Locke San Sebastien

Unacknowledged Exoticism inDebussy: The Incidental Music for Lemartyre de saint Sebastien (1911)

Ralph P. Locke

How are locales and peoples that are exotic—distant and different from“us”—evoked in and through music?

In my book, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections, I argue thatthe portrayal of exotic peoples and places has been too often reduced, byscholars and critics, to a search for specific stylistic codes.1 The discus-sion of musical exoticism generally ends up fragmenting into numerousseparate hunts after markers of musical oddity. For example, the melodicinterval of an augmented second can signal, depending on other factors,a Gypsy style (as in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies), an Eastern-EuropeanJewish one (typical of klezmer music), or a Middle Eastern one (as in theBacchanale from Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila).2 Black-note pentatoni-cism often represents China or the gamelan traditions of Indonesia.Scholars who explore musical exoticism primarily or solely in terms ofsuch quasi-semiotic signals (or topoi) are working within what I call the“Exotic Style Only” Paradigm. I love the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm.I use it often. I feel strongly that it needs to be used more.3

But the “Exotic-Style Only” Paradigm is inadequate for dealingwith the thousands of exotic portrayals that do not make continuoususe, or in some cases any use, of stylistic (musico-semiotic) indicators ofthe exotic. This is particularly true of works for the musical stage(including operas). Stage works, by their very nature, frame the music ina panoply of nonmusical signs: words, sets, costumes, dramatic action,dance, and so on. When the job of identifying the locale has alreadybeen accomplished by these nonmusical elements, the composer is freeto use many kinds of musical materials to tell other things to thelistener, such as what the locale, its people, and its customs “are like.”The musical materials that he or she employs may include ones markedas exotic but also ones that are not marked in that way. After all, music(as critics and aestheticians have long recognized) is well equipped for

doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdn017 90:371–415

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“characterizing”: that is, for conveying mood, gesture, personality, andall kinds of feeling tones and emotional reactions. Music can often dothis, compellingly, on its own. It can do so more explicitly when it islinked (as in much song, opera, and film) to verbal and dramaticcontext.4

I call this new and broader approach to exploring how culturalOthers are represented the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm.The phrase is, I hope, just ungainly enough to stick in the mind. I donot intend the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm to take theplace of the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm, nor to serve as an alternativeto it. Rather, I see the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm as abroader methodological umbrella, under which may be found the“Exotic Style Only” Paradigm but also many other options whose veryexistence the latter cannot recognize (much less explore and explain).

As I was working on the early-twentieth-century chapter of mybook, I noticed that a major work by Debussy, his incidental music toLe martyre de saint Sebastien (1911), had rarely been discussed in regardto exoticism, even though its various Eastern locales (e.g., Syria andBabylonia) seemed to me to offer intriguing possibilities.5 This neglectof a work written during Debussy’s full maturity—a scarce seven yearsbefore his death—is not entirely surprising: a number of other piecesfrom Debussy’s later years (some exotically tinged, others not) have like-wise never quite become central items in the performing repertoire inthe way that many of his early and middle-period works have (say, thePrelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, or the Estampes for piano). Amongthese fascinating and varied late-ish works are the Etudes for piano, Sixepigraphes antiques, En blanc et noir, the three Images for orchestra (onlythe second of which, “Iberia,” gets played often), and the ballets Jeuxand Khamma. Of these works, the Six epigraphes antiques and Khammaevoke, in a number of specific ways, ancient Egypt and other EasternMediterranean locations, as does the somewhat better-known “Canope,”from the Preludes for piano (book 2). Furthermore, each of the threeorchestral Images is steeped in accepted musical gestures pointing to oneparticular European locale, namely (in order) France in its rural aspect,Spain, and England.6 Clearly, the portrayal of other places and culturesremained a recurrent fascination for Debussy during his later years, as ithad been at earlier points in his career (e.g., “Pagodes” and “Soiree dansGrenade,” from the aforementioned Estampes for piano, 1903).

For reasons of space, I ended up not writing about Le martyre inthe book. I here share my thoughts about the fascinating and substantialways in which this remarkable theater work evokes, per musica, variousexotic worlds.

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Neo-Medieval but Also Exotic

In 1910, Debussy agreed to compose incidental music (or, as the genreis known in French, musique de scene) for Le martyre de saint Sebastien, aneo-medieval mystery play whose spoken and sung texts had beenwritten directly in French by the noted Italian poet and novelistGabriele D’Annunzio. By the time Debussy was enlisted, the projectalready involved four stellar and strong-minded collaborators.D’Annunzio, the prime mover, was a vain, pretentious womanizeraddicted to living in luxury beyond his means. But he was also imagina-tive, enterprising, and a virtuosic versifier. (Two decades later, he wouldplay a controversial role in Italian politics.)7 Le martyre was commis-sioned by the Russian-Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein, who, in the role ofSebastian, intriguingly combined dance, mime, and poetic recitation—and who, through the work as a whole, launched what would becomean important career as a creative impresario. (Rubinstein would latercommission Bolero from Ravel and would dance the central part in itschoreographed premiere.)8 And the choreographer and set and costumedesigner, respectively, were the widely renowned Michel Fokine andLeon Bakst, regular associates of Serge Diaghilev and of his latest com-positional protege, Igor Stravinsky.9

The famous story that gave Le martyre de saint Sebastien its name—Sebastian’s being shot full of arrows by Roman soldiers for having re-fused to renounce Christianity and to worship Jupiter and the othergods of Rome—made up acts 3 and 4 (see Figure 1).10 In D’Annunzio’sretelling, this already vivid story became rich in homoerotic sadomaso-chism. The Emperor of Rome, Diocletian, yearns for Sebastian’s bodyand “hyacinth tresses,” asks him to sing with the Roman lyre, offers himworldly treasure and a promotion to divinity, and has the crowd cry out:“May the just gods save your beauty, Sebastian, for the Emperor.”11

Sebastian spurns all temptations, shatters Diocletian’s lyre, and dances(and also describes in verse) the Passion of Christ. Diocletian ordersthat Sebastian’s beautiful face be disfigured by fire:

Scellez sa bouche avec la torche!Faites de sa face une plaie fumante!

[Seal up his mouth with the torch!Make of his face a smoking wound!]12

But Diocletian quickly changes his mind and commands instead that theobstinate one be “smothered” (etouffez-le) under a heavy heap of crowns,

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Figure 1. Title and brief summary of each of the five acts (“Les cinq mansions”),omitting many episodes that do not involve music (e.g., additional miracles, andcommentaries from heavenly voices and from the crowd).


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golden necklaces . . . and flowers, “for he is beautiful” (car il est beau).13

This particular death sentence was perhaps intended to echo, and elabo-rate upon, the one that ends Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and the contro-versial Richard Strauss opera based on it: at the command of Herod, theRoman ruler of Judaea, the guards crush Salome “under their shields.”

Le martyre, though, does not end with this attempted smothering.Sebastian, we learn at the beginning of act 4, was saved by his fellowarchers. Diocletian has responded by ordering that the stubborn Chris-tian be stripped, bound to a laurel tree in Apollo’s grove, and shot full ofarrows by those same archers. In act 4, the archers try in vain to per-suade Sebastian to flee, then weep as they—urged on ecstatically by thevictim with cries of “Votre amour! Encore!” [Your love! More!]—com-plete his martyr’s fate. The people of Syria mourn the beautiful youth,whom they call Adonis. The arrows miraculously vanish from his bodyand reappear in the tree behind him. (Hence the title of act 4: Lelaurier blesse, The Wounded Laurel Tree.)

D’Annunzio prefaced this lengthy story of Sebastian’s temptationand martyrdom with two independent stories: Sebastian walking onburning coals yet feeling no pain (act 1), and Sebastian vanquishing thepagan sorceresses of Babylonia (act 2). He followed it with an epilogue(act 5) set in heaven. He studded all three stories and the epilogue withadditional miracles and with commentaries by various pagans, the soulsof saints, and angelic voices. And he encrusted the whole text withinternal rhymes, precious allusions, and quasi-musical repetitions ofwords and phrases. (The printed libretto, in exquisite typography, ex-tends to more than 250 pages.) At the 1911 performances, the show,despite some cuts in the spoken portions, lasted over four hours.14 Inthe near-century since its original run of nine performances, the workhas rarely been revived on stage—always with extensive, even drasticcuts in the spoken passages; and rarely, if ever, with enough success tocreate a demand for many repeat performances.15

One might also note that the sets and costumes devised for Lemartyre in productions of recent decades (e.g., Paris 1988 and Palermo1999) have largely eschewed all marks of Middle Eastern local color.Instead, they have tended to be either cleanly abstract (thereby empha-sizing such putatively universal themes as oppressive power and sexualtransgression) or else, at most, generically “ancient.” In the process,these productions have reflected, and perhaps also reinforced, the ten-dency toward downplaying or even leaving unmentioned the exoticaspects of this remarkable work.16

