Debussy

Teacher's Score: 8/10

Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye (France) in 1862. His father was a china shop owner and his mother was a seamstress. He began piano lessons at age 7. At age 11, he entered the Paris Conservatory. There, he shocked the professors with bizarre harmonies that went against the rules, though he received many gold medals there. His teachers included Antoine-Francois Marmontel for piano, Emile Durand for harmony and Ernest Guiraud for composition. At age 22, he won Prix de Rome with his cantata L'enfant Prodigue. He went to Villa Medici of Rome, but didn't like it there, so soon, he went back to Paris and was employed as a piano teacher for the family of Nadezhda von Meck. He was also a music critic for Revue Blanche, an artistic journal published in Paris.

1890-1900 was the most productive decade of Debussy's life. In this decade, he produced the opera Pelleas et Melisande. It premiered in Opera-Comique in 1902, but was attacked as decadent, and lacking in melody, form and substance. However, it made an impression, and Debussy was now famous. In 1899, he married his first wife Rosalie ("Lilly") Texier who he later left. Ten years later he married Emma Bardac. The had one daughter, Claude-Emma ("Chou-Chou") and Debussy wrote his "Children's Corner" piano suite for her. But in 1914, World War I struck, and Debussy lost all interest in music. However, in 1915, he realized that music could make the army cheerful and happy, so he had a small burst of music from 1914 to 1918. He died of cancer just prior to the end of World War I.

Debussy is one of the most important French composers of the early 20th century. He was a true Impressionist-he had pieces that evoked images of Impressionist painting (widely spaced melodic lines and light and airy texture). Some individual instruments stand out against the orchestra (ex. in Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun"). The Paris World Exhibition in 1889 inspired Debussy's interest in non-Western music and instruments especially Asian music-he used the pentatonic scale, unusual timbres, and textures in several piano preludes. He created a new piano style-it had contrast of high and low registers-it had contrast of high and low registers, a blending sound through the use of pedal, a clash overtones, and a parallel succession of widely spaced chords. He established the French song as the national art form-he based many of his works on Symbolist poems such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Pierre Louys, and Stephane Mallarme. He broke many musical rules-he was one of the first composers to break away from the major-minor system, using instead patterns such as the whole tone scale, the pentatonic scale, modes, parallel 5ths and octaves, "floating" chords (chords from different keys used without modulation) and pedal point (Debussy resolves to a weird note, such as the supertonic).

Teacher's Comments:
- Define Impressionism
- Which era is this composer in?
- Last sentence: do not say weird, say unconventional or unexpected
- Compositional titles and genres?