Debussy and Saint-Saëns

As two of the most prominent members of the Parisian musical connunity, Debussy and Saint-Saëns were well known to each other. But were they good friends?

In fact, they were not. Debussy deplored Saint-Saëns’s conservatism and Saint-Saëns felt much the same about Debussy’s modernism, which he scarcely understood. A particularly interesting story about their relationship is that, whereas Ravel and like-minded progressive companions cheered every performance of the first run of Debussy’s operas Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique in 1902, Saint-Saëns cancelled his holidays so that the could stay in Paris and boo it. I don’t suppose he thought much of Debussy’s private life either. Even his younger colleagues disapproved.

So Debussy’s private life was a cause of some scandal then?

Inevitably. After his first serious affair with Mme Vasnier, the (married) dedicatee of his early songs, he lived for years with Gabrielle Dupont (milliner), got engaged to and disengaged from Thérèse Roger (singer), was turned down by Catherine Stevens (rich artist’s daughter), got married to Rosalie Texier (model), had an affair with Emma Bardac (banker’s wife and amateur musician), got divorced from his first wife, got married to Emma… and that’s only a selection. The suicide attempts of two of them women he left were particularly damaging to his reputation in conventional circles. But he was not a conventional sort of person.

What does that have to do with his music?

Well, obviously, Debussy was a man who lived on his senses, great intellect though he was. This sensual side of his personality got him into all kinds of trouble in his domestic life – a life which, even after the success of Pelléas et Mélisande, he could never afford to sustain – but it was also the source of the ultra-fine perception of sound, atmosphere, colour, light, scent, landscape, seascape, character, all those precisely evoked features of his mature orchestral music and piano pieces. Indeed, he could perceive certain essential aspects of Spain without even going there.

And where does impressionism come in?

That’s the point. There can be no impressionism without perception and it was Debussy who at last created the musical equivalent of the impressionism that was such a prominent feature in the work of French artists of the generation before his. Chabrier was a precursor and Ravel was a significant influence in developing the actual technique of converting visual perceptions into music, piano music in particular. But orchestral works like Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images are in the same class as the greatest paintings of Monet, say, or Camille Pissaro.

But he changed, didn’t he?

That’s interesting too. All the pieces he composed in the last years of his life, the three Sonatas for various combinations of instruments and the two books of piano Etudes, have abstract titles. This, it is true, had something to do with the effect of the 1914-18 War and a renewed interest in his French baroque predecessors. But it has far more to do with the disease which was developing in him at that time and which eventually killed him. Deprived through illness of his sensual life – while he continued to admire the sea from his cottage at Pourville– he was inspired now not so much by his sensual perceptions as by his intellectual observations.

Those late works are a long way from the early songs.

Yes but the intensity of the creative passion remains constant.

Gerald Larner©

further reading

Lockspeiser, E: Debussy (London 1980)

Nichols, R: Debussy Remembered (London 1992)

further listening

orchestral works (including Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Nocturnes, La Mer, Images): Concertgebouw Orchestra/Eduard van Beinum, Bernard Haitink: Philips Duo 438 742-2PM2