Achille Claude Debussy

The French composer Achille Claude Debussy (1862-1918) developed a strongly individual style and also created a language that broke definitively with the procedures of classical tonality.

The world having made peace with his innovations by the time of his death, Claude Debussy subsequently came to be regarded as the impressionist composer par excellence—a creator of poetic tone pictures, a master colorist, and the author of many charming miniatures (including Clair de lune, Golliwog's Cake Walk, and Girl with the Flaxen Hair ). Only a handful of critics between World Wars I and II were concerned with the historical impact of his accomplishment, the scope of which is gradually coming to be recognized. It is generally accepted today that his coloristic harmonies do not simply "float" but "function" in terms of a structure analogous to the classical tonal structure and are governed by equally lucid concepts of tension and repose.
Claude Debussy was born on Aug. 22, 1862, at St-Germain-en-Laye into an impoverished family. Thanks to his godparents, he was able to enter the Paris Conservatory 10 years later. Although he worked hard to gain a solid grounding, the archaic and mechanical nature of much of what he studied there did not escape him. Still, certain aspects of his training were exciting, notably his introduction to the operas of Richard Wagner.

Attitude to Wagner

In 1884 Debussy won the Prix de Rome for his cantata L'Enfant prodigue. In Rome the following year he was homesick for Paris, and he wrote that one of his few solaces was the study of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. Not many years later Debussy harshly criticized Wagner, but his scorn seems directed more toward Wagner's dramaturgy than toward his music. Although Debussy could ridicule the dramatis personae of Parsifal, he did not neglect to add that the opera was "one of the finest monuments of sound that have been raised to the imperturbable glory of music." Throughout his life Debussy was fascinated by the chromatic richness of the Wagnerian style, but in keeping with Verlaine's epigram, "One must take eloquence and wring its neck," he would categorically reject Wagnerian rhetoric. His inclinations were toward conciseness and understatement.

Influence of the Gamelan Orchestra

At the height of his enthusiasm for Wagner, Debussy had an experience as important for his later development as Wagner had been for his beginnings: the revelation of the Javanese gamelan at the Paris World Exposition of 1889. This exotic orchestra, with its variety of bells, xylophones, and gongs, produced a succession of softly percussive effects and cross rhythms that Debussy was later to describe as a "counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child's play." What has come to be regarded as the typical impressionist texture—an atmosphere of melodic and harmonic shapes in which dissonant tones are placed so as to reduce their "shock" value to a minimum and heighten their "overtone" value to a maximum—was a logical conclusion to the explorations in sonority of 19th-century European composers. Yet without the specific influence of the gamelan Debussy might never have realized this texture in all its complexity.
The effect of the experience at the Exposition of 1889 was not immediately manifested in Debussy's work. It was the process of growth in the years 1890-1900 that brought the elements of the exotic music of the gamelan into play with others already discernible in his style and produced a new tonal language. The completion of this process toward the end of the decade can thus serve as a line of demarcation dividing the earlier years, not without their masterpieces—Ariettes oubliées (1888), Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1892; Afternoon of a Faun ), and the String Quartet (1893)—from the period of maturity.

Mature Works

Debussy's first large-scale piece of his mature period, the Nocturnesfor orchestra (1893-1899), is contemporaneous with the work on his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (1894-1902), based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck. The notoriety surrounding the premiere of Pelléasin 1902 made Debussy the most controversial figure in musical France and divided Paris into two strongly partisan camps.
Two years later Debussy abandoned his wife of 5 years, Rosalie Texier, to live with and eventually marry Emma Bardac, a woman of some means. The first taste of existence free from material worry seems to have had a beneficial effect on his productivity. During these years he wrote some of his most enduring works: La Mer (1905) and Ibéria (1908), both for orchestra; Images (1905), Children's Corner Suite (1908), and two books of Préludes (1910-1912), all for piano solo.
Debussy's pieces of the following years show certain marked changes in style. Not as well known as his works of the preceding years but in no way inferior, they have less surface appeal and are therefore more difficult to approach. It is ironic that just when he was exploring new avenues of thought he was in a sense relegated to the shadows by a "radicalism" more sensational than anything connected with Pelléas 10 years earlier. Debussy's ballet Jeux, his last and most sophisticated orchestral score, which had its premiere on May 15, 1913, was virtually eclipsed by the scandal of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Sacre du printemps (Rite of Spring ) on May 29. Debussy's ambivalent attitude toward Stravinsky's music may reflect a certain resentment of the younger composer's noisy arrival on the scene. Debussy evinced a genuine, if limited, admiration for Stravinsky's work and even incorporated certain Stravinsky-like effects in En blanc et noir (1915) and the études (1915). Whether or not Debussy's general tendency in his late pieces to achieve a drier, less "impressionistic" sound is the direct result of Stravinsky's influence is difficult to say.
When Debussy composed these last-mentioned works, he was already suffering from a fatal cancer. He completed only three of a projected group of six sonatas "for various instruments" (1915-1917). He died in Paris on March 25, 1918.