Assigning the role of a young male saint or biblical character to afemale performer was a relatively standard practice at the time among


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producers of religious and other “ancient” spectacles.17 In the case of Lemartyre, D’Annunzio and the other members of the creative team mayalso have hoped that the use of a woman as Sebastian would make thehomoerotic aspects of the text and physical movement less objectionableto the audience, critics, and religious authorities. Nonetheless, manypeople at the time found D’Annunzio’s and Debussy’s bold reworking ofcentral Catholic traditions tasteless, opportunistic, or worse. Shortlybefore the opening night, the Vatican placed all of D’Annunzio’s workson the index of forbidden writings, and the archbishop of Paris formallyforbade his flock to attend the performances of a work so “offensive toChristian conscience.”18

The next year, Debussy published a four-movement work for orches-tra alone, entitled Le martyre de saint Sebastien: Fragments symphoniques.This authorized suite stitches together (with minimal adjustment) some ofthe work’s lengthier passages of continuous music (e.g., preludes andscenes for miming), reassigning to instruments certain lines that were orig-inally sung by soloists or chorus.19 Debussy’s apparent aim was to include asmany distinctly different passages of musical material as possible. Thus, incases where a passage in the complete score returns several times—alwayswith significant, dramatically apposite adjustment—only one version of thematerial (usually the initial one) appears in the Fragments. The Fragmentssymphoniques last around twenty-three minutes and, in recent decades,have been performed and recorded with increasing frequency.20

In 1928, Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht—who had been choral conductorfor the 1911 performances and was one of Debussy’s closest associates—collaborated with his wife Germaine to drastically condense the spokentext, producing an effective seventy-five-minute quasi-oratorio with reci-tations by a single actor or actress.21 In 1962, Leonard Bernstein createdand recorded an English-language version with two actors (one male, asnarrator and Emperor; the other female, as Sebastian), which conveysthe drama with particular vividness.22 In recent years, Pierre Boulez hasconducted his own version. Like those of the Inghelbrechts and ofBernstein, it contains the complete music, but the passages of spokenrecitation between the musical numbers—and even sometimes during amusical number—are even shorter. (This is the version that forms thebasis for the forthcoming edition of the work in the Debussy Oeuvrescompletes.)23 In the remainder of the present essay, phrases such as “act1, no. 3, reh. no. 3/4–8” refer to the complete stage music, whether withfull or shortened spoken text. Phrases such as “Fragments, mvt. 2, reh.no. 7/4–8” refer to Debussy’s four-movement orchestral work.24

Debussy’s complete contribution to D’Annunzio’s Le martyreamounts to close to an hour of music. It consists of preludes to the five


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acts, orchestral passages to support extended speech or mime (primarilyby Sebastian), and vocal numbers for several solo female voices and—especially in act 5—for female, male, and mixed choruses of varyingsizes. Marcel Proust found the musical contributions to D’Annunzio’ssacred drama “slight” (mince) and expressed astonishment thatD’Annunzio and Rubinstein had hired “a quite immense orchestra toplay these few farts” by Debussy (orchestre bien immense pour ces quelquespets).25 Nonetheless, Debussy’s contribution to the evening-length eventwas recognized by many commentators at the time as substantial indeedand as displaying a high level of inspiration and innovation.26

Barely mentioned at the time, or since, is the fact that the scorealso contains some remarkably diverse exotic portrayals.27 These exoticportrayals interact in important ways with two aspects that have domi-nated discussion of the work from its own day onward: the “perverse”sexuality (incarnated in Ida Rubinstein’s vivid manner of dancing andposing) and the extreme religious mysticism. In pointing them out,I hope to complement (not supplant) the insightful observations byPeter Lamothe about similarities between Debussy’s music in Le martyreand “ancient” and “early Christian” styles in stage works of the gener-ation or two before Debussy.28 I should add that I am particularly eagerto stress the exotic aspects because Le martyre has sometimes been por-trayed as representing a decided retreat on Ida Rubinstein’s part fromDiaghilevan exoticism (Cleopatre, Sheherazade), as in Toni Bentley’sotherwise perceptive account.29 Writers who have focused on the cos-tumes and sets for the original Le martyre know better: several, echoingthe views of observers at the time, consider this production the apogeeof Bakst’s many efforts at creating “a magic Orient.”30

Because Le martyre as a whole is such an elaborate and disparatework, and because some of its music is unknown to most music lovers,I will, for greater clarity, be discussing the musical examples in the orderin which they occur in the work and will often mention their dramaticcontext. This will also make it easier to coordinate my comments withthe Fragments symphoniques, since the passages in it proceed in the sameorder as in the complete work. (As indicated in the captions, Examples1, 2, and 3 are all included in the first movement of the Fragments andExample 9 in the third.)

“That Young Man from Asia”

The exotic tilt to the work was largely instigated by D’Annunzio, andDebussy’s previous exotic explorations may have been one reason whyD’Annunzio sought him out.31 Exoticism was not an obvious component


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for D’Annunzio to include in a work about this particular saint. Afterall, according to Catholic tradition, Sebastian was an archer, not fromthe Middle East, but from Narbonne in southern France or from Milan(or, combining the two, born in Narbonne but educated in Milan). Thestory goes that he was one of Emperor Diocletian’s Praetorian guardsand that he was put to death in 287 AD by the emperor’s archers forrefusing to worship the gods of Rome. In Renaissance and Baroquepaintings, Sebastian is usually shown tied to a tree, his face gazing heav-enward, his half-naked body pierced by numerous arrows.32

D’Annunzio’s play fluctuates unsteadily between a variety of loca-tions, all of them lying to the east of Europe. Acts 3 and 4 occur in oraround one of the palaces of Diocletian, perhaps his main one inNicomedia (today Izmit, in Turkey). Diocletian was emperor of the easternportion of the Roman Empire. (His son-in-law Galerius ruled the westernportion from Rome itself, and two other “tetrarchs” ruled yet other por-tions.) The majority of the onstage characters, though, come from greaterSyria, a broad territory that included the Mediterranean coastal regionknown then (and now) by some version of the name Lebanon, e.g.,“Libanus” (Latin) or “Liban” (French). Most crucially, the Roman warriorSebastian is, from the beginning of the work, called “archer of Lebanon”and head of a cohort of archers who, though loyal to Rome, come fromEmesa, the Syrian city that is today known in Arabic as “Homs.”33 Inaddition, Sebastian visits, in act 2, a major world power located yet furtherto the east: Babylon. (The text sometimes calls it “Chaldea.”)

Sebastian’s smothering (in act 3) and death-by-shooting (act 4)—wherever they are understood as occurring, whether in Turkey orSyria—are mourned by the women of Byblos, the famous coastal city ofthe Phoenicians that is today Djubayl, in Lebanon. Sebastian identifieshimself at one point with one particular pagan god, namely BaalMarcod, who was worshiped in greater Syria during the time of thePhoenicians. (The name, which means “Lord of the Dance,” is given inLatin inscriptions as Balmarcodes.)

Cesar, Cesar, aux yeux de lynx, je danserai, je danserai, si je suis leSeigneur des danses venu de Beryte marine avec tes cargaisons d’epices. . . . Pour tes mages et tes devins je danserai la Passion de ce JeuneHomme asiatique[,] de ce Prince supplicie: car la feuille de ton laurierest comme le fer de la lance qui lui perca le flanc anxieux.34

[Caesar, Caesar, with [narrow] eyes like a lynx, I shall dance, I shalldance, if I am the Lord of the dance, come from Berytus-by-the-sea [i.e.,Beirut] with your cargoes of spices. . . . For your wise men and seers I


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shall dance the Passion of this Young Man from Asia[,] of this torturedPrince: for the leaf of your laurel [wreath that you offer me] is like theiron [tip] of the lance that pierced his tense thigh.]

Jesus and Sebastian are thus presented, by Sebastian himself, as “youngmen from Asia,” hence as ethnic outsiders to Imperial Rome (and, inact 2, as outsiders to an older, even more benighted empire, Babylon).They were also that much more exotic to a Paris audience of 1911. Andtheir association, in D’Annunzio’s text, with an Eastern region of simpleways seems consistent with their unselfconscious beauty and their will-ingness to sacrifice themselves toward a higher religious goal.35

I might add that the (Middle-)Easternness of Sebastian, from aParisian point of view, was apparent in the very casting of aRussian-Jewish dancer, Ida Rubinstein, in the role—particularly giventhat her most famous previous roles were as Cleopatra and the Sultan’swife Zobediade. To be sure, Bakst’s costume for Sebastian early in thework was primarily European in allure (see Figure 2). But the overtonesof the ancient Middle East—and of famous paintings of Bible scenes—became ever stronger as evening went on, with Sebastian being strippeddown at one point in act 3 to a plain white robe and finally to a loin-cloth and some chest wrappings in act 4.

