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This chapter presents a brief survey of early Modernism and its ambivalent relation to the musical vernacular and popular art generally. The cultures and representative composers singled out are France (Debussy), Germany (Richard Strauss, Schoenberg), and Russia (Stravinsky).

This chapter takes up French poets in the years around 1900, to reconsider their relationship to music and musicians. Through close readings of works by Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and testimonies by younger poets such as Camille Mauclair, Robert de Souza, and others, it proposes an alternative reading of the literary movement conventionally known as “symbolism” in light of the linguistic history presented in the previous chapter. The connection between poetic and scientific experimentation is especially evident in the rhetoric surrounding vers libre, which revealed how poets of the period were aware of the material properties of language, especially timbre and rhythm. The chapter goes on to observe how French composers echoed this awareness in their new approaches to French prosody, an awareness that becomes clear through a close analysis of two sets of songs by Fauré and Debussy.

The Fêtes galantes of Debussy, the Histoires naturelles of Ravel, and the Mirages of Fauré tell a different story in the decades following 1900, offering a glimpse of that future moment when the art of the mélodie would no longer mean the same thing to French poets, composers, and audiences. This chapter speculates about the waning of the mélodie as a significant cultural expression in the 20^th century, while considering the changing cultural value of “sincerity” in the same period.

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.

In June 1898 Debussy wrote to his editor Georges Hartmann, “Without wanting to create a parallel between Balzac and myself, having nothing of the scope of this literary cathedral, I have at least in common an eternal care for money and a complete ignorance of what one calls economies.” As the recently published Correspondance attests, money occupied a preponderant place in Debussy's life and is to be found not only at the heart of his professional relations with his editors, Georges Hartmann and Jacques Durand, but also in his friendships. If money weighed heavily on his private life—with Lilly and Emma Debussy—it also determined certain artistic choices and incited the composer to appear as conductor, pianist, and writer. This chapter examines Debussy's relationship with money, focusing in particular on the composer's social status, his income, his patrons, and the influence of his finances on his artistic production.

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 considers aspects of large-scale form as they interrelate with transformational structuring. Among such formal matters are the “polytonal” ending, the double reprise of the theme, and the progressive melodic modifications in the variations that follow the first statement of the theme. A rich complex of transformational motifs is generated over the first twenty-four measures, motifs that provide characteristic gestures for the formal profiles of various later sections. The generative process culminates at the registral climax of m 25, preparing the entrance of the theme. A characteristic pitch-class set named APEX is attained there; characteristic transformational gestures involving various forms of APEX shape much of the “middleground” in the ensuing music.

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.

As a student competing for the Prix de Rome and as an eventual winner of that coveted prize, Debussy was preoccupied with the subject of spring. For the Prix de Rome competitions in 1882 and 1884 he composed “Salut, printemps” and Le Printemps (“L'aimable printemps”). For his second envoi from Rome in 1887 he offered a symphonic suite entitled Printemps. Just as the 1882 and 1884 settings of Printemps served as proving grounds for the 1887 suite, so did the latter serve as a harbinger of his future works: in some ways Printemps can be viewed as a direct musical antecedent to the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. This chapter explores the oft-neglected Printemps, considering its importance as a preliminary essay in Debussy's quest to develop his unique compositional voice.

André Schaeffner's pioneering article of 1953 about Russian influence on Debussy (“Debussy et ses rapports avec la musique russe”) remains untranslated and little digested in English-speaking circles, except for Elaine Brody's “The Russians in Paris, 1889–1914.” Historically fascinating, these sources do not offer close study of Debussy's piano music. This chapter concentrates on how the imprint of Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, and Musorgsky makes itself felt throughout Debussy's piano music, from his first three surviving piano pieces of 1880 to those written during the 1914–18 war. Chabrier, Fauré, and Ravel are equally and inextricably involved in these relationships, reflecting a wide fascination at the time with Russian music (among other exotic or semi-exotic sources) as a source of musical renewal in France.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is often considered radically new. But whereas scholars have shown how this work should be understood in relation to Wagner or Symbolist theater, this chapter situates it in the context of French musical tradition. Learning to express seduction and enchantment was both a critical aspect of composers' Conservatory training and an important theme in nineteenth-century French opera. Mélisande's antecedents include Ambroise Thomas's Mignon, Delibes's Lakmé, and even Massenet's Thais. However, it is not just the beauty of Mélisande's voice that interested Debussy, but her voice as a medium of truth. The opera suggests that truth can disappear and die before we grasp it. Mélisande and her charms thus were not a metaphor for the social order or French identity, but a conduit to a new kind of beauty, or what Charles Morice called “the dream of the truth.”

Recent productions of Pelléas et Mélisande have often used current strategies in interventionist “subsequent” or “afterlife” interpretations, terms emanating from Jonathan Miller's book Subsequent Performances. Two approaches are popular: first, to use current psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic concepts to interpret the play and opera; second, to set the opera in its own age, the turn of the nineteenth century. Instead of such graftings of meaning, this chapter returns to the worth of original significances, as reflected in Maeterlinck's early writings, to determine his views of destiny, fate, and theology and their effect on the central cameo of the opera: the idealized, incomparable love between Pelléas and Mélisande. The chapter is motivated by two beliefs: that Miller's “subsequent performances” are preceded by a primary concept of particular worth, and that we must test whether this concept of worth is reflected in the musical projection.

The role of Pelléas in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is problematic, both vocally and dramatically. André Messager, the conductor at the première, described the challenge of its tessitura: “The part is too high for a baritone and too low for a tenor.” At the première the role was sung by a high baritone (a baryton Martin) who, under the composer's supervision, lowered the tessitura and documented the changes in his personal score. Debussy considered making Pelléas a trouser role and also prepared a tenor version of the part (involving more than six hundred pitch changes), which remained unpublished, although his publisher made it available to singers upon request. Some of these changes are unrelated to tessitura adjustments and thus may represent “lost” revisions. The dramatic significance of these different versions of the role and the voice types that they represent (baritone, tenor, and soprano) form the focus of this chapter.

This chapter shows how Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande transforms the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language, and how this language reflects the psychodramatic symbolism of the poet Maurice Maeterlinck. In reaction to the realism of nineteenth-century theater, many authors began to develop a new interest in psychological motivation. In his plays Maeterlinck was to transform internal subconscious motivation into external behaviors, demonstrating that human emotions and actions are controlled by fate. The Debussy-Maeterlinck opera represents the first significant attempt to establish more profound correspondences between the Symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. This language is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic and diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract whole-tone and other symmetrical transformations, the opposition of these two harmonic extremes serving as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as symbols of fate.

Although destiny was a concept more usually associated with Maeterlinck and Pelléas et Mélisande, it was still very much in Debussy's mind as he struggled to finish La chute de la Maison Usher in 1916. Hardly any music emerged from the first two versions of the libretto that Debussy made in 1908–10, and it was not until 1915–16 that he was able to make any real progress with his music. This chapter traces the gestation and chronology of Usher, suggesting reasons why it remained only half-finished, as well as outlining the problems involved in preparing the complete performing version. It also examines Debussy's motivic and harmonic planning for Usher, which suggests that its major difference from Pelléas lies in its unique blend of linear total chromaticism with an underlying tonal structure.