Claude Debussy: A Guide to Claude Debussy’s Life and Music

Claude Debussy was a Parisian composer whose many compositions, including his orchestral poems and his piano music, helped establish the musical language for much of the twentieth century.

Critics often credited Debussy with pioneering a genre called impressionism, although Debussy consistently rejected the term. He did not consider himself aligned with the impressionist painters that dominated Paris during his lifetime. Debussy found their work—which emphasized radical brushwork and changing perspectives—unrelated to his music.

Instead, Debussy felt he was adapting the harmonic language of Richard Wagner—which challenged the norms of tonal music—for a new century. Debussy saw Wagner as an innovator in league with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and sought to continue that innovation in his own way.

Achille Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise, on the outskirts of Paris. Due to the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Debussy spent part of his childhood in Cannes in the south of France, which is where he began his piano studies.

• A child prodigy: Debussy was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. His teachers at the conservatory included Antoine François Marmontel, Ernest Guiraud, and Émile Durand, and organ with César Franck. He was regarded as a top-flight pianist (his Chopin performances won him prizes), but his approach to harmony and composition was at odds with the highly conservative faculty.
• Early works: In 1879, inspired by Alfred de Musset’s poems, Debussy wrote his first formal compositions: Ballade à la lune and Madrid, princesse des Espagnes. In 1880, he was hired as a personal pianist to Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which led to greater study of the Russian composer's literature.
• Time in Italy: Debussy won the Prix de Rome in 1884 for his cantata L'enfant Prodigue. As part of the prize, Debussy moved to Italy, where he studied at Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. It was here that Debussy composed early works, including Zuleima, La Damoiselle élue, and Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, based on themes by his organ professor from the Paris conservatory, César Franck. These works were poorly received by the faculty, which called them "bizarre, incomprehensible and un-performable."
• New inspirations: In 1887, Debussy returned to Paris, where he would be exposed to new musical inspiration. The first was Wagnerian opera; Debussy is said to have attended Tristan und Isolde at the Concerts Lamoureux. He was further inspired by the rhythms, harmonic concepts, musical modes, and timbres of Javanese gamelan music. He also took great interest in the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's music, particularly his unorthodox approach to harmony and his widely varied orchestrations.
• Growing acclaim: By 1894, Debussy began to enjoy musical breakthroughs that would come to elevate his name among French composers. His symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, debuted at the Société Nationale. He also completed a first draft of Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera that formally debuted in 1902.
• Major works: Over the next decade, Debussy would complete almost all of his major works including three orchestral nocturnes: Suite bergamasque (featuring the famous "Clair de Lune" section), La Mer (The Sea), and the Pour le piano suite. He also began fraternizing with a group called Les Apaches, an artist collective that at various times included Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Manuel de Falla.
• Final preludes and etudes: Toward the end of his life, Debussy composed numerous piano preludes and etudes, the piano suite Children's Corner, two arabesques, the musical Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, the ballets Khamma and La boîte à joujoux, and solo piano piece Valse romantique. They did not match the popularity and influence of his mid-period piano and orchestral works but are nonetheless performed regularly to this day.

Debussy died on March 25, 1918, as Paris was under siege during World War I. He is buried in Paris's Passy Cemetery near the Trocadéro, alongside his wife, Emma Bardac, and their daughter.

The music of Claude Debussy is celebrated for the following characteristics:

1. 1. Embrace of the avant-garde: Like fellow Frenchman Erik Satie, Debussy sought out the vanguard of classical music. The two are often considered Impressionists, but Debussy and Satie had little use for the term. They sought to push boundaries of harmony and form and did not trouble themselves with the notion of genre.
2. 2. Master of orchestral texture: Debussy had an innovative approach to orchestration. In pieces like La Mer and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, he brought attention to all parts of the symphony orchestra. Many prior composers, even in the late Romantic period, gave outsized influence to the string family, but Debussy highlighted woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
3. 3. Literary influences: Debussy did not have a formal university education, but he was an avid reader. He particularly loved Edgar Allan Poe and attempted an operatic adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. His famed Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune was based on a symbolist Mallarmé poem.
4. 4. Non-traditional scales: Debussy was inspired by composers who pushed the boundaries of harmony. This included Javanese gamelan ensembles, the German opera composer Richard Wagner, and J.S. Bach. In his own work, Debussy embraced pentatonic scales, parallel fifths, whole-tone scales, and chromaticism—all of which helped set a musical palette for the twentieth century and beyond.

Debussy wrote many famous works, and few of them followed traditional forms.

• Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun): This 1894 symphonic poem, inspired by symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, broke many "rules" of harmony. In doing so, it helped shape the musical language for decades of modern, twentieth-century music.
• La Mer (The Sea): Composed in 1905, this tone poem is one of Debussy's most significant orchestral works. In the spirit of Wagner and Beethoven, it uses the orchestra to convey the raw emotion of nature.
• Estampes: A piano suite famed for the "Pagodes" section, which directly borrows from Javanese gamelan.
• String Quartet in G minor: Debussy eschewed traditional forms, and thus he only wrote a single string quartet—in 1893 at the age of 31. Still, it is considered a masterful piece and a highlight of his output.
• Pelléas et Mélisande: Debussy's most famous opera, based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name.
• Suite bergamasque: This piano suite, which debuted in 1905, contains many of Debussy's most famous piano passages, notably "Clair de lune" and "Passepied" (a type of French dance).

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