The exoticness of the work’s various pagan worlds (Lebanon/Syria,Babylonia, and even, as we shall see, the Roman Empire itself, either asa whole or just its eastern half ) and of its two chief Christian figures(Sebastian and Jesus; the latter, though he never appears, is oftendescribed, praised, or excoriated) permitted D’Annunzio and Debussy toenrich the work with a staggering variety of religious, cultural, andmusical images. There were extensive exotic elements in the costumesand sets. This is suggested in the numerous costume and set designs—and onstage photos from the original production—that were publishedat the time, either in the program book for the 1911 performances or intwo important theater magazines: Le theatre and L’illustration theatrale.36

It is said that Baron Robert de Montesquiou, a noted writer and one ofthe age’s great dandies and aesthetes, “went with Bakst to the Louvre toexamine” (with an eye toward imitating them in Le martyre) “Sassanidfabrics, Byzantine enamels, and bas-reliefs from the eastern part of theRoman Empire that had extended into Egypt and Syria.”37 If so, Baksthelpfully ignored a lot of what he saw there, choosing instead to inventhis own versions of Roman togas and Arabian-style caftans and turbans,painting them with bold, contrasting, and freshly imagined geometricdesigns that could be easily seen at a distance. (See Figures 2–8, mostof which have rarely, if ever, been reprinted in discussions of Debussy’s


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Figure 2. Ida Rubinstein in the vaguely European-Renaissance costume for act 3, inwhich she confronts the Roman Emperor Diocletian in his palace (presumably in whatis now Turkey). Diocletian was costumed in a brightly decorated version of arecognizably Roman toga. Several of Diocletian’s seers wore togas that were somewhatGreek in cut and design. From the issue of Le theatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree that isdevoted entirely to Le martyre (no. 299, for the first half of June 1911).


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score. The description cited earlier of the Sebastian in act 4 being near-naked except for some strategic wrappings accords with oneoft-reproduced drawing by Bakst. A less well-known Bakst drawing of

Figure 3. By contrast, the Babylonian sorceresses were given strikingly weird andnon-European garb. These sketches by Leon Bakst (see also Figures 5–8) werescrupulously carried out in the actual costumes, as numerous photos attest. From Letheatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree 299 (1911).


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the same scene, shown as Figure 8, is more modest but perhaps evenmore redolent of Biblical characters, such as John the Baptist. No photoof the actual costume survives.) The costume sketches and photos alsogive hints, in conjunction with some surviving verbal descriptions, ofthe dancing, miming, and other stage movement.

We are on significantly more solid ground when discussingD’Annunzio’s text and Debussy’s music, since both of these were pub-lished in full at the time. (The music was published in a complete

Figure 4. Stage photo of two Women of Byblos (in Lebanon), from the scene inact 3 in which Sebastian (costumed as shown in Figure 2) confronts Diocletian. FromLe theatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree 299 (1911).


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piano-vocal score, plus the various orchestral excerpts mentioned earlier.The complete orchestral score was long available only on rental, but acritical edition, edited by Eiko Kasaba, is scheduled to be published inthe near future.)38 Naturally enough, many of the textual and musicalimages of exotic locales chosen by the various members of the creativeteam were ones considered, at the time, peculiarly appropriate to theMiddle Eastern regions in question. Others were borrowed from un-named locales that lay even further to the east, notably India and, inone startling case (as has apparently not been pointed out), Indonesia.

Figure 5. A Jew of the Eastern Roman Empire. From Le theatre: Revue bimensuelleillustree 299 (1911).


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In some spots, this proliferation of exoticisms strengthened the primaryRoman Catholic message of the work; in others, as we shall see, it deftlyundermined it.

Figure 6. A dark-complexioned augure (seer) serving Emperor Diocletian. From Letheatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree 299 (1911).


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The poet’s seemingly idiosyncratic emphasis on regions beyondEurope was not without some basis in history and legend. A longstand-ing version of the Saint Sebastian myth specified that Diocletian’s mur-derous archers were Mauretanians (natives of the “Moorish” lands thatare now Morocco and Algeria). Furthermore, it is a historical fact that,in 303–04 AD, Diocletian promulgated four successive edicts againstChristian worship, leading to the slaughter of thousands in Alexandriaand Asia Minor.39

D’Annunzio labored to make theatrically plausible the saint’s con-nection to what early-twentieth-century French people called l’Orient.He posited that the Syrians (including the Lebanese/Phoenicians) didnot grasp the principles of the nascent Christian religion and that theytherefore conflated Sebastian with the Greek god Adonis (and withAdonis’s Middle Eastern predecessors, since his name derives from theSemitic root adon, “lord”).40 Indeed, as the well-read D’Annunzio surelyknew, the second-century writer Lucian recorded that a river flowingdown from Mount Lebanon was named Adon. Once a year, the riverturned red from silt, yet people in the region believed that they were

Figure 7. Three turbaned non-Europeans in Diocletian’s extensive retinue: from left,a devin (soothsayer), a Nubian slave, and a mage (wise man or fortune-teller). From Letheatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree 299 (1911).


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Figure 8. Saint Sebastian in act 4, stripped of his courtly garments and wearing a quasi-Biblical short tunic and animal skins. From Le theatre: Revue bimensuelle illustree 299(1911).


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seeing—in quasi-ritualistic annual repetition—the blood that Adon shedwhen he was gored by a boar.41

Another aspect of exotic characterization is evident in the way that,toward the end of act 3, the Syrian people (including the Women ofByblos) are portrayed as blindly obedient to the Emperor. To be sure, obe-dience is a central function of all the various choral groups in act 3. The(presumably Roman, or at least loyal-to-Rome) cithara players respondinstantly to Diocletian’s demand that they sing in praise of Apollo (and ofDiocletian himself). Similarly, when the Emperor—having dressedSebastian in a white robe, regal necklaces, and other attributes of power—cries out to his augures (seers), “Annoncez l’etoile future au ciel romain!”[Announce [Sebastian as] the future star in the Roman skies!], theyinstantly do so in a joyous chorus (act 3, no. 6).42 By contrast, theLebanese and Syrians are not in the employ of Rome, and therefore haveno presumed need to bend to Diocletian’s will and whim. Yet he sooncommands them as well:

Mais il est pale, Adoniastes, plus que vos images de cire apres l’equinoxed’automne, sur vos lits d’ebene, a Byblos. Il renaissait, et il se meurt. Opleureuses, pleurez encore! Il se meurt, l’Archer du Liban!

[He is pale, oh worshipers of Adonis, paler than your images of wax afterthe autumnal equinox, upon your beds of ebony, at Byblos. He wasfinding new life, and [now] he is dying. Oh, weepers, lament again! He,the Archer of Lebanon, is dying!]

And the Syrian people (Chorus Syriacus) respond without hesitation byrepeating the exotically colored chorus that—as will be discussed later—the Women of Byblos had sung earlier in act 3, at the end of Sebastian’sretelling (and miming) of the Passion of Christ. One can read this supinereaction narrowly—as typical of the specific ethnic group we are seeing(fourth-century inhabitants of what would in later centuries become Arablands, and already clothed in semi-Arab garb)—or broadly—as a universaltendency of crowds to be manipulated by selfish people in positions ofpower. Or, perhaps (as is so often called for when dealing with a highlyallegorical work), at once narrowly and broadly.43

I have said that Le martyre presents a predominantly Christianframe for its various exotic moments. This basic Christian context isreflected in choral and other vocal movements that make free use ofstyles borrowed from Western sacred-music traditions, such as Gregorianchant and Renaissance polyphony. Listeners familiar with variousextended works of the 1880s by Debussy—notably L’enfant prodigue and


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La damoiselle elue—will find themselves on familiar ground. The orches-tral prelude, offers music of utter purity (Ex. 1a). Here, simple triads inroot position imply various church modes, much like two well-knownmoments that were surely familiar to Debussy and many of his listeners:the ecclesiastical procession in the middle of Musorgsky’s “Great Gate ofKiev” (from Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874); and the solemn openingchords of Tchaikovky’s Romeo and Juliet (1870, rev. 1880), which plainlyrepresent Friar Laurence. But, as if predicting the pain that the agentsof paganism will inflict on God’s “elected ones,” we soon hear chordsjuxtaposed a tritone apart (Ex. 1b).44

Easternness surprises the listener in m. 31 (Ex. 2) when, over awavering countermelody in the English horn (left-hand part of the pianoreduction) and repeated arpeggios in the two harps (on a chord contain-ing a dissonant minor second), the oboe begins a tune that is (accordingto Debussy’s marking) expressif et douloureux.45 (Oboe and English hornhad long been markers of the Middle East and Central Asia, in partbecause of their similarity to the zurna and other double-reed instru-ments much practiced in those regions.) The tune continues witharabesque-like flourishes, some of which descend chromatically, ratherlike those in Middle Eastern portrayals by numerous composers duringthe previous decades, such as the recurring solo violin tune inRimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade or Dalila’s “Ah, reviens” fromSaint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila.

