Some Recollections of Debussy Author(s): G. Jean-Aubry Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 59, No. 903 (May 1, 1918), pp. 203-209 Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/910278 Accessed: 12-05-2016 09:46 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Times This content downloaded from 144.82.108.120 on Thu, 12 May 2016 09:46:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE MUSICAL TIMES.-MAY I, 1918. 203 and this: SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF DEBUSSY. Ex. 2. BY G. JEAN-AUBRY. Inif Leaving Paris for London a few months ago, I visited Claude Debussy on the morning of my pp. departure. His health at that time was much improved; so much so that he was projecting plans for the future. I was able, without any effort, to make him believe that I thought their realisation possible; but for almost a year I had known him to He is like a child with a new toy that he persists not be doomed, and had never entered his door in the only in playing with in the nursery but in dragging Bois de Boulogne without a feeling of deep sadness, into the drawing-room and out on the lawn and into which had to be concealed. One day I had found the street. The novel resonances fascinate him for him after a long and painful attack of his illness, their own sake: he does not know how to make music spent and scarcely recognisable, without his usually of them, how to build them up into living constituents keen perception, and smiling weakly and pitiably. of a continuous idea. To vary the simile, he is a child I tried to resign myself to the thought of never seeing with a tube of paint the colour of which delights him again; but then there came one of those deceptive him and which he dabs upon the drawing-paper improvements that mocked fears and revealed him with painful, irrelevant iteration. But in the again so alive, so restored in verve and quickness of work of this period there are also the admirable intellect, that I cherished a hope that he would live, 'Masques,' 'L'Isle Joyeuse,' 'Pour le Piano,' and that the doctors had been wrong. The last time I was to see Debussy we spoke at 'Estampes' ('Pagodes,' 'La Soiree dans Grenade, great length of his coming to England. I undertook ' Jardins sous la Pluie '), and the first set of 'Images' negotiations for his conducting and playing the ('Reflets dans l'eau,' 'Hommage ' Rameau,' pianoforte parts in his two Sonatas. On his saying 'Mouvement '). In all of these, except the that he did not yet feel well enough to take up 'Hommage 'a Rameau,' where he lapses into the composition again, but that he would gladly write an unrhythmic stiffness of the 'Danse Sacree,' he is at article, I begged him to send me one for publication in his very best, moving with perfect ease and freedom England. I did my best that day to awaken in him the sense of renewed life-that life which I had along the most unaccustomed ways, drawing new already believed lost, but for which, as I have said, I resonances from the pianoforte, capturing all sorts of began to hope again. As he accompanied me to his phases of light and water and aerial vibration that door, and shook hands, he said (and these were the had never been recorded in music before. The last words I heard from his lips) : 'How I should like 'Chansons de Bilitis' are a new and curiously to go back to England with you.' And that day, successful experiment in song-writing. If the second indeed, he had spoken of the time when we had come set of ' Fetes Galantes' is not quite so successful, that here together in 19o8. He ardently desired to revisit is because the calculation is a little more obvious at London, for he had many charming recollections of his first visit. But now I shall never hear that voice times; Debussy is too plainly bent on showing that again, except in the tender remembrances I hold of he is Debussy. The songs of this period, indeed, him-that voice, mordant and passive by turns-and are on the whole more sophisticated than the I shall no longer see those piercing eyes gazing so pianoforte pieces and the orchestral works, because ironically and, at the same time, seemingly under the here he is more intent on realising the spell of an indefinite dreaminess. Mallarme ideal. An interesting sidelight on his His death is an irretrievable loss to French music; mind is thrown by the 'Proses Lyriques,' the words and for me, personally, is the loss of a friend whom I of which are his own. We see him manipulating deeply admired, one who during more than ten years had given me many proofs of affectionate interest. the stock formule of the symbolists with a sad lack of To-morrow no doubt many of those who never did humour Some of the phrases are the usual facile anything for him or his work will assert that they had French cliches, such as the description of ladies, 'les been his ardent friends; yet of friends he had but Freles, les Folles,' who have in times gone by few, for he was scarcely sociable and seldom wandered among the trees of the scene, 'semant leur communicative. I myself had indeed for a long time rire au gazon grele, aux brises fr6leuses la caresse avoided his acquaintance, having been warned against charmeuse des hanches fleurissantes.' That may pass: his misanthropy. Yet from the day I knew him I felt but we cannot repress a smile to-day as we that I had found an admirable man of balanced read of a 'white shiver,' of the waves 'chattering outlook, able to weigh the great and the little, like mad little girls coming out of school, amid the jealously guarding his solitude, despising gossip and impulsiveness, avoiding the inquisitive journalist frou-frous of their dresses,' of the 'naughty shower who is one of the drawbacks to fame, but of rain' that has the effect on the little waves of full of confidence in-and even intimacy with-a creating 'frou-frous of flying skirts,' of the ' white kiss ' chosen few. of the moon, of the Sunday in the country, when To have found and held his friendship I consider one everyone in his best makes for the outskirts of the of the most memorable incidents of my career. To me town, and the trains go fast, devoured by insatiable it had been given to know and appreciate his work tunnels,' and 'the good signals along the line exchange long ere the public acclaimed it. Debussy seemed to mechanical expressions with their solitary eye' ! It feel how my admiration for his individual art ignored is hardly to be wondered at that these facile falsities of circumstance, and was independent even of our common friendship. I remember his strange satis- poetry should generate, at times, a musical style faction when once I declared that there was one of equally facile and equally false. his works I did not like, although it was one for which [ The work of Debussy's thirdperiod will be dealt with he had a certain attachment. He loved liberty as by Air. Newman in our june issue.] much for others as for himself. There is abundant This content downloaded from 144.82.108.120 on Thu, 12 May 2016 09:46:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 204 THE MUSICAL TIMES.-MAY I, 1918. proof of his intense dislike of, or at least indifference the list of towns you are going to visit. Surely that to, a certain uncritical admiration without judgment, a town is an important musical centre where French kind of fashion dictated by the 'Debussy snobs' which music would be cordially received ? was entirely foreign to his nature, and perhaps more To tell the truth, this allusion to Cardiff is attributable repugnant to those who admired the composer than to the fact that his brother lived there at that the indifference once shown to his work by the greater time. But already he had shown a desire to know public. how the British public would judge his music, and to In a letter dated March 25, 191o, referring to a come to England himself to ascertain how his works certain remembrance very precious to me, he said, in would be received. a significant postscript : ' In any case, my dear friend, I might perhaps quote here the following passages one of my best recollections of that time when I was from another letter written at the same period not yet pestered with "Debussyism."' (December I I, 1907), to show the interest he took in I met Claude Debussy for the first time in 19o6. the first efforts to make his works, and particularly his Living in a provincial town, I had for several years chamber music, known in this country: known and greatly admired the 'Cinq Poemes de I received the programme of your concerts in England; Baudelaire,' the ' Chansons de Bilitis,' and 'Pellkas et it is perfect, and I have no doubt that English people M61lisande,' and I made each of my short visits to will appreciate its elegant concision.