Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Books/Book Chapters Conservatory of Music and Drama 2015 Claude de France: Debussy's Great War of 1915 Arun Rao Technological University Dublin,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaconmusbk Part of the Music Commons Recommended Citation Rao, A. (2015). Claude de France: Debussy's great war of 2015. In France and Ireland:notes and narratives (Hunt, U. & Pierse, M. eds.). Bern, Peter Lang. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Conservatory of Music and Drama at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Books/Book Chapters by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact
[email protected],
[email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License ARUN RAO (edited by Drs. Mary Pierse & Una Hunt) ‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 In August 1915, exactly one year after after the start of the conflict, Debussy signed his Sonata for Celo and Piano - the first of his intended six sonatas for various instruments - Claude Debussy, musicien fançais. In Bertrand Dermoncourt’s L’ univers de l’opéra, the opening lines of the entry on Debussy read: He who became, by some regrettable nationalistic twist, known as ‘Claude de France’ - as if his music embodied the national cultural identity - was in many respects an atypical artist in the French musical landscape of his time.1 These two statements evoke an apparent contradiction in the last creative phase of this fascinating composer: how his yearning to contribute in a meaningful way to the war effort ended up with the composition of works whose features, both formal and stylistic, display the sort of modernism that was castigated in nationalist discourses.