I propose that Debussy meant this Eastern-tinted tune to refer toSebastian and Jesus because, in the oratorio, it returns (played touch-ingly by the solo violin) during Sebastian’s powerful spoken words abouthearing, presumably on the Day of Resurrection, “the footsteps of thenew god, [walking] side by side with the new man” (la marche dunouveau dieu a cote de l’homme nouveau).46 The Easternness and sad-eyed

Example 1a–b. Le martyre, act 1 (La cour des Lys), no. 1 (Prelude), mm. 1–4 andm. 12 (equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, same measure numbers). Root-position chordsand, in m. 12, triads a tritone apart. Musical examples from Le martyre are drawn fromthe piano-vocal score prepared by Andre Caplet (see n. 23).


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gracefulness of Jesus—and, by reflection, of Sebastian, the onstage char-acter who is invoking Jesus’s arrival at the end of days—could not bemore plainly marked.

Exotic Fire

Later in act 1, Sebastian treads upon burning coals to give witness tothe power of the one God. (The orchestra’s music, without Sebastian’sspoken lines, forms movement 2 of the Fragments symphoniques.)D’Annunzio surely based this episode on Indian fakirs and theirworld-renowned feats of endurance.47 The (unacknowledged) Hindu

Example 2. Debussy, Le martyre, act 1, no. 1, mm. 31–38, reh. no. 2/3–10(equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, same measure numbers). Middle-Eastern sorrow.


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background to the action here makes Sebastian’s daring feel at leastsomewhat rooted in human life—and therefore more plausible.Debussy’s music (see Ex. 3) is not directly exotic-sounding. Instead, con-sistent with the broader paradigm that I discussed at the outset—the“All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm—it emphasizes elements thatare, in some other way, consonant with the exotic premise. The crack-ling flames and increasing heat and tension are suggested by string pizzi-cati and ponticello tremolos, all rising in dynamic level from pp to f, andby sudden interjections from the brass, including passages played in a“brassy” manner (cuivrez). The fakir-saint’s confident footsteps are indi-cated by steadily rising and falling phrases in the winds.

Are fire and footsteps exotic? They become so, I contend, whenthe figure whom we see stepping upon the glowing embers is an exoticholy man who advances calmly, having entered into a mental statesimilar to what, fifty years later—in the context of a renewed Westerncultural fascination with Indian culture and religion—would be called“transcendental meditation.”

During the remainder of act 1, the work’s primary Christiancontext gradually asserts itself in three phases: first, a chant-like

Example 3. Debussy, Le martyre, act 1, no. 3, reh. no. 3/4–8 (equivalent toFragments, mvt. 2, reh. no. 7/4–8). Crackling pizzicati and sizzling brass entries portraythe fiery coals upon which Sebastian is preparing to step. (The horns play “brassily” abit earlier, at reh. no. 2/6–7).


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proclamation of faith by the martyrs (and twin brothers) Mark andMarcellian (Le martyre, no. 3, reh. no. 6; Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no.10);48 then sudden beneficent smoothness as Sebastian reports that thescorching coals feel to him as cool as white lilies (at the markingModere); and, finally, a Palestrina-like a cappella motet for the angels’praise of Sebastian’s deliverance (Le martyre, no. 3, reh. no. 12;Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no. 16).49

Chaldean Sorcery and an Indonesian-SoundingGoddess

Act 2, “La chambre magique” [The Chamber of Magic], musically verystrong, is unfortunately not represented in the orchestral Fragments. Thescene is the dark laboratory of the Eastern (Babylonian) sorceresses whomaintain the heavenly bodies in orbit. Figure 3 shows the very strangeand distinctly non-European garb devised by Leon Bakst for the sevenwomen who performed these non-singing roles.50

As in the episode of the danse extatique in act 1, Debussy’s musicmakes no use of exotic style yet nonetheless helps a heavily exoticizedscenario make its impact. The prelude—accompanying our view of thedark laboratory, with its Chaldean inscriptions and seven steaming cruci-bles in which the fires of the planets, sun, and moon are burning—openswith mysterious tremolos and other figurations on two open fifths a half-step apart, and a notably ambiguous melody in the contrabassoon that,among other things, arpeggiates a diminished-seventh chord (Ex. 4).

This passage is hard for us, the listeners, to make sense of.51 Weare, one might say, peering aurally into a dark space and trying to iden-tify shapes and their secret purposes. Ravel may have had thismysterious passage in mind when writing two (today much better-known) sinuous contrabassoon solos: the one that opens his Concertofor Piano Left Hand (1930) and the one that represents the Beast inthe movement entitled “Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bete”[Conversations between Beauty and the Beast] in the Ma mere l’oye[Mother Goose] orchestral suite and ballet score (1908–12).52

Particularly appropriate to the alchemical wonder-working of theseMesopotamian sorceresses are two crystalline upward swoops on celestaand harps (Ex. 5, using the bitonal double fifths from Ex. 4) and, in thewinds and harps, eerie augmented triads descending along a whole-tonescale across several octaves (Ex. 6).53 Again, musical materials that arenot exotic in origin (and that, in this case, are almost “high-tech” fortheir era) are invoked to characterize a strikingly exotic and backwardnon-Western culture: Babylonian astrology.


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Soon after, the voice of Erigone, a fabled virgin of pagan days(sometimes identified by stargazers with the constellation and zodiacalsign Virgo), is heard singing from beyond the heavy locked doors at the

Example 4. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1 (Prelude), mm.3–7. A dark, winding melody for contrabassoon, against tremolos on two-fifths ahalf-step apart.


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back of the sorceresses’ chamber.54 Her radiant music freshens thegloomy atmosphere. It also briefly challenges the work’s prevailingWestern frame. Whereas, elsewhere in Le martyre, offstage voices con-sistently provide “correct” Christian interpretations of onstage events,here the offstage voice presents a mystical, almost pantheistic vision, in

Example 5. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1, (Prelude), reh.no. 1/9–10. “Magical” swoops on celesta and harp (based on the same two fifths as inExample 4).

Example 6. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1, (Prelude), reh.no. 2/6–7. Parallel augmented triads in the winds, descending along a whole-tonescale.


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Example 7. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2, no. 2 (song for the voice of the VirginErigone), mm. 1–12. “Black-note” pentatonic writing on E, equivalent to better-known“gamelan” passages in works of Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Britten, and others.


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which human life is fleeting and merges seamlessly into the naturalworld: “Mon ame, sous le ciel clement, / Etait la soeur de l’hirondelle; /Mon ombre m’etait presqu’une aile” [My soul, under the gentle sky, wassister to the swallow; my shadow was, to me, almost a wing].

Erigone’s gentle, emotionally restrained song (Ex. 7) alludes to atonally placid but rhythmically multilayered musical style fromIndonesia, an unexpected locale that lies some five thousand milesfurther away from Rome (and Paris) than any of those explicitly invokedby D’Annunzio (Turkey, Syria, and Babylonia). Erigone’s melody de-scends and ascends in relaxed, delicate fashion along the (slendro-like)pentatonic scale. Often her notes move in simple, even rhythm, like anursery rhyme, thereby suggesting her innocent nature. The solo windsimitate the vocal line much as performers in a gamelan echo each other.This remarkable song deserves to be examined as comprehensively as hismuch better-known exploration of pentatonic-drenched gamelan style“Pagodes” (from the Estampes for piano solo). That it has escaped theattention of commentators—normally so quick to apply the “ExoticStyle Only” Paradigm—surely derives from the fact that the sung words(unlike, say, the titles of “Pagodes” and Ravel’s “Laideronnette, impera-trice des pagodes”) give no hint of an East Asian ethnic context.55

Later in the act, Sebastian breaks open the doors, letting in thevoice of the Virgin Mary, who sings of the bright face of her pure child.But the more sensuously enchanting—and intensely exotic—song ofErigone, with its carefree, overlapping orchestral traceries, lingers in thelistener’s memory. Indeed, this Indonesian-style number seems to be thesolo vocal number from Le martyre ever to have established a perfor-mance life on its own: Lucienne Tragin would record it in 1943 withFrancis Poulenc at the piano, the two elegantly conveying a mood ofunforced sensuousness tinged with the inevitability of loss.56

The Exoticness of Rome

Different yet again in tonal language, orchestral color, and exotic impli-cations is the passage, early in act 3, in which Diocletian commands hiscithara-playing male singers to “blind the impious one” (aurally) withthe “radiance” of the hymn to Apollo (Ex. 8).57 The words of thehymn consist of an almost syntax-free string of epithets, suggesting theemptiness of pagan theology and the servility of Roman courtiers andfunctionaries: “Hymn of Joy! Golden Lyre! Silver Bow! . . . BeauteousSovereign crowned with light!”58 Another composer might have set suchphrases to straightforward operatic-style choral music of regal and divineglory, as if to reinforce the conventional notion that Rome was (with


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Greece) the cradle of Western civilization.59 A third composer wouldhave employed music that was faintly modal, and bland in orchestration,thereby rendering it, in Michael Walter’s apt term, “colorless.”60

Debussy’s setting, by contrast, is colorful in the extreme, as quirky andunique as any of his more obviously ethnic portrayals in the work(Ex. 8). Indeed, one might call this hymn of the cithara playersexotically bizarre, with the important exception that the exoticism isconveyed by a musical dialect that is freshly invented rather thanconventionally associated with the locale (and, in this case, era) inquestion.

