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8/18/2019 Portrait of Debussy 5, Debussy and English Music
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Portrait of Debussy. 5: Debussy and English Music
Peter J. Pirie
The Musical Times, Vol. 108, No. 1493. (Jul., 1967), pp. 599-601.
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8/18/2019 Portrait of Debussy 5, Debussy and English Music
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Portrait of Debussv-5
Peter J.
Pirie
DEBUSSY
A N D
ENGLISH MUSIC
In this series q articles 1r.e arrenlpt to brtilrl a
oin
posite portrait o f Debu s.\) the nzrtsician throrrgh
exarrtination of the very diferent irrtpressions he left
on the mrtsic of othev cornposers: in general, anrl also
in particular 6 ) docrimentation of ~ohar works thej .
heavrl, and w hen, their .staten lents, and the reflections
fbrmd in their 0br.n compositions.
In discussing Debussy s emotionally conlplicated
relations with England several issues have to be
clarified at the beginning. Debussy, though arguably
the greatest French composer between Berlioz and
Boulez, was less French in his essential nature than
Faure or Ravel. In spite of his ambivalent attitude
to Wagner the emotional atmosphere of Tvisran, and
to a lesser extent
Parsifal,
found so strong an echo
in his own temperament that such dark, sensual,
erotic music is never far away in his mature works.
It is interesting to note that his barbed sarcasm is
usually directed at
The Ring;
for
Tristan
he had a
reluctant, but passionate, respect. This realization
clarifies his attitude to Wagner considerably. This
is of importance because Debussy entered the Eng-
lish consciousness in the trough of the great Wagner-
ian wave; and English milsic in the first quarter of
this century reveals the considerable influence of
Wagner, but the Wagner of
The Ring
almost exclu-
sively. This is clearly seen in the music of Hol-
brooke and Bantock-Holbrooke actually attempt-
ing an English
Ring.
Even in France the Wagnerian
influence on d Indy, Chausson and Chabrier was
that of The Ring. as can clearly be seen from their
subject matter. In fact, the only definite cont inua-
tion of the Tristan atmosphere and technique in the
first quarter of the century is found in Debussy and
the Second Viennese School-this is the elusive link
between Debussy and Schoenberg. One must note
too that Debussy was not only a distinguished
individual composer hut also closely associated with
the French symbolist movement and the artists of
the Decadence generally.
His early music can be described as light and
pretty, with Massenet and Rimsky-Korsakov the
predominating influences. The mature, character-
istic works begin with
L apres-rnidi d un fartne; and
towards the end of his life his music underwent a
change, becoming hard and prophetic. (It is worth
noting in this connection that the picture of the lazy
Debussy married to a rich woman and disinclined
to compose has been proved false. Lockspeiser s
authoritative new life proves that Emma Bardac s
marriage cost her her inheritance, and that the
desperately ill composer had to accept conducting
engagements to provide for his wife and child. )
His nearest English contemporaries were Elgar
(1857-1934), Delius (1862-1934; he was born in the
same year), and Holst (1874-1934). It would be
difficult to imagine a composer who had less in
common with Debussy than Elgar. If Debussy had
Lockspe i ser : Debrrssy his lif
on
irrind
1965).
11,
1 4
Tristan
at the back of his mind, as it were, Elgar, the
eclectic, had in his musical make up, apart from a
dash of Berlioz and a touch of Verdi, several
different German strains. The Brahms influence is
not the only one; comparison between the openings
of Don Jrtan (1 888) and Froissarr (1890) reveals how
strikingly Elgar was at one with the post-Wagner
generation of German composers, while his later
development revealed some kinship with Mahler.
In this he takes the opposite face of the German
coin from Debussy: the line that led from Schubert
through Schumann to Mahler. There is nothing in
Elgar of
Tristatz s
brooding eroticism.
Like Bax and Frank Bridge, Delius stands a little
apart from the most typical streams of English
music; the nationalist school of Vaughan Williams,
Holst, Rubbra, Finzi ere and the Elgarian eclectic of
Elgar himself, Bliss, Walton and, distantly, Britten.
