E. Robert Schmitz - The Piano Works of Claude Debussy

By E. Robert Schmitz

Foreword by Virgil Thomson

Dover Publication, Inc., New York

Copyright 1950 by Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.

All rights reserved.

This Dover edition, first published in 1966, is an unabridged and corrected republication of the work originally published by Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., in 1950.

This edition is published by special arrangement with Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., an affiliate of Meredith Publishing Company.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-17275-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-20423

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

21567917 2014

www.doverpublications.com

To those of my family, assistants, students, and friends who shared with me the exalting task of fighting for ultimate sincerity in the interpretation of this alchemy of sounds this book is dedicated

Cathedral of Bourges (12th Century)

Examples of arches: Notre Dame de Paris

This book is not intended to subtract from those which have been written about Claude A. Debussy. Nor will it attempt to dispose of the private life and inner thoughts of the man whom I profoundly admired. This book is solely concerned with a part of the musical heritage he left usthat part written for the piano.

As time goes on, Debussys recommendations, his criticisms during the many hours spent in his studio accompanying singers or reading piano worksthese recommendations seem to crystallize with an evergrowing and firm command as does his music, the witness of his intent.

It is true that literary commentaries on music are dangerous procedures to the extent that they detract from the very essence of that music which lies outside of conceptual notions; the intrinsic value of music is in its own perfection, which long survives both the primum mobile of its composition and its specifics of technique. Yet, before a music can be liberated to assume its status of a pure art form, a correct appraisal of its source and ways and means must have been made, understood, and then discarded as having served its purpose in orientating the listener and performer to the quality of beauty, of perfection, which this music will thereafter spell for them.

The whole being of the listener must participate in the reception of the beauty contained in music, but it is often necessary to stimulate the imagination by commentaries to obtain a state of receptivity. Little by little the commentary will pale, only the musical substance per se remaining in the memory.

The insistence of this book upon intellectual commentary on the works it considers is motivated by the repeated experience of imperfect or erroneous conceptions and perceptions of the piano works of Debussy, by both performers and listeners.

The causes of these imperfections are multiple. Wrong, preconceived notions of this music, built on hazy, not to say lazy, commentaries, have done untold harm. Early criticisms, baffled by the original and daring innovations contained in this music, either glibly pass it off with few knowing terms of little service to the student, or belittle it in a reactionary mood of distrust, or outright envy.

Sometimes the insufficient learning, or imperfect discriminative reaction, may establish a wrong perception which scientific and true education may help to correct. Erroneous perception also may consist in attributing to one object the reaction appropriate to a somewhat different object; or different objects may stimulate the receptors in ways so nearly alike that different reactions can never be built for them.

It can also happen that failure to integrate the complete content of a work may result in substituting illusion for actual sensory content.

So the disturbing factors range from emotional states, biased and biasing ideas, lack of education, or lack of discrimination. It seems then, in the face of these elements, that commentary about Debussy, if conscientious and based on many years of performance and study of his piano works, may not be amiss. Literary connotations, pictures reproducing views of objects that might have been, or actually were, sensorial stimuli to composition, can serve an end, most particularly when coupled by melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal, structural analysis.

It is my hope that these will rectify certain notions and complement the intrinsic musical audition and perception of those who, through limited experience of the world of travel or of peaceful contact with nature, through biased and narrow musical study, or through insufficient classical schooling, have been deprived of the multiple imaginative resources to recreate with truth in their interpretations the colorful and genial piano literature of Debussy.

Historically viewed, Debussy is the summit toward which, during the two centuries since Rameaus death, French music has risen and from which, at least for the present, it seems to decline. Internationally viewed, as Fred Boldbeck lately pointed out, he is to the musicians of our century everywhere what Beethoven was to those of the nineteenth, our blinding light, our sun, our central luminary.

So high a content of expression, of communicable meaning, in structures, at once vast, monumental, and bold, is not to be found in any other music than that of these two composers. Neither is so masterful a workmanship in all the musical elementsrhythm, melody, harmony, and their offspring, orchestrationin music that, for all its technical sophistication, speaks so directly to the heart. For musicians and for laymen, both are in their epoch peerless. And for culture they are classical, which is to say, basic both to pedagogy and to the repertory of public execution. Without them music is Europe without Napoleon, Hamlet without the Prince.

Just as Beethoven, not Bach nor Mozart, really summed up the German temperall emphasis and ordered planning, jollity and private meditationso Debussy, not Berlioz nor Bizet, encompassed most fully the French, with its dramatic contrasts of reason and sensuality, of irony and tenderness, stiffness and grace. From France, the home of liberty, too, came the firm freedom of Debussys style and structure. Among all our musical masters, I should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussys operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructedand in that order.

It is in that sound French order, too, that E. Robert Schmitz built up his book about Debussy. Love is in it, and a spontaneous enlightenment, studied penetration, logic, and the completeness of a vast experience with the material. He knew Debussy and Debussys music; he knew classical esthetics and contemporary; he knew the pianoforte. He early created from all these a method of piano playing at once radical and comprehensive. He made that method, I insist, both