Immediately obvious to the eye is the white-note tonal language ofthe hymn: not one accidental is to be seen until the shift to a kind of Emajor in the last phrase. The key signature is two sharps, but the musicconsistently avoids the two modes typical of functional tonality (i.e., Dmajor and B minor). Instead, it briefly establishes, one after the other,three further modes that are available within the seven notes of the dia-tonic two-sharp scale: A-Mixolydian, E-Dorian, and F-sharp-Phrygian.The constant modal shifts make the hymn an instance of the harmonictechnique that Nicholas Slonimsky would later term “pandiatonicism.”61

This technique—i.e., restricting the music to a single seven-note dia-tonic (“white-note”) scale and abruptly shifting the tonal center (and,hence, mode) within that scale—points back to Satie’s Gymnopedies(1888, orchestrated by Debussy in 1897) but also ahead to 1920s-eraStravinsky, 1940s-era Copland, and such composers of the present dayas John Adams and Arvo Part.62

Intriguingly, this obsessive exploring of successive modes otherthan major and minor is not wildly different from the Christian-style(or, we might say, “Cathedrale engloutie”-style) opening of Le martyre(first measures of Ex. 1) or from the powerful choral paean that endsact 2.63 But harmony in this Hymn to Apollo (from act 3) is intenselyinflected by texture, rhythm, and the manner in which the men’schorus declaims D’Annunzio’s words (which are, unlike in some othernumbers in Le martyre, unrhymed). These seventeen remarkablemeasures feature much stolidly unison singing in an energetic butoff-kilter 5/4 meter, perhaps recalling the 7/4 of the Jewish soothsayersin Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ (1854). The French words sometimesend up misaccented, as happens nowhere else in Le martyre. Theestranging effect of the 5/4 meter is reinforced by the robotic accom-paniment (for full string orchestra and three harps), whichconsists mainly of triads (or open fifths) that stomp up and down thescale in “unthinking” parallel motion and in nearly unbroken quarter-note rhythm.


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Example 8. Debussy, Le martyre, act 3, no. 3 (hymn of the cithara players), mm.1–12. Harmonies sequencing mechanically to different modes available with the notesof the D-major scale, and to stolid quarter-note rhythms. Detache duplets on a singlepitch for violins in harmonics.


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As compositional experiment, this brusque, punchy music is fasci-nating. In context, though, it suggests how oppressive and unfeeling theRoman Empire of the story is, especially by contrast to the sweet flow orpious churchliness of one or another of Le martyre’s pointedly“Christian” passages. In perhaps no previous musical work was theRoman Empire—or do we see it as specifically the Empire’s Easternhalf?—presented as so exotic, antipathetic, and incomprehensible, sounredeemably Other, so profoundly un-Christian (in all senses of thatword).64

Markers of Easternness

Soon after this comes the one extended passage in Debussy’s score forLe martyre that most plainly fits the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm: thelamenting of the Women of Byblos over Sebastian, who has justdescribed and enacted Christ’s despair in the garden of Gethsemane.These four linked laments (Ex. 9) incorporate markers that had longbeen used by composers to tell the listener that she or he is now “in”the Middle East. The exotic effect of the music was no doubt furtherreinforced by the costumes of the women (Figure 4) and by their contin-ual verbal references to the local Semitic god Adonis (whom they mista-kenly believe Sebastian to be).

The passage concludes the Gethsemane scene, in response toSebastian’s vivid reference to (and miming of) Jesus’s imminent death:“Sa sueur tombe comme gouttes de sang, trempe la terre” [His sweatfalls like drops of blood, soaks the earth]. The horror-stricken women’schorus enters with what we might call Lament A (first measures ofEx. 9), a fluid descending chromatic melody line over a sudden forteorchestral passage, full of dissonant chords and tritonal pounding in thetimpani.65 The chorus’s melody bears a striking resemblance to the de-scending chromatic vocal lines in two exotic opera arias by Rimsky-Korsakov that would soon become worldwide favorites: the “Song of theIndian Guest” from Sadko (1898; this aria is popularly known as “Songof India” or, in French, “Chanson indoue”); and the “Hymn to the Sun”from Le coq d’or (1909; this aria is performed by the queen of a fantasyland, called Shemakha, in Central or East Asia). It may be that Debussywas, like Rimsky-Korsakov, primarily drawing upon well-establishedexotic conventions of Middle Eastern style (such as in the aforemen-tioned aria from Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila). But the possibility of adirect influence should not be excluded. True, neither Sadko nor Le coqd’or had been performed in Paris by 1911. But their piano-vocal scoreshad been available in print since, respectively, 1896 and 1907.


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Furthermore, the French singing translation published in the Sadkoscore had been prepared by Louis Laloy (in conjunction with MichelDelines), a music critic who, in the intervening years, had become atrusted friend of Debussy’s and had written his biography.66 Composersof Debussy’s day, it helps to remember, had many ways of getting toknow other composers’ music, not just (as most listeners needed to) byattending a live performance.

The ribbons of half-steps continue in Lament B (“Ah! Tu pleuresle Bien-Aime!”—Ex. 9 at reh. no. 6), but upwards as well as down, theseveral vocal parts sometimes engaging in wedge-like contrary motion.In Lament C (“Helas!”—Ex. 9, reh. no. 6, at upbeat to m. 5), half-stepsnow alternate with an even more specific intervallic marker of theMiddle East: the augmented second (between C-natural and D-sharp,the latter curiously spelled as an E-flat).67

Finally, the lament tapers off in the voices (Ex. 9, at reh. no. 7),moving into the orchestra—flutes and violins, playing piano and dolcewhat we shall call Lament D—while six women in unison wail“Adonis!” (In the orchestral Fragments—last pages of mvt. 3—LamentsB and C and the unison cries of “Adonis!” over the orchestra’s LamentD are variously transferred to English horn and/or oboes, no doubtbecause of those instruments’ Middle-Eastern associations.)68

Lament B is punctuated by little repeated-note interruptions in theharp. Though their rhythm derives immediately from that of the afore-mentioned forte timpani entry in Lament A, these detache duplets, as Ishall call them, have a significant connection also to analogous detacheduplets (likewise on a single pitch) in notable operas set in the MiddleEast, such as Aida (the Nile Scene that opens act 3, appearing inEx. 10) and, even more similar in musical detail, Massenet’s Herodiade(Ex. 11).69 This figure—equal-value repeated notes on a single pitch—does not derive from musical traditions of the Middle East. Rather, it isan invented device that, when played against a long-held pedal tone (asoccurs in two of these instances: Lament B and Ex. 11), evokes qualitieslong imputed to Middle-Eastern societies by people in Europe andNorth America: stasis and rigid (perhaps ritualistic) repetition ratherthan forward movement and flexible growth.

Pedal points in music evoking the Middle East (or other exoticlocales) are usually placed in the low instruments, as, for instance, inthose moments by Verdi and Massenet (Exx. 10–11). In Debussy’sLaments B and C, the pedal (a long A-flat) is given out by solo winds:flute for a full four measures, then clarinet, oboe, or both together. And,significantly, the pedal is trilled. This thirteen-measure-long trill is analmost exact quotation—except that it is about an octave lower—of


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what was (and remains) the most memorable extended wind trill in thehistory of Western music, namely the one (on A) for flute in RichardStrauss’s notorious exotic opera of six years earlier, Salome (Ex. 12; thework received its Paris premiere, in French, in 1907, three years beforeDebussy began composing Le martyre). Surely it is no coincidence thatStrauss’s long-held wind trill occurs at the moment when the title

Example 9. Debussy, Le martyre, act 3, no. 4, reh. no. 5/2 to reh. no. 7/2 (appearingin condensed and adapted form as the end of Fragments symphoniques, mvt. 3, from reh.no. 25, mm. 2 onward). The Women of Byblos sing typically exotic (“Middle Eastern”)intervals in their several successive laments over: “le bel Adonis” [fair Adonis]. Example 9continues on next page.


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character sings desirously about her beloved Middle-Eastern male andChristian martyr, the decapitated John the Baptist. The infamous words(derived from Oscar Wilde): “I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan.”Though Sebastian (as noted earlier) has just mimed Jesus’s impendingcrucifixion, the Lebanese women mourn him as if he were a handsomeyoung lover: “le bel Adolescent, couche dans la pourpre du sang” [thebeautiful Youth, lying bathed in the purple of blood]. Indeed, they stillcall him by the name of their own local (Semitic in origin) pagan adoles-cent god: Adonis. Debussy’s (unconscious?) echo of the most famous

Example 9. Continued.


