Context
From the Letters of Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Debussy’s
aesthetic was prescient. His emphasis on mutation, and his search for a
musical theme without beginning or end prefigures the thought of Roland
Barthes and others who looked for an avant-garde text of the infinitely
plural. The text of drift and of plaisir. Or perhaps what we ought to
say is that the "newness" of the postmodern or the poststructural is
not the point. Both tendencies participate in very old traditions of
philosophy and literary making. When
the old Saxon Cantor [Bach] is short of ideas, he starts off with
anything at all, and he is really merciless. In fact, he is bearable
only when he is absolutely admirable. Well, you will say, that in
itself is something. All the same, if some friend—or publisher—had
gently advised him to stop writing on, say, one day of the week, we
should have been spared some hundreds of pages through which we have to
wander between long rows of dreary bars which succeed one another
relentlessly, repeating the same rascally little subject and counter-subject. Sometimes—in fact, often—his marvelous style of writing (which, after
all, is nothing more than a gymnastic feat peculiar to this old Master)
does not succeed in filling the awful void, which increases in
proportion as he insists, at all costs, in turning some insignificant
idea to account. After
several years of passionate pilgrimage to Bayreuth, I began to
entertain doubts as to the Wagnerian formula; or rather, it seemed to
me that it could serve only the particular case of Wagner’s genius. He
was a great collector of formulas. He assembled them all into one which
appears individual to those who are ill acquainted with music. And
without denying his genius, one may say that he placed a period to the
music of his time in much the same way as Victor Hugo did for poetry.
The thing, then, was to find what came after Wagner’s time but not after Wagner’s manner. The drama of "Pelleas," which, in spite of its fantastic atmosphere, contains much more humanity than the so-called documents on life, appeared to me to be admirably suited to my purpose. The sensitiveness
of the suggestive language could be carried into the music and
orchestral setting. I have tried to obey a law of beauty which appears
to be singularly ignored in dealing with dramatic music. The characters
of this drama endeavour to sing like real persons, and not in an
arbitrary language built on antiquated traditions. . . . It
is all quite correct and almost mercilessly logical. You evidently
received the somewhat ironical impression that all these experiments,
all these colours, plunge one eventually into a state of alarm from
which one emerges with a note of interrogation firmly implanted like a
nail in one’s brain. Whether you so intended it or not, your essay is a
severe censure of modern harmony. There is something almost savage
about your quotations of passages which, being necessarily separated
from their context, can no longer justify their "curiousness." Think of
all the inexpert hands that will utilize your study without
discrimination, for the sole purpose of annihilating those charming
butterflies which are already somewhat crumpled by your analysis. Well,
so much the worse for the dead, and for the wounded that will be
dispatched in this wise. . . .
Translated from the French by Maire and Grace O’Brien.