Characteristics of Debussy's Music

A notable characteristic of Debussy's music is its finesse, but it is a characteristic applicable to almost every other aspect of his artistic behavior as well. His choice of texts to set to music (from Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Maeterlinck), his own efforts in verse for the song set Proses lyriques (1894), and his fine prose essays (posthumously compiled under the title Monsieur Croche, the Dilletante-Hater ) all attest to a culture that must have been mostly innate, since there is so little evidence of it in his early family life or formal education.


Finesse and understatement would seem to reinforce the mysterious and dreamlike elements in Debussy's music. In this respect his opera Pelléas is the key work of his creative life, because through it he not only achieved the synthesis of his mature style, but also in the art of allusion of Maeterlinck's play found the substance of what he could express in music more tellingly than anyone else. The words and actions of the opera pass as if in a dream, but the dream is suffused with an inescapable feeling of dread. Debussy brings to this feeling a disquieting intensity through music of pervasive quiet, broken rarely and only momentarily by outbursts revealing the underlying terror.
Similarly, in Nuages (Clouds ), the first movement of the Nocturnes, the clouds are not cheerful billows in a sunlit sky but ominous signs—of what we cannot be sure. Characteristically, Debussy leaves us with a mystery: he presents us with the imminence of disaster but not disaster itself. Premonition is a force capable of disrupting the amiable surface of Debussy's music and is also one of the music's chief emotional strengths. What is more, it is a symbol of Debussy's position vis-à-vis European music at the turn of the century.

Further Reading

The standard biography for many years was Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (trans. 1933). Its scholarliness and serious approach give it lasting value. It has been joined in recent years by Edward Lockspeiser's indispensable Debussy: His Life and Mind (2 vols., 1962-1965). This study places Debussy in the context of Paris at the turn of the century and gives a vivid picture of an extraordinary moment in France's cultural life. See also Oscar Thompson, Debussy: Man and Artist (1937); Rollo H. Myers, Debussy (1948); and Victor I. Seroff, Debussy: Musician of France (1956). "The Adventure and Achievement of Debussy" in William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century (1966), is a valuable combination of biography and analysis.

article source: http://www.encyclopedia.com

More on Debussy:   French Impressionism in Music: Debussy's "La Mer"

Enrique Granados

Enrique Granados is a modern Spanish composer and pianist who modeled much of his music on his country's folk-idiom. He was born Pantaléon Enrique Granados y Campiña on July 27, 1867, at Lérida, Catalonia. His father, though Cuban by birth, was an officer in the Spanish army, and so the precocious child's earliest musical studies, both in piano playing and in theory, started under an army bandmaster. Soon, however, the family settled in Barcelona, where Enrique received piano instruction under Francisco X. Jurnet and Joan Baptista Pujol, and later worked at composition with Felipe Pedrell. From 1887 to 1889 Granados was in Paris, studying under Charles de Bériot, lodging with his compatriot pianist Ricardo Viñes, and reveling in an existence devoted equally to music and to bohemianism. He returned to Barcelona in 1890, a full-fledged pianist and composer, and married two years later.

In 1900 Granados founded and directed a short-lived concert society in Barcelona, the Sociedad de Conciertos Clásicos. He also started the Academia Granados a year later and was in charge of this piano school until his death.