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and controversial moment from Salome adds a further level of culturalcommentary to D’Annunzio’s scene, intensifying its aura of sacrilege andperversity.

At the end of act 4 of Le martyre, after Sebastian has expired fromhis arrow-wounds, the Eastern-style choral passage returns once more,reworked in various ways and finally turned into a stirring funeralmarch.70 Now the chromatically descending tune is sung by all theSyrians (male and female).71 They no longer refer to Sebastian asAdonis; this presumably indicates a first step away from paganism andtoward spiritual enlightenment. Nonetheless, they do repeat the Womenof Byblos’s earlier prediction that the dead man is headed toward “thedarkened portals . . . [of] gloomy Hades.” We thus see that the Syriansstill have no concept of the Christian Heaven, despite all they have wit-nessed of Sebastian’s devotion.

Example 9. Concluded.

Example 10. Verdi, Aida (1871), act 3, mm. 1–2. Detache duplets across four octavesportray the placidity of nighttime by the Nile.


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The Joys, and Colorlessness, of Heaven

The pagans are hopelessly mistaken. D’Annunzio shows this by moving,without comment or pause, to the brief act 5. Set in Heaven, against apainted backdrop that, in the original production, gleamed with rays ofcelestial light, this brief final act consists primarily of statements of praise(for Sebastian’s sacrifice) from God’s apostles and angels and a culminat-ing paraphrase of Psalm 150 (“Praise the Lord with flute and lyre!”).72

This wonderfully affirmative music stands in sharp contrast to thechromatic and augmented melodic motion—often over a long-heldpedal—that Debussy, in the two previous acts, had repeatedly assignedto unbelieving Middle Easterners (Lebanese women, and the people ofSyria) and that was, in his day, an unmistakable marker of non-Westernexotic ethnicity. Exotic musical markers helped Debussy convey thelimited insight of heathen peoples, their blindness to what we encounterat the very end of act 5: the transcendental, all-embracing Christianvision of blessed life after death (rebirth in Christ), embodied in splen-did music of diatonic and clearly Western glory. This concludingnumber presents a grand series of I–IV–V (tonic–subdominant–domi-nant) affirmations by the chorus, and then the bracing coda, heavilypentatonic in tonal language, shown in Example 13.73

Debussy scholar Denis Herlin, in a recent study, agrees with manyof the reviewers of the premiere performances that act 5, with its gran-diloquent Christianizing, is “by far the least successful” part of thescore.74 I would have said the same thing until I heard the Michael

Example 11. Massenet, Herodiade (1884), act 2, scene 1, mm. 8–11. Detache dupletson a single pitch for a semi-timeless scene in the Middle East: Herod, reclining in hischamber, is waited upon by servants and yearns for the beautiful young Salome.


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Tilson Thomas recording, in which the final minutes sound as convin-cing as anything else in Debussy’s score. Indeed, I might argue that theend of Debussy’s act 5 helped bring a spirit of joy and light back intoWestern religious music, a field of musical productivity that, duringmuch of the nineteenth century, had suffered from an excess of gloomi-ness or, worse, timid tastefulness.75 True, these triumphant, repeatedrising arpeggios for two solo sopranos in unison on “Alleluia” do notsound much like what most of us think of as “Debussy.”76 But this maybe a limitation on our own part. Perhaps we have typecast Debussy aswriting in a certain highly refined and often oblique manner, whereas heoften took on a grand, more direct manner when writing works for large

Example 12. Strauss, Salome (1905; Paris premiere 1907, in French). “I have kissedyour mouth, Jochanaan.”


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forces—not least at the two ends of his career, e.g., in the Fantasy forPiano and Orchestra (1889–90) and La damoiselle elue (a kind ofsecular cantata, 1888–89, rev. 1902) or, among later works, the orches-tral Images (1905–12) and the astounding ballet Khamma (composed in1912 on commission for the notorious “Salome dancer” from America,Maud Allan, and orchestrated by Charles Koechlin).77

The Importance of the Exotic for Debussy

Still, several of those works (the Fantasy, in its full version; the orches-tral Images; and Khamma) make very happy play with a variety of exoticor at least regional and folk styles, in a way that the final pages of Lemartrye do not. It may in fact be the case that Debussy—however muchhe defended the work against charges of sacrilege by insisting on his“sincere” response to the “idea of Ascension”—felt more comfortable,generally, with concrete images of earthly joys and sorrows.78 Suchimages, as we have seen, occur at numerous moments in acts 1–4 of Lemartyre, whether overtly or (as in the case of Erigone’s quasi-Javanesenursery song) covertly. Perhaps Debussy was less comfortable, finally,

Example 13. Debussy, Le martyre, act 5, reh. no. 9/1-2. Joyous affirmations ofspiritual rebirth.


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with rapturous but culturally bleached affirmations of a transcendentalDivinity, as in the Alleluias of Example 13.

Distinctions between various exotic styles (long established ornewly invented) and the more normative materials of Western music—in other words, distinctions between “Them” and “Us”—were a crucialpart of what made music, for Debussy, worth composing. Surprisingthough it may seem, there is more exoticism in Debussy—and there ismore to that exoticism—than we have realized. As our examination ofLe martyre de saint Sebastien has demonstrated, even such inherentlyethnic-neutral elements as a long trill or a two-note figure on a singlepitch can, when placed in an exotic nonmusical context, acquire power-ful exotic resonance. We will do a better job of noticing and evaluatingthe full range of exotic portrayals in the works of Debussy—and, indeed,many other composers—if we no longer restrict ourselves to the “ExoticStyle Paradigm” but instead adopt the much broader “All the Music inFull Context” Paradigm.

Notes

Ralph P. Locke is professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s EastmanSchool of Music, and senior editor of the University of Rochester Press’s EastmanStudies in Music. His books include Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (1986),Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (2009), and (as contributing co-editor)Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (1997). Locke is afive-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His 2005 article in CambridgeOpera Journal on exoticism in Verdi’s Aida received the H. Colin Slim Award(American Musicological Society). Email: [email protected].

The present study was first presented at meetings of the American MusicologicalSociety (New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter) on March 30, 2008; at a session orga-nized by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations (during the AmericanMusicological Society’s 2008 conference in Nashville); and at the University of NorthCarolina (Chapel Hill), April 5, 2008. The following read drafts, commented helpfullyon specific points, or shared their unpublished writings: Annegret Fauser, Denis Herlin,Eiko Kasaba, Peter Lamothe, Anne MacNeil, and Marie Rolf. Lamothe, in addition,shared with me his copies of crucial documentary materials from 1911, and Herlin andKasaba kindly made available previously unpublished portions of the forthcoming criti-cal edition of the full orchestral score of Le martyre. Illustrations were kindly providedby the staff of Special Collections and Rare Books at the Sibley Music Library of theUniversity of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music (David Peter Coppen, MatthewColbert, and Emily Mills). A shortened version will be appearing, in Italian translation,in Beyond the Stage: Musical Theatre and Performing Arts between fin de siecle and theannees folles, ed. Michela Niccolai and Giuseppe Montemagno.

1. Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009). See also a separate essay, “Doing the Impossible: On theMusically Exotic,” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (2008): 334–58. A shortened


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version of “Doing the Impossible” appeared as “L’impossible possibilite de l’exotismemusical,” in Musique, esthetique et societe en France au XIXe siecle: Liber amicorumJoel-Marie Fauquet, ed. Damien Colas, Florence Getreau, and Malou Haine (Liege:Mardaga, 2007), 91–107.

2. In the present article, I mention—without the use of quotation marks—variousstyles that were constructed by Western composers to represent various groups widelyperceived as exotic or Other, e.g., the Hungarian Roma (often called—sometimes evenby themselves—Gypsies or, in Hungarian, cigany) and Middle Easterners. I rely uponthe reader to understand that I am not referring to actual music of these variouspeoples but, rather, to often limited and stereotypical images of them within Westernhigh culture.

3. See, for example, Ralph P. Locke, “Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen:Unexplored Borrowings and Transformations,” in Stage Music and Cultural Transfer:Paris 1830 to 1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, forthcoming).

4. The process just described is, not surprisingly, similar in film and on television: seemy Musical Exoticism, chaps. 9–10.

5. The few references to the exoticism of Le martyre tend to be brief and to operateexclusively within the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm, e.g., “variously influenced by folksong, medieval ballad, Renaissance polyphony and Asian music” (Michael TilsonThomas, in the essay “My Approach to Performing ‘Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien’,”8–9, quotation from p. 8, in the booklet to his recording—see n. 21), and “cromatismomelodico, di ispirazione orientale, centrato su intervalli di seconda eccedente . . . nelcoro delle donne di Byblos” (Bruno Gallotta, “Estetica e funzione della music diDebussy nel Martyre de saint Sebastien,” in Carlo Santoli, ed., L’Arte del tragico: l’avven-tura scenica del Martyre de Saint Sebastien di Gabriele D’Annunzio dal 1911 ad oggi

[Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000], 25–26, quotation from p. 26).

