. With him épater le bourgeois was never an issue; on the contrary his watchword was beauty, and he honestly felt that attentive listeners would be able to hear and appreciate this quality if only they could shake off their attachment to the familiar and predictable in the standard repertoire. It turned out that they could. His music never seems to have created significant problems for audiences, although, as with his beloved Boris Godunov, critics were wary of it because it didn’t meet their normal criteria of elucidation or assessment. Debussy’s main enemy, as we have seen, was the Conservatoire, and the books of rules that were supposed to tell you what you could and couldn’t do as a composer trying to respond to an inner voice. Just as the Impressionist painters had declared war on the Académie, with its mantra about drawing, colour and subject matter, so Debussy, a comparative latecomer to a discipline that gifted children could master almost before they could talk, was bewildered by the apparent need to obey precepts that were unable to accommodate his ideas. Study them, by all means; master them; but never let them take control of your thoughts. After all, the rules had been extracted in the distant past from the work of geniuses who were themselves probably stretching conventions that didn’t meet their needs. Yet now these rules were taught like the Ten Commandments, or like algebra, as Delacroix had grumbled about the teaching of the beautiful at the École des Beaux-Arts.12

Debussy’s music criticism shows that he was always equivocal about the accepted great music of the past, and more inclined to praise composers outside the Paris mainstream: composers such as the polyphonic masters Palestrina, Victoria and Lassus, whose music you would encounter only if you went to particular churches at particular times; or the clavecinistes, Rameau, François Couperin, Daquin, whose work had, in his opinion, been bullied out of the repertoire by German keyboard music from Bach onwards; or maverick figures such as Musorgsky, whom it was safe to admire because he had never obeyed a Conservatoire rule in his life and apparently hadn’t known any. Debussy was perfectly well aware that the classical masters were secure on their plinths, but he sometimes resented their influence. His in-and-out attitude to Wagner is a case in point. It illustrates to perfection Harold Bloom’s theory about precursors and the artist’s desperate need to escape their influence in order to achieve anything remotely worthwhile of his own. To invent out of nothing is not so much impossible as feckless, the equivalent of banging stones together or cutting holes in reeds. The serious artist has no choice but to draw on his precursors, and everything hangs on his ability to do this without merely repeating or parroting their work: to be, in Bloomian terms, a ‘strong composer’, who takes what he needs, reshapes it in his own image, deliberately ‘misreads’ it.

This misreading, paradoxically, is the key to Debussy’s approachability for modern audiences. Where Schoenberg saw his work as the logical outcome of the German classical tradition, and pursued that logic as a moral calling, regardless of, or even with conscious disregard for, the complexity and impenetrability of the results, Debussy treated existing music like a young child with a picture book, singling out this or that picture, this or that character, and ignoring the actual story. His enjoyment of particular sounds and his love of making patterns out of them were juvenile in a sense, except that, unlike a child, he never ran riot with the sounds, never crashed around on the keyboard. His starting-point was what he found, serendipitously, in the music around him: in Wagner, in Massenet, even in Bach or Chopin. This was music whose beauty was both sensual and architectural. From start to finish it held up, made sense, but slice it where you liked, and you would find something beautiful and worth examining for itself, regardless of its ‘meaning’ in the context from which you had extracted it.

Of course, this is an over-simplification. In taking rich tonal chords out of context, Debussy was perfectly aware of their function, which still formed a part of their latent character for any Western listener or musician. So, in pieces such as Hommage à Rameau or Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, which contain strings of such chords, the effect is hybrid, partly tonal, partly anecdotal. The harmonic idea is, so to speak, stolen and misread: a problem for the theorist, but for the unconcerned listener a fascinating, unthreatening journey through a semi-familiar soundscape.

For Debussy, however, all this was merely a beginning. He was, after all, a composer, and a composer’s job is to put things together. A piece of music occupies time, and it has to do so not idly but coherently. Debussy, as we’ve seen, brought a highly refined ear to the fashioning and voicing of individual sonorities, but he also had an acute sense of musical form and timing. Though he loved Wagner, he had no ambition to compose on a Wagnerian scale. His longest work by far, Pelléas et Mélisande, is really a succession of short scenes linked by orchestral interludes, while his longest single movements, his three ballets, are to some extent pre-formed by their scenarios.

More typical are the piano pieces, mostly between three and six minutes long, and almost without exception beautifully and convincingly designed, yet hardly ever in one of what Newman would have called ‘the larger forms’. The history of musical analysis is full of expressions like ‘a kind of sonata form’, ‘a sort of rondo’, which reveal the desperation of the programme-note writer to fit any and every piece into a predetermined form. But in any decent work of art, form is a by-product of material, subject matter and workmanship, not a process of filling a template, like a dot-to-dot drawing or a do-it-yourself tapestry. ‘Jeux’, Eimert remarks, ‘is a formless work in the traditional sense, without symphonic architecture, without thematicism by attraction, without contrapuntal evolution, not working out motives loaded with significance and relation-functions. What sounds at any moment is constantly adapted to what follows …’13 Eimert calls this process ‘vegetative’, in the sense of growing and spreading, throwing off shoots and suckers, but never returning or repeating (Jeux has brief, modified recapitulations, but they are almost swallowed up in the growth).

Jeux is an extreme case, which is one reason why it was singled out by Boulez. But something similar happens in La Mer and the solo piano pieces, often mixed up with hints of recapitulation, more or less varied, and new ideas emerging from the old. In its origins this is a form of improvisation, and we know that Debussy was addicted to improvising, because when, at Pourville in July 1915, he did not yet have a piano, he told Durand that this ‘would concentrate the emotion by stopping it dissipating itself in improvisations, in which one too often gives way to the perverse charm of telling oneself stories’.14 Improvising can be a wonderful source of ideas, but it needs disciplining, and Debussy obviously felt this was best done away from the piano, where he could stop and reflect, just as a painter standing back from his canvas could see a work whole, refine and exclude. In this activity he was a ruthless perfectionist, and if one sometimes feels that his treatment of the people in his life – the teachers he mocked, the women he ruined, the friends he lied to and sponged off – was not all it might have been, we can go to the music for an explanation, if not for an excuse.

Above all, it is this perfectionism that separates him from his many imitators. Anyone can find a vagrant chord or two, repeat them a few times, perhaps with slight changes (what Eimert called ‘organic inexactness’), add a flute-like arabesque and some silences, mark the whole thing pianissimo, and pretend it sounds like Debussy. But it won’t, because it will lack that precision of the inner ear that makes the harmonies in Danseuses de Delphes or the orchestral voicings in Nuages or La Mer so unforgettable simply as musical moments, and it will lack that feeling for the touch and resonance of the piano, the mysterious functions of the two pedals, so rarely indicated by Debussy because he refused to generalise details that were of such refinement, yet so crucial to the character of his work.

Much of what happened to music – and to art in general – in the twentieth century marked a break, conscious or unconscious, with the nineteenth. The past was an orphan parent, rejected by its children, despised by its grandchildren. Debussy, too, found fault with his forebears and tried to do things differently from them. But while he questioned their methods, he never doubted their fundamental intention, which was to create beauty and to share sensibilities, to communicate wonder at the richness of the world around us and the various ways our senses give us of responding to it. His music is without ideology and without doctrine. Like the world, it simply is, take it or leave it.