He lived for many years in France, and had the
same background of poets and painters as Debussy
himself: one of his early works is called Paris. All
this has led a contemporary critic to describe Delius
as the only German Impressionist : a remark
revealing a characteristic mastery of historical back-
Edward
Elgar
A
short biography of
pages by \rX'illiam
_\lcN augh t is available
at
S
6d f rom
NOVELLO CO LTD
B or ou gh G ~ e e n
Sevenoaks
I
8/18/2019 Portrait of Debussy 5, Debussy and English Music
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Elgar at Birchwood, near Malvern:
a pkotograplt of about
19 1
ground but complete helplessness in face of an
aesthetic and technical issue. Delius is not very
German and his technique does not resemble that of
Debussy. It may well be true that the first ten years
or so of our lives are the most vital, for the music of
Delius can be proved to be Nordic-to have strong
English and Scandinavian characteristics. (Unless
anyone wants to call him an American composer,
on the strength of Ward s teaching, residence in
Solano Grove, and Appalachia.) The texts Debussy
and Delius set should be decisive-one cannot
imagine Debussy setting Whitman, Nietzsche,
Keller, Shelley. Like Elgar, Delius was born into
the same world as Debussy, but that is where it ends.
Debussy s technique of moving chromatic higher
discords by exact transposition and step is nowhere
found in Delius, who approaches such chords by
leap and does not repeat them; Delius s long, flow-
ing melodies, often folk-inspired if not actually folk
tunes, are most unDebussian. On the other hand,
his forms are quite unGerman. His most typical
form, free variations with a meditative middle
section, is found elsewhere only in the FitzwiNiam
Virginal Book and the music of Arnold Bax: and in
all three it is probably instinctive, if distinctively
English. Thereis, actually, one example of Debussy s
technique, in some of its aspects, exactly imitated, in
Delius. This is the second half of In a Summer
Garden, which uses individual chords as sensations
in a pointillist technique. It is unique in Delius s
output. The music of Holst, austere, cold, and
transparent. shows no trace of awareness of the
French composer. In fact, these three contempor-
aries were set in their ways (very different ways)
before Debussy came into their ken.
But with the next generation it is the same story.
Debussy s music did not impinge on England until
the new century had well begun. (In
1904
Arnold
Bax, progressive and alert, had not heard a note of
his music.2) He was here, however, in
1902, 1903,
1904
and
1905;
in
1908, 1909,
and
1914
he con-
ducted here.3 There is a point here that must
be
taken into account. That is the fall of Oscar Wilde in
1895.
From the point of view of English apprecia-
tion of the background to Debussy s music, apart
from Debussy himself as an isolated modern
composer, this is important, and I shall return to
it.
Vaughan Williams, like Elgar, is usually described
as very English . I sometimes wonder. The two
composers have little in common.
It could be said
that Elgar is the Englishman as the Englishman
likes to see himself, while Vaughan Williams
accords more with the continent of Europe s idea of
us. We should not be flattered. To judge from the
small Vaughan Williams pieces known over there,
the main ingredient would seem to be insipidity.
The most purely English of English composers, all
partial views aside, is probably John Ireland. In
fact, the English composers of the generation after
Elgar have very little in common with each other;
and this is also true of Elgar, Delius, and Holst. But
there is one major psychological trait that all Eng-
lish composers have in common, at least until
1950
or thereabouts, and to that too I shall later return.
There is a tenuous link between Vaughan Williams
and Debussy; Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel.
Ravel and Debussy have not much in common, but I
believe that Vaughan Williams s studies with the
former were crucial to his survival of the great crisis
of his life as a composer; the period between the
Pastoral
and F minor symphonies. The pupil of
Stanford might not have made that great and
triumphant leap forward without the encourage-
ment of a progressive, continental composer in his
youth. One should examine the Ravel String Quartet
and Vaughan Williams s On Wenlock Edge side by
side to see how much Vaughan Williams absorbed of
Ravel s technique; no wonder Ravel admired On
Wenlock Edge 4 And one should lay the opening of
the
Pastoral Symphony
beside almost any mature
work of Debussy to see what they have and have
not in common. Vaughan Williams s consecutives
are almost always triads, diatonic or modal, in
streams against each other, and owing a good deal
of their effect to the fact that each chord is not
exactly transposed, but left to make its full impact as
a unique structure conditioned by the scale pattern.
It would perhaps be wrong to run through all the
English composers between
1900
and
1939
denying
any influence of Debussy; but even when that in-
fluence is obvious, as it is on Cyril Scott and Eugene
Goossens, it is of early music like
Petite Suite, Pour
le piano, Suite bergamasque, and La dam oiselle Plue.
Moreover, one can never be sure that the influence
is not that of the composers who influenced Debussy
ee Bax: Farewell My Youth (1943), p.22, pp.58-9 for a
remarkable thumb-nail sketch of Debussy
3Lockspeiser, 11 116
*Kennedy:
The works
o f Ralph
Varrghan
WiNiams (1966)
chapter
5
8/18/2019 Portrait of Debussy 5, Debussy and English Music
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Lorrj;s' photograph of Debussy
1894),
lnutilated by the composer
rather than that of Debussy himself, and, in the case
of Constant Lambert, those who headed the
reaction against Debussy-Satie, Les Six, Stravinsky.