In his concert appearances Granados played many of his own works, including the Spanish dances and the piano version of his Goyescas (a piano suite named after scenes from the paintings and tapestries of Goya and episodes from the Goyesque period in Madrid, a time marked by bloodshed and political upheaval). He began these pieces about 1902, and the work occupied him on and off for seven years.

Granados produced, in addition to original compositions, sundry arrangements, adaptations, editings, studies, and even a textbook. Meanwhile, appearing at intervals throughout his career were several stage works, among which were the operas Follet (1903) and Liliana (1911). After the première of his opera Maria del Carmen in 1898 he was made a Knight of the Order of Carlos III. Later distinctions he received were Officier de l'Instruction Publique and Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur.

When the Goyescas piano suite had received its first performance, in 1911, Granados turned to a project that may well have already been long in his mind--an opera based on the same material. But for the outbreak of the war, the opera would have been produced in Paris in 1914. Instead, the première was in New York on Jan. 26, 1916. Two months later, on March 24, Granados was returning home from this event when his ship, the Sussex, was torpedoed in the English Channel; both he and his wife were drowned.

Like Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909), Granados was a member of the national school of composers in Spain who felt that a nation should build its art music on the foundation of its native folk-songs and folk-dances. (The leader of this movement was Granados' former teacher, Pedrell.) Granados was among the great pianists of his era; his Goyescas pieces established him as a serious composer, and his Spanish dances were to secure his position in light composition.

Source: Collier's Enclycopedia, 1997
Copyright © 1997 Collier Newfield, Inc., all rights reserved.

Joseph - Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel was a French composer who studied at the end of the Romantic period, worked through the Impressionist period and into the Modern period. He was born in Paris in 1875, and died in quiet, rural retirement in 1937.

He studied music at the Paris Conservatory, where his tutor, and a significant influence on his style, was Faure. His composition was also influenced by the styles of Chabrier and Satie. Ravel showed much promise as a young composer, and was nominated, by Faure, for a number of awards. To the surprise of many of his contemporaries, he was overlooked for these awards and he left the Conservatory bitterly disappointed.

During the First World War (1914 - 1918) he was unfit for service, and volunteered to work as an orderly in a military hospital. After the war, his health, which had never been robust, deteriorated. He moved to the village of Tourador, continuing to compose until shortly before his death, though during the last ten years of his life he produced only a few works.

Major Compositions

These are listed in chronological order. It is not a complete list - just highlights.

• Pavan for a Dead Princess (piano) (1899)
• Mirrors (piano) (1904)
• Sonatina (piano) (1905)
• Gaspard of the Night (piano) (1908)
• L'heure Espagnole (opera)(1909)
• Minuet on the Name of Haydn (piano) (1909)
• Pavan for a Dead Princess (orchestral) (1910)
• Mother Goose (piano, then orchestral) (1911)
• The Tomb of Couperin (piano) (1917)
• The Tomb of Couperin (orchestral) (1919)
• The Child and the Furniture (opera) (1925)
• Bolero (orchestral) (1928)
• Don Quixote and Dulcinea (vocal) (1932)

Technique and Style

Ravel is a contemporary of Debussy, and, although classified with him as using the Impressionist style, Ravel's compositions are more classical, with disciplined harmonies and part work. He did not, for example, adopt the whole tone scale or pentatonic scale for any of his major works. His music, however, is certainly not typically classical or Romantic.

He heard the use of new intervals - 9ths, 11ths and 13ths - in jazz, but used them very differently in his compositions, splitting them between parts, and applying a technique called the 'long pedal', in which the pianist is instructed to keep the dampers (the 'loud' pedal') raised for extended periods. The result of this is that the strings can resonate at the harmonics of the notes being played. This technique, pioneered successfully by Beethoven in his later works, had fallen into disuse because, if applied without great skill, it sounds 'muddy'. Ravel showed that it can highlight relationships between notes played at different times.