6. On the creative absorption of elements of Spanish music in “Iberia,” see MatthewBrown, Debussy’s Iberia (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 36–64.

7. Three D’Annunzio-centered accounts of Le martyre are Rubens Tedeschi,D’Annunzio e la musica (Scandicci: Discanto/Contrappunti, La Nuova Italia Editrice,1988), 61–79; Annamaria Andreoli, “D’Annunzio e il Martyre de Saint Sebastien,” in“I consigli del vento che passa”: Studi su Debussy, atti del Convegno Inernazionale-Teatro allaScala, ed. P. Petazzi Milano, 2–4 giugno 1986, Quaderni Musica/Realta no. 21, 308–36;and Carlo Santoli, D’Annunzio: la musica e i musicisti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 217–46.

8. Four Rubinstein-centered accounts of Le martyre are Michael de Cossart, IdaRubinstein: A Theatrical Life (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987), 29–47,56–58, 90–96; Vicki Woolfe, Dancing in the Vortex: The Story of Ida Rubinstein(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 51–63, 93–98, 160–61, 164–66;Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 143–52; andCharles R. Batson, Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater:Playing Identities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 16–43.

9. Fokine’s contribution is largely lost to us. Bakst’s is documented in a number ofbooks, including Sylvie Forestier, et al., Saint Sebastien: Rituels et figures [exhibition cata-logue] (Paris: Ministere de la culture, Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux,


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1983), 156–61; Santoli, L’Arte del tragico, 49–69, 75–76 (images erroneously stated asbeing from 1929), 120–28; and idem, “Leon Bakst, Stage Designer for the Premiere ofThe Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Gabriele D’Annunzio,” in Saint Sebastian: ASplendid Readiness for Death [exhibition catalogue], ed. Gerald Matt and Wolfgang Fetz(Bielefeld: Kerber, 2003), 104–16.

10. The plot summary in Figure 1 is, inevitably, misleading as D’Annunzio’s text doesnot consistently differentiate between actions happening onstage and direct or indirectanalogies to specific Christian figures, e.g., Saint Anthony (see n. 42).

11. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Le martyre de saint Sebastien: Mystere compose en rythme fran-cais (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1911), 199–200, vv. 2953–54, 2963–64. “chevelure d’hya-cinthe”; “Que les dieux / justes conservent ta beaute / pour l’Empereur, Sebastien!”

12. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 233, vv. 3529–31.

13. Dicoletian is, among other things, a pointed critique of the bored fin-de-siecleaesthete who turns all humans into toys for his pleasure. The Emperor announces hisplan of having Sebastian laid upon the floor and smothered with jewels and flowers:“Non. Je veux rire. Je cherche des facons nouvelles. J’invente des modes nouveaux”(p. 211, vv. 3166–68).

14. For simplicity, I refer to the five sections of the work as “Acts.” D’Annunzio,reviving a usage from medieval church mystery-plays, use the term “Mansions” (i.e.,successive locations). In Leonard Bernstein’s English-language adaptation, they arecalled “Windows” (i.e., stained-glass windows, as in a church).

15. Further on origins of Le martyre and on later performances, see Emile Vuillerzmoz,“Autour du Martyre de Saint-Sebastien,” in Revue musicale 1, no. 2, special Debussy issue(December 1, 1920): 155–58; D. E. Inghelbrecht, Mouvement contraire: souvenirs d’unmusicien (Paris: Domat, 1947), 213–25; Germaine Inghelbrecht, D. E. Inghelbrecht etson temps (Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere, 1978), 68–71; Germaine andD. E. Inghelbrecht, Claude Debussy (Paris: Costard, 1953), 192–214; EdwardLockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (London: Cassell, 1962–65), 2:10, 15, 153–54,157–67, 272, 276; Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982), 217–36; Eiko Kasaba, “Le martyre de Saint-Sebastien: Etude surla genese,” Cahiers Debussy, nouvelle serie, nos. 4–5 (1980–81): 19–37; idem, “Retoursur Le martyre de saint Sebastien,” Cahiers Debussy, nouvelle serie, no. 24 (2000): 57–78;Ivanka Stoıanova, “Saint-Sebastien, mythe et martyre,” Silences, no. 4: special Debussyissue (May 1987): 131–35; Francois Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie critique, suiviedu catalogue de l’œuvre (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 335–42, 344, 353, 369, 376, 550–52;Denis Herlin, “Le martyre de saint Sebastien,” in Opera et religion (Saint-Etienne: Pressesde l’Universite de Saint-Etienne, 2006), 201–26; and Peter Lamothe, “Theater Musicin France, 1864–1914” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2008),207–38. Lamothe presented his main findings on Le martyre in a paper at theAmerican Musicological Society meeting, Los Angeles, November 2006, entitled“Quite Far from that State of Grace: Debussy’s Le martyre de saint Sebastien as IncidentalMusic.” For a critical assessment of Le martyre, see Massimo Mila, “Sulla situazione del‘Martyre de Saint Sebastien,’ ” in “I consigli,” 400–407. (That same volume also con-tains an Italian version of the aforementioned article by Stoıanova.)

16. The productions of 1911 and onward are documented, visually and otherwise, inRevue musicale 234 (1957), an issue entitled Le martyre de Saint-Sebastien, de la creation


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1911 a la reprise a l’Opera de Paris 1957; and in Santoli, L’Arte del tragico, 71–119 (butnot 75–76, which are from 1911), 129–34 (Palermo l999). The La Scala 1929 perfor-mances (conducted by Arturo Toscanini) omitted act 2; they thereby removed from thework all trace of Babylonia as well as Erigone’s exotic song (discussed below). A 1995production at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice featured, as Sebastian, Kader Belarbi, arenowned French ballet dancer whose father was Algerian. The performances thussuggested the history of Western imperialism: European soldiers overseas, slaying anunarmed native male of somewhat dark coloring (see photos in Santoli, L’Arte deltragico, 113–16). Robert Wilson’s 1988 Paris Opera Ballet version (with additionalchoreography by Suzushi Hanayagi) embodied Saint Sebastian in two dancers, a womanand a man, the latter being Sebastian’s spirit, who has returned to witness his ownmartyrdom. See Matt and Fetz, Saint Sebastian, 84–87, and two articles (overlapping incontent) by Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times: “A Visionary ‘Martyre’ In a U.S.Premiere,” July 11, 1988, and “Robert Wilson’s Stunning Images: Do They Add Up?”July 24, 1988. In the latter article, Kisselgoff notes that “Mr. Wilson’s vision is tooclean-cut to effect the merger of religious and erotic ecstasy. When Mr. Wilson, follow-ing the [D’Annunzio] scenario, has the women onstage confuse Christian worship withthe worship of Adonis, no one seemed even to notice a point that caused scandal in1911.” Wilson used an orchestra-only recording (i.e., without the lines for solo voicesand chorus) and added a prologue set on a sinking ship. Kisselgoff saw the latter aspointing a “universal” moral about the decline of empires. A video of the end of act 2,featuring Jean-Christophe Pare (and including obvious choreographic references toNijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune), can be viewed at ,http://youtube.com/watch?v=jjHhzeE2JgY..

17. W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks, 99–102. Decades earlier, Berlioz’sversion (1859) of Gluck’s Orphee et Euridice had analogously reworked theopera’s central role—the demigod Orpheus—for a mezzo-soprano, the great PaulineViardot.

18. Herlin, “Le martyre,” 214; further excerpts from the early reviews are excerpted inLamothe, Theater, 207–38.

19. The movement titles of the Fragments are simply 1: “La Cour des Lys,” 2: “Danseextatique et Final du 1er Acte,” 3: “La Passion,” 4: “Le Bon Pasteur.” These titles donot nearly compensate for the loss of the words in those passages that, in the completework, also included parts for voices. Also, the Fragments score contains no programnote at all. The reader/listener thus cannot learn what on-stage actions the differentpassages in the four movements were meant to illustrate (such as that the “EcstaticDance” in movement 2 takes place on charbons embrases), much less what actions occurin passages of the complete work that are not represented in the Fragments (notably theentire act 2, in Babylonia).

20. Recordings by, e.g., Monteux, Barenboim, and Conlon; also, on a DVD, ValeryGergiev in Rehearsal and Performance, RM Arts IM9255RADVD.