An inquiry sent to Sir Arthur Bliss produced
courteous bewilderment: not only had Bliss never
reacted to any Debussy except some early pieces-
those named above, in fact-but it seemed that the
later, great Debussy was not particularly sym-
pathetic (as one expected). Gerald Abraham
wrote that Bax's music was made up of 'the debris
of impressionism'. It might be more true to say that
Bax is the missing link between the two extreme
poles of the 20th-century symphony: Sibelius and
Mahler.
He has the cold, Nordic, nature rugged-
ness of the first and the anxiety, complexity, and
mixture of the lyrical and the epic of the second.
Apart from a deliberate parody in Mediterranean
(and he parodied Vaughan Williams in
Country
Tune), The Garden of Fund is Bax's most impres-
sionist work, but here Rachmaninov and Ravel also
appear. It is not very typical of the composer of
those most unDebussian symphonies. Frank
Bridge, most unfairly treated by Frank H o w e ~ , ~n
his later music showed some awareness of Debussy,
particularly in the String Trio recently published
(Faber); but of Bartok and Stravinsky also. Delius,
Bax, Bridge, lacked Debussy's particular harmonic
and fragmented technique and his erotic undertow;
but they have paid for superficial resemblances by
being the less popular with their fellow countrymen:
they are the cinderellas of English music.
The point has been sufficiently made, I think. No
major English composer of the first half of the 20th
century shows much influence of Debussy, and what
there is is from the early, uncharacteristic works. In
fact, if Debussy had never lived English music would
have been much the same. The English composer, at
least until after 1945, did not really like the erotic,
urban, hedonistic aesthetic of the French symbolists
and of Debussy's most characteristic work. Apart
from Wagner in the beginning of the century, until
1945 by far the greatest influence on English music
was that of Sibelius, and the extraordinary Sibelius
cult of the 1930s shows that the average English
music lover felt the same. There was a similar cult
of Nielsen in the late 1940s. There was, as has been
said, an attempt to draw England into the conti-
nental sphere in the 1890s by a group of artists who
were directly influenced by Tristan, Baudelaire, and
the French symbolists. English society waited its
chance, and then turned on their spokesman, Oscar
Wilde.6 His fate was considered sufficiently exem-
plary. Beardsley and Dowson died young. The
group, significantly, held no English composer. The
way was open for the Georgian poets, for Elgar,
Vaughan Williams and Holst. The English poetic
revolution, when it came, was at the hands of
puritans; Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, and the violently
unfleshly Wyndham Lewis. Debussy was slowly
accepted in the first quarter of the century, but not
$The English musical renaissance ( 196 6), pp.160-2
OGaunt: The aesthetic adventure (194% V Debacle
as the member of the group of artists that he was;
rather as an isolated progressive composer, one
among many.' There was much criticism of his
mannerisms, and of his vague and unhealthy atmo-
sphere. Debussy himself was very conscious of these
islands, rather curiously so. The references
in
his
music have a way of being Scottish rather than Eng-
lish
(The Keel Row
in
Gigues,
and
The La ss wi' th'
lint-white locks) and he seems to have suffered from
the delusion that Swinburne was the major English
19th-century poet-which is typical, ~omehow.~
There is a curious link here between Debussy and
Schoenberg. In fact, it took the Schoenberg revolu-
tion of the 1950s to convince theEnglish ofDebussy's
true stature. Still more, it was the magnificent
Debussy ieadings of Pierre Boulez, and Debussy's
music filtered through his own. Even today, we
prefer Debussy at a distance. The Manchester
School of composers shows at last something like
the direct influence of Debussy, especially in the
work of Peter Maxwell Davies. But even here one
ingredient is missing-the torrid late romanticism
of Tristan, felt through Debussy's personality. It is
as lacking in Davies as it is in Walton, Britten, and
Tippett.
English art, and especially English music, is
Nordic, and musically we are a Scandinavian
nation. There has been a good deal of hypocrisy
and prudishness, but the basic fact is that our
artistic temperament is moderate, cool, open-air,
lyrical and wistful. Cotman, Palmer, Constable,
with the occasional wild man like Blake and Turner.
No need to deplore it. There must be differences,
and Debussy's range, for all his great stature, is
actually rather narrow. Even more so than Delius's.
Lambert:
Music Ho (1934).
Debussy as Key Figure
SGray:Survey of contemporary music (19 24) ,chapter onDebussy
Lockspeiser, I, 11 3