He made extensive use of the technique of first composing a work at the piano, and later orchestrating it. As a result, many of his works exist both as piano pieces and orchestral scores. Later in his life, he also produced orchestral arrangements of the works of other composers, including

• Debussy (Sarabande, Tarantelle)
• Chabrier (Picture Pieces)
• Musorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition)

Some Interesting Pieces

Even a small study of the pieces can tell you a lot about the musician.

The suite of orchestral pieces called The Tomb of Couperin contains many classical elements, and is rightly understood to be a sincere homage to the classical French composer François Couperin (1688 - 1733) and to that school and style of music. The later orchestral version is written like that, and that's the interpretation that most people pick up. If you play the original version, written for piano, exactly as written, you discover that all the pieces have an overlay of intense sadness. On the original manuscript, each piece is dedicated to a soldier, and it turns out that each one was nursed by Ravel; each one later died of wounds received in battle. As well as a homage to things past, Ravel was mourning the passing of that civilization, for he felt at the time that the war would be lost, and France would be overrun.

The Mother Goose suite was written for two pianos. Although it sounds 'full', each piano part is not very difficult technically. It was intended to be performed by children - as it was at its premiere.

The Minuet on the Name of Haydn assigns letters of the alphabet to the notes on the piano (as expected, but extended beyond one octave), and weaves a three-part minuet using those notes as the theme. At some points in the piece, the name can be detected running backwards. To achieve this, and still sound musical, shows the highest technical skill

Although it is a piece that has been done to death in recent years, Bolero must be mentioned. If this is the only piece by Ravel that you know, do not let it put you off trying some others. It is by far the most overtly dramatic piece that he wrote. It was written for an avant-garde dance troupe, and was designed to make the dancers work against it - the opposite of conventional dance music. Ravel described it as 'anti-music'. At the end of the first performance, someone in the audience shouted 'This is madness!'. Ravel shouted back 'Yes! Someone understands!'.

article and image source: bbc.co.uk

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's life

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov was born in a small provincial town called Tikhvin , 200 km from St.Petersburg. His family was unusual by the age of its members. At the time of his birth his father was 60, his mother 42 and his brother was already a naval officer and was 22 years old.

In Tikhvin little Nika learned to play the piano. His parents noticed, that he made good progress and had a perfect ear. But they did not pay attention to this. At his parents will, Nika, when he was twelve, entered the Naval School at St.Petersburg to become a mariner following his brother.

From that time he began to go to operas, symphonic concerts and acquired a passion for music. His new music teacher Canille noticed the musical gift of his pupil and told him he should try to compose music himself. Canille explained the general rules of musical composition, set him homework and soon introduced to the composer Mily Balakirev who was the head of a St.Petersburg musical circle. During the last year of his studies at the Naval School (1861/62) Nikolay began to compose a symphony. He was happy and dreamed to become a composer.

But his mother and brother (his father died in March 1862) convinced him that a musical career would not ensure a sufficient income, and therefore he should become a naval officer. In order to do this, he had to embark on a round-the-world trip. In October 1862 Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov set off from Kronstadt as a gardemarine on the clipper "Almaz".

The young composer agreed with his parents hoping he would be able to compose on the ship. But the atmosphere there was not suitable to write musical compositions. Official duties did not allow any spare time for music. There was no piano or any other musical instrument on the ship. Not one of the crew took any interest in music. Nevertheless, during the first months of the cruise, mainly during a long stop in England (winter 1862/63) he composed the Andante for his symphony. But later, little by little, his passion for music died down. He thought that music was no longer a part of his life. The cruise lasted 2 years and 8 months. During this time Rimsky- Korsakov visited Germany, England, The United States of America (where he went on a trip to the Niagara Falls), Brazil, France and Spain. He saw many different aspects of nature, particularly of the Northern, Equatorial and Southern seas, the stormy and calm ocean, the starry sky of the Southern hemisphere.

All these natural pictures left striking impressions in his memory. Later he interpreted in his music, with a great talent,these impressions, as well as the natural phenomenon of the North of Russia. He created beautiful musical pictures of the sea (e.g. in "Sadko", "The Tale of the Tsar Saltan", "Sheherazade"); of the forest with its sounds (e.g. in "The Snowmaiden", "The Legend of the Invisible Town Kitez"); of the air and sky (e.g. in "The Christmas Night", "Kashtshey Immortal").

After Rimsky-Korsakov came back to Russia (May,1865), he began to work for the Coast Service in St.Petersburg and intended to enter the Naval Academy. But in St.Petersburg he met his former musical friends, who forced him to return to music and to complete his symphony. In the same year, on December 19th , the N.Rimsky-Korsakov's first symphony was performed for the first time in a concert with Mily Balakirev as the conductor, and it was a great success. The audience were astonished, when they saw that the author was a very young naval officer. So his musical career began. Still he had to earn a living and thus only gave up active naval service eight years later.

Rimsky-Korsakov's musical activity did not only include the creative work. From 1871, when he was twenty seven, and until the end of his life, he was a professor of the St.Petersburg Conservatoire; he held a civilian post of the inspector of the Naval Brass-bands for ten years (1873-1883); worked as the Director of the Free Music School for seven years (1874-1881); was the Director' s Assistant of the Imperial Capella for ten years (1883-1893); conducted symphonic concerts for more than thirty years (1874-1907) at St.Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Brussels and Paris. He died in his own country-seat, Loubensk when he was sixty four.

article and image source: www.russianlaw.net

The Wizard of Keyboard and Piano Music Chopin

Frederic Chopin was born March 1, 1810 in the Duchy of Warsaw in Poland. He was not very old when his potential was recognized. In fact, he was regarded as a child prodigy pianist. As early as seven, Frederic Chopin was performing in front of an audience and composed two of his first pieces in the same year. When he was a young man, he left Poland and would never return. He eventually made his way to Paris where he worked as a piano teacher and a composer. He did not perform very often as most of his time was put into his teaching and personal work, though he did perform in a few concerts from time to time.

The first instrument that Frederic Chopin learned to play was the piano. He was creative from the start, making up his own tunes, and received his first piano lessons from his older sister. He was six years of age when he received his first professional lessons and it was not long before his skill and talent surpassed that of his teacher. The same year that he first began performing in public, he composed G minor and B flat major, two polonaises. In 1926, he went to the Warsaw conservatory, which was a part of the Warsaw University and studied with Jozef Elsner for a period of three years. It was after this that he left Poland and would eventually make his way to Paris. When he first arrived in Paris, he was uncertain about whether he would remain there or not; however, it would soon become his home. He would remain there for some time and travel around while he performed. He eventually married and had two children. Later, his health deteriorated and he eventually past away from tuberculosis.

From the start, Frederic Chopin was different from other composers and musicians, such as Mozart and Beethoven. He was more innovative, more creative and more experimental with music than the great ones before him. In fact, he created new forms of music that was beautiful and was more of an emotional expression of Chopin's. He made innovations in waltz, impromptu, prelude and many other existing forms of music. This particular musician and composer made an incredible impact on music. He introduced a change from the original forms that would greatly influence the future of music. He was the first composer to write ballads and pieces of music separately, and changed etudes, among other genres, into expressive and emotional pieces.

Much of his music was also thought to be influenced by his beloved homeland, Poland. Many of his pieces were an effort to celebrate the culture of his homeland. Even though he left Poland to grow in his musical career, his heart was always rooted there and much of his inspiration came from the home he loved so much. Even after Russia regained control of Poland, which was a main reason why he could never return home, he continued to show his love for Poland through his music in a number of compositions.

by Victor Epand

Ludvig van Beethoven

Born in 1770, Ludvig van Beethoven was one of only three of his parents’ seven offspring children to survive infancy. Yet the world of music owes this chance event an immeasurable amount, because he would go on to be one of a handful of composers to grace the art form with a style and quality that is truly unique. His father was his first music teacher, a proficient tenor, and his grandfather on the paternal side had been Kappelmeister at the court of Clemens August of Bavaria. Music was in his blood, and he started playing viola and organ at a very early age, although he was not a prodigy in the Mozart mould – despite his father’s attempts to declare that Ludwig was seven for an early performance when he was in fact nine. However he was certainly a talented youngster, and published his first three piano sonatas in 1783. He died in 1827 and it is said that as many as 30,000 people attended his funeral procession.

How Beethoven’s deafness has helped interpreters

Beethoven’s genius is merely underlined by the fact that he started to lose his hearing in his late twenties, yet continued through intense frustration and anguish to compose some of music’s most complex and beautiful pieces. For the historian and student of his music, however, the composer’s deafness created a unique opportunity to appreciate the composer. Because he could not take part in an oral conversation, he would carry with him notebooks and have conversations with people in writing. These people could be performers, conductors, students or masters, and the notes survive today to give a unique insight into not only the man, but his art, too – among his notes are specific instructions on how to play many of his compositions and descriptions of his emotional state and day-to-day life, all of which are priceless to the modern interpreter.

Beethoven’s major piano works

During Beethoven’s life, the piano as an instrument became much more accepted as an instrument, partly due to technological enhancements that meant a piano could hold its own with a full orchestra whilst retaining its warmth, tone, sustain and power in the chamber setting. The harpsichords, spinets and clavichords of the past would eventually lose popularity among composers and audiences. The timing could not have been more perfect for Beethoven; he would become a master at both performing on and composing for the piano. He is usually regarded as having composed five piano concertos, although his piano arrangement of his Violin Concerto in D Major is sometimes referred to as his Piano Concerto No. 6. Beethoven was a prolific composer of piano sonatas; altogether there are 32 of them, and many are well known, even among people with no interest in classical music. His best known piano sonatas are “Moonlight”, “Waldstein”, “Pathétique” and “Pastoral” (not to be confused with his Pastoral Symphony). He also left copious amounts of chamber music, much of which had a piano (or more than one piano) as an integral part, along with his string quartets, duos and quintets.

by Charlie Buquette

The Divine Composer Named Johann Sebastian Bach

Born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach in the year of 1685, this German composer began his musical career with learning to play the violin and the harpsichord, which his father taught him to play. His family was a very musical family; his father was an organist for the church and his uncles and brothers were composers and organists as well. In fact, his uncle, Johann Christoph Bach was extremely well known at the time for his talents. Johann Sebastian's family was quite successful in their music and was relatively well known for their talent.

At the age of ten, tragedy struck Johann Sebastian's immediate family when his mother passed away and his father followed her fate within a year. After this happened, his older brother took him in and this is where Johann Sebastian continued to learn what he could from his brother. It was during this time that he also learned to play the clavichord. Four years after moving in with his older brother, he earned the Choral scholarship, which allowed him to travel to Luneburg and attend St. Michael's school for two years. There, Johann Sebastian learned more about playing instruments, like the harpsichord and the organ, but also studied some geography, theology, other languages, physics and history.
After his two years at St. Michael's, he went to the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst where he remained for about seven months as court musician. During this time in Weimar, his reputation as an organist began to grow. Life continued to improve for Johann Sebastian when he took the position of organist at a church in 1703, which offered him a higher salary and allowed him more time to work on his own creations. It was there that he began creating some of his own compositions, though he still had much to learn about composing music.

He remained in this position for about three years before he decided that it was time for him to move on. In 1706, he was offered the organist position at the church of St. Blasius', located in Muhlhausen, where he had more freedom than he did in his previous position. He later married Maria Barbara and had seven children. Sadly, only four of the seven children made it to adulthood. This marriage would not be his only marriage as his first wife, Maria Barbara passed away in 1720. Bach remarried in 1721 to Anna Magdalena and together they had thirteen children. Unfortunately, only six of the thirteen grew into adulthood.

As time went on, his career and reputation continued to grow. He accepted a few more different positions including court master in Weimar, director of music for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen, and was eventually appointed Cantor of Thomasschule in Leipzig where he remained until his death in 1750. Throughout his life, Johann Sebastian Bach learned all that he could about music. His passion for this art was incredible and was what led him to compose some of the most amazing pieces of the time. He is remembered today as one of the most innovative genius' of that period, though he didn't bring in any new forms of music; instead, he built on the style that was present at the time. Today, he is best known for the music he composed and is considered one of the best composers in history.

by Victor Epand