21. Le martyre de saint Sebastien, mystere de Gabriele D’Annunzio, musique de ClaudeDebussy: Analyses et Textes destines a accompagner les executions symphoniques etablis parGermaine Inghelbrecht (Paris: Durand, 1948). Splendid “live” performances of Debussy’scomplete music for Le martyre, with much or all of the Inghelbrechts’ shortened narra-tion, were recorded under Inghelbrecht (three different ones have been released onCD). Equally fine are studio performances conducted by Eugene Ormandy (2 Columbia


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LPs: M2S 609), Michael Tilson Thomas (Sony Classical CD SK48240), and KurtMasur (on Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic, vol. 1; this 3-CD set, released bythe New York Philharmonic Orchestra, also contains Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion).Tilson Thomas’s recording removes some of the spoken lines from musical numbers, soas to permit the music to make an effect on its own. Charles Munch recorded for RCAVictor all of Debussy’s music and declaimed the Inghelbrechts’ text himself. (TheVictrola LP re-release removed the speaking; the CD restored it.) Louis de Fromentrecorded most of the music (for Vox), with some narration. Claudio Abbado can beseen conducting a lengthy “suite” with solo singers but without narration on a DVDentitled Abbado in Lucerne (Euroarts, 2005). Three recordings from the pre-stereo erawere conducted by Andre Cluytens, Ernest Ansermet, and Victor Alessandro. TheCluytens used narration adapted by Vera Korene, the other two no narration.

22. The Bernstein recording is now available as Sony Classical CD SMK 60596.

23. Claude Debussy, Oeuvres completes, series VI, vol. 4, ed. Eiko Kasaba (Paris:Durand-Costallat, forthcoming).

24. E.g., “fourth to eighth measures after reh. no. 3” (so the measure at reh. no. 3 iscounted as m. 1). The piano-vocal score—which, unfortunately, lacks rehearsalnumbers—was prepared by Andre Caplet and is still available from Durand, in aversion that adds to the singers’ parts an English-language translation by HermannKlein (below the French text or occasionally, for lack of space, over the staff ). Thespoken cues are given in French only. The original French-only piano-vocal score(essentially identical, except for the lack of English sung words) seems no longer to beavailable for sale. A copy has been made available at the Sibley Music Library website:http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4061. The original Durand edition of the prelude to act 2(full score)—one of the many passages lacking in the Fragments—has been made avail-able at the Sibley Music Library website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4218. SibleyLibrary also owns a Durand edition of the prelude to act 3.

25. Proust’s letter to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, [May 23, 1911], inCorrespondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1976–93) 10:288–90.

26. On the work’s early reception, see especially Herlin, “Le martyre.”

27. Theo Hirsbrunner does state that “nowhere else [in Debussy’s output] is exoticismso strong as in Le martyre de saint Sebastien”; but his discussion restricts itself to what hecalls “exoticisms” (in the plural, i.e., stylistic markers of the exotic). His two examplesare the lamenting of the Women of Byblos (its frankly Middle Eastern style elementswill be discussed below) and a Japanese mode that he feels is “recalled” in act 1, no. 1(reh. no. 1, mm. 12–13, equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no. 1, mm. 12–13)—Debussy und seine Zeit (Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag, 1981), 120–23.

28. Lamothe, Theater, 207–38.

29. Bentley, Sisters, 144–45: “As D’Annunzio’s St. Sebastian she would be pierced byChristian sacrifice not pagan debauchery. It was as if this particular Salome wanted toreverse roles and play John the Baptist.” This is, of course, partly true. The role ofSebastian is less overtly Middle Eastern (and sensuous in a different way) than femaleroles that Rubinstein had danced for Diaghilev, e.g., Cleopatra, and—in Sheherazade—Zobeıde. But the role remains that of a young Middle Easterner who (here despitehimself) arouses sexual desire in a Roman ruler.


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30. See, for a recent example, Riccardo Sica, “Dai Balletti Russi al Martyre de SaintSebastien: La magia dell’Oriente nei decors di Leon Bakst,” in Santoli, L’Arte del tragico,43–46 (p. 43: Bakst’s set for act 1 is like “una miniatura islamica”).

31. Debussy was not the first composer that D’Annunzio approached. Roger-Ducasse,for example, considered the collaboration but declined to participate. PerhapsD’Annunzio hesitated to ask Debussy first, out of fear that he might prove unwilling towork to the poet’s specifications. Debussy did, in fact, chafe at what turned out to be atight time frame. In the end, he chose not to set to music a number of additional pas-sages that, in the margins of the printed libretto, are indicated as having been “givensound” by him (“Magister Claudius sonum dedit”). He also hired Andre Caplet to helpwith the orchestration of many sections. Rumors that Caplet even composed some ofthe music are no longer accepted by most Debussy scholars.

32. Forestier, Saint Sebastien; and Matt and Fetz, Saint Sebastian. In the Renaissancedepictions, Sebastian tends to be emaciated, like a starved prisoner, or (less often)bearded and muscular, like a Hercules or Samson. In the Baroque era and later (e.g., inpaintings of the 1860s–70s by Gustave Moreau), he tends to be a soft-skinned adoles-cent, beardless and sometimes nearly androgynous.

33. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 92 (“mes elus de la cohorte d’Emese”). The archers areplainly non-Christian. Sebastian, they declare, is as beautiful as Adonis (p. 32).

34. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 216 (and, on 195, the author’s description of the statuesof dozens of gods in this scene, including “Balmarcodes, le Seigneur des danses, venu deBeryte”). In act 1, “Les Gentiles” speak condescendingly of Jesus as “cet Asiatique mortau gibet!” (p. 60). Soon after, members of the crowd cry out “Minotaure, Minotaured’Asie, gorge de vierges et d’adolescents!” (p. 78). In Greek mythology, the viciousMinotaur—half-human and half-bull—lived on the island of Crete, to the East ofGreece, and devoured numerous Athenian youths and maidens until he/it was slain byTheseus.

35. In act 4, the chief of Sebastian’s Syrian archers, Sanae, pleads with Sebastian toflee by boat from the impending death-by-arrows. “Si tu es sauf . . . /avec ton visage/divin tourne vers l’Orient,/vers l’heritage de ton ame,/vers l’heritage de ton dieu,/n’auras-tu pas une plus sainte/guerre et une victoire plus/grande que cette insatiable/mort?” [Once you are safe . . . with your divine face turned toward the East, toward theheritage of your soul, won’t you have a holier war, a greater victory, than this insatiabledeath?]—D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 248, vv. 3667–76.

36. A copy of the program book is at the Bibliotheque Nationale (BnF-ASP Ro5260). An entire issue of L’illustration theatrale (May 27, 1911) was devoted to Lemartyre, and the same was true of Le theatre (no. 299, first two weeks of June 1911).A copy of the latter is BnF-Arts du Spectacle Ro 5262.

37. Philippe Jullian, Robert de Montesquiou, un prince 1900 (Paris: LibrairieAcademique Perrin, 1965), 310. (The Sassanid empire, centered in Persia, lastedfrom the third to the seventh centuries AD) According to some reports,Montesquiou helped D’Annunzio improve some wordings in the French text andstepped onto the stage in rehearsal to demonstrate to Fokine one appropriate gesturefor Sebastian (309, 311).

38. See n. 23.


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39. Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London: B. T. Batsford,1985), 153–85.

40. See Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: MacmillanReference USA, 2005), s.v. Adonis. D’Annunzio also enjoys, at times, inserting the(related) Hebrew name for God, Adonaı.

41. Lucian of Samosata [or Shimsheta, a city on the west bank of the Euphrates],attrib., The Syrian Goddess (De Dea Syria), trans. Harold W. Attridge and RobertA. Oden (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 14–17 (sections 6–8), also 4 (onLucian’s use of Greek names for the Semitic gods). D’Annunzio’s sources (and somethat he possibly did not know, at least directly) were surveyed at the time in GustaveCohen, “Gabriele D’Annunzio et Le martyre de Saint Sebastien,” Mercure de France, June16, 1911, 688–709. Perhaps the single most widely read source of stories aboutSebastian and two saints associated with him, Polycarp and Tiburtius, was and remainschapter 23 in the thirteenth-century compendium The Golden Legend. One or more ofthese three saints break hundreds of pagan idols, smash an expensively constructedmodel of the heavenly bodies (which emperor Chromatius employed for divination),and, forced to choose between offering incense to the gods or to tread barefoot onglowing coals, tread the coals and declare that the embers feel like roses. At theclimax, Sebastian is shot full of arrows “to such an extent that one would havethought him a porcupine” (an image that D’Annunzio put into the mouth ofDiocletian, as reported by Sanae; libretto of Le martyre, 248). See Jacques deVoragine, La legende doree, trans. and ed. Alain Boureau et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004),136–37.

42. “Io! Io! Adoniastes!” (vv. 3488–95 and further verses not set by Debussy). Themoment is made profoundly dramatic by the evident battle going on in Sebastian’s soul—a battle between the temptations of worldly power and the spiritual power of Christianbelief (from D’Annunzio’s stage directions: “les soulevements de sa poitrine indiquent laviolence du combat invisible”—Le martyre, 230). In the stage directions on pp. 225 and226, Diocletian’s attempts at tempting Sebastian are equated with the demons and wildbeasts that assailed Saint Anthony, though the latter’s many years in the Egyptian desertare reduced to forty days and nights. The latter is a standard time-length in the Bible, asin the stories of Noah, Genesis 7:4, Moses on Sinai, Exodus 24:18, and, most relevanthere, Christ in the wilