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In 1920 Henry Prunières dedicated an issue of La Revue Musicale to the achievements of Debussy. This publication is significant because it documents the beginnings of the composer's posthumous reputation and offers an early appraisal of the late works. Particularly striking about the issue is how little mention is made of the last four years of the composer's life. Debussy's efforts to affiliate his music with the French eighteenth century in these years are refuted or treated with ambivalence by the contributors. What is most noticeable about the volume as a whole is the disparity between the composer's desired legacy and the one afforded him by La Revue Musicale. Debussy's efforts in the final years of his life to associate himself with certain musical traditions appear to have been in vain, and La Revue Musicale would contribute, albeit unwittingly, to the negative evaluation of Debussy's late music in the decades following his death.

Claude Debussy’s final works were written under the twin shadows of terminal illness and World War I. In response to the latter, he emphasized his stature as a “musicien français” and used quotation and paratexts to challenge the boundaries of abstract music. Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison, a work often dismissed as blatant propaganda, stands out for its lack of discretion in text and music. The reception of the performance of Noël at charity concerts and at a concert organized by Jane Bathori confirms both its contemporaneous importance and its ambiguous place in Debussy’s music and thought. Reframing that work in the context of the Great War facilitates a reconsideration of the whole of Debussy’s wartime compositions.

Louis Laloy, a close friend of Debussy and, along with Jean Marnold, one of his most prolific defenders in the Parisian press, drew from a wide range of intellectual influences in his writing on Debussy, intertwining his account of Debussy’s innovations with interests in musical archaism and exoticism. Like that of Marnold, Laloy’s writing engaged with recent ideas from the human sciences involving acoustics, sensory physiology, psychology, and affective experience; like Marnold, Laloy continually wrestled with questions of historical and cultural difference in his account of Debussy’s music. However, Laloy approached these questions very differently, shrouding Debussy’s music in a mystical haze that served as a rebuke to reductive scientific theorizing—even as Laloy’s account of Debussy had been uniquely enabled by the scientific discourse that was ostensibly under critique.

By 1910, Debussy occupied a very different position in Parisian musical culture from where he had been at the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902—now the acknowledged patriarch of modern French music rather than its intrepid trailblazer. Debussy’s writings in the decade after the Pelléas premiere, emphasizing the importance of listening and reevaluating the relationship between music and emotion, betray a significant debt to the critical discourse of debussysme. At the same time, debussysme, even for such Debussy stalwarts as Jean Marnold and Louis Laloy, was itself losing its relevance after 1910, overshadowed by other modernist currents that were then taking hold of critics’ attention. As a new music aesthetics defined by logical universals redefined the significance of Debussy’s music, the work of Henri Bergson and Albert Bazaillas inspired a new intellectual-historical relationship between the practice of music criticism and a modern psychology of the unconscious.

This chapter considers four music critics and three performers—Emile Vuillermoz, Charles Koechlin, Louis Laloy, Léon Vallas, D. E. Inghelbrecht, Marguerite Long, and Alfred Cortot—whose writings in the postwar years helped to combat the negative press that surrounded Debussy after his death. Viewing these personalities through the lens of the “reputational entrepreneur” sheds light not only on what they wrote on behalf of Debussy, but also on how and why they wrote what they did. By drawing on multiple sources, this chapter provides an interpretation of their motivations that makes it possible to read between the lines of the narratives they constructed around the figure of Debussy. Indeed, the manner in which they defended and perpetuated Debussy’s reputation was in large part a result of how they renegotiated their own professional positions in the unsettled musical environment of postwar Paris.

Chapter 4 considers the posthumous premieres of 1928 and their performance in a high-profile concert commemorating the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death. The event sparked fevered debate in the press and occasioned a surge of vitriolic commentary. By performing unpublished works from Debussy’s student years as well as his final incomplete work, the Ode à la France, the concert program and ensuing controversy got to the heart of what was now at stake in the composer’s posthumous reputation: what should be commemorated and who had the authority to decide. The struggle over these two questions led to numerous exchanges in the press and culminated in a lawsuit that pitted the composer’s widow, Emma, against a committee formed of Debussy’s closest friends and colleagues. Whereas the previous chapters highlighted the antagonisms between the pre- and postwar generations, Chapter 4 turns its focus to the fissures within the debussyists themselves.

Chapter 5 considers the role of material culture by examining the campaign to erect a monument dedicated to the memory of Debussy. Rather than taking at face value the timeless, universal image that these monuments sought to project, this chapter focuses on the political, practical, and aesthetic realities that underpinned contemporary debates on how best to commemorate Debussy. Every step of this project of public commemoration was called into question: from the choice of sculptor, artistic style, subject matter, and location of the monument to the necessity of fashioning such an homage in the first place. In its turbulent fourteen-year history (1919–1933), this project encompassed three committees, five sculptors (Henry de Groux, Jan and Joël Martel, Antoine Bourdelle, and Aristide Maillol), and four proposed monuments and concluded with a highly successful international subscription that led to the inauguration of the two very different statues that stand today.

The premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in late April 1902 occasioned a maelstrom of critical responses in the Parisian press—more than a hundred reviews over the course of a few months and eighty-eight in the month of May alone. A flashpoint of French modernism, the Pelléas premiere catalyzed a rethinking of the nature of music in this critical discourse, as prominent critics, such as Pierre Lalo and Robert Godet, shifted their account of music away from the Revue wagnérienne’s exclusive focus on sentiment and interiority and toward an aesthetics of noise, materiality, and outer sensation. While it was not uncommon for critics to compare the music of Pelléas to Impressionist painting or Symbolist poetry, such comparisons only served to highlight an overriding preoccupation with a specifically musical problem: how to negotiate the demands of musical convention and historicity against the nature of music as material sound.

This chapter considers some of the general mechanisms by which artistic figures are consecrated and weighs their relative contribution to the construction of Debussy’s reputation. Drawing on Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang’s analysis of the survival of reputation in the fine arts, four areas emerge that would seem to be particularly relevant to Debussy: (1) the initiatives undertaken by the composer to establish his own legacy; (2) the posthumous reception of the corpus of works left behind; (3) the actions of heirs and family members on behalf of the deceased: and (4) the efforts of the composer’s close friends and collaborators. Yet, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, the first two were rendered less effective because of the particularities of Debussy’s case—namely, his protracted illness and his death during the First World War.

“Le chant du départ,” born during the French Revolution, was first performed in public on July 4, 1794. Jules Michelet, one of the first and most important of French nationalist historians, wrote proudly and effusively of its effect upon the citizenry, and a collection of France's most important patriotic songs compiled during the Great War, Marches et chansons des soldats de France, correctly ranked “Le chant du départ” next to “La Marseillaise” in impact and importance. Singing “Le chant du départ,” Parisians would inevitably have recalled another familiar and potent bit of imagery: the sculpture by François Rude that adorns the Champs-Elysées face of the Arc de Triomphe. Called “Le départ,” it shows a group of idealized figures moving to defend a threatened France. This chapter focuses on mobilization of French troops during the Great War, along with Claude Debussy's work for two pianos titled En blanc et noir, and Neoclassicism and national identity.

One of the most vociferous of Debussy’s early defenders, Jean Marnold, the critic for the Mercure de France, bolstered his account of Debussy’s music with appeals to the acoustic discoveries of Hermann von Helmholtz. Debussy’s unconventional uses of seventh and ninth chords, Marnold claimed, represented the “artistic confirmation” of Helmholtz’s theories. Widely influential in early Debussy criticism, Marnold became a conduit through which recent developments in German acoustics and music theory were disseminated into Parisian musical culture. The technical nature of his arguments also instigated controversies within Debussy criticism, most notably with the homme de lettres Camille Mauclair. Marnold’s responses to these controversies demonstrate a sustained, and distinctively debussyste, engagement with a problem that had wide salience in musical discourse around the turn of the twentieth century: how to conceptualize the nebulous space between physiology and culture in which musical listening happens.

In wartime Paris, the offices of the various charities that registered and distributed tickets for food, clothing, and lodging were frequently manned by writers and artists. One of the most important of these charities, the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, was organized in 1915 by Edith Wharton. Wharton's overall commitment and generosity were hardly to be questioned, and it was in order to sustain these charities through the winter of 1915–1916 that she determined to compile Le livre des sans-foyer (The Book of the Homeless). At about the same time as Wharton was compiling her anthology Claude Debussy, now ravaged with cancer, took up his pen once more to write the text and music of his last completed composition, “Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons.” Throughout the Great War, the effects of the conflict on children fostered a potent imagery, and numerous acts of heroism, both real and imagined, proliferated. During the war, France may have produced “the first grand moral and intellectual mobilisation of the concept of childhood in the field of European politics.”.

This chapter examines the career development of Georges Barrère during the period from 1893 to 1895. In 1893, Barrère started freelance at the Folies-Bergère which was the most important music hall in Paris, France during this time. It was also the year when Claude Paul Taffanel was appointed fluting professor at the Paris Conservatoire. In his autobiography, Barrère gave Taffanel the credit for his success as a solo flutist. He later secured a freelance engagement in the orchestra of the Société Nationale de Musique (SNM) where he was able to perform the flute solo of Claude Debussy's Prelude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In 1895, at the age of 18, Barrère was awarded the first prize by the flute jury at the Conservatoire.

Chapter 3 considers the effects of the contingencies of music and cultural history on reputation. The arrival of new artists or aesthetic tendencies on the Parisian scene forced writers to reconsider the recent musical past and to reshape it in accordance with present-day concerns. Cocteau, Les Six, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg all had significant implications for Debussy’s posthumous reception as historical frameworks were revised to integrate or denigrate Debussy’s position vis-à-vis recent musical developments. Chapter 3 examines three musical currents of the 1920s—debussyism, anti-debussyism, and neoclassicism—all of which had a notable impact on the early formation of Debussy’s legacy. Whereas the postwar turn to anti-debussyism was undoubtedly harmful for the composer’s legacy, Chapter 3 considers how the development of neoclassicism over the course of the 1920s was ultimately beneficial for the first stages of its recovery.

This chapter explores Ida Rubinstein’s expression of Sapphic desire in her performance of the narcissus plucking in Perséphone. The chapter begins by describing the culture of Sapphic modernism in early twentieth-century France and Ida’s relationship with it. In Debussy’s and D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, Ida splits as a dandy between her outer, capitalist and inner, rebellious self by transforming herself into a famous artwork—a frame from within which she explores Sapphic desire through emotive mimicry of colonial performance. In Perséphone she tries to recreate this dialectic, but cannot pull off the effect. She merges Eros and Thanatos by donning an old coat that had symbolized for her Sapphic desire for the painter Romaine Brooks in her youth. With this gesture, her desire becomes trapped and reduced to mimicry of its own retrospective self, an example of Benjamin’s allegory, taken to the stage.

This chapter explores French medievalist music theater, focusing first on Ida Rubinstein's collaboration with Claude Debussy and Gabriele d'Annunzio and then on her more significant work with Paul Claudel and Arthur Honegger. Prior to his encounter with Noh and his collaborations with Rubinstein, Claudel had already demonstrated an interest in the medieval mystery plays and in creating modern religious works for the stage. One of his most successful plays, the 1912 L'Annonce faite à Marie, was inspired by the mystères tradition. Rubinstein's commissions encouraged him to focus more intensely on religious drama.

Creativity, in the context of traditional arts, is more about finding inventive combinations of well-known elements than about coming up with something entirely new. Within conservatories, the masters used annual contests to reward or weed out students who were good or bad at combining various learned schemas in artistic ways. The chapter examines some harmony assignments completed by Claude Debussy. While he was one of the most original composers in music history, he was also very good at combining traditional schemas in response to a given melody or bass. Two of his assignments for the class of Émile Durand are among his earliest known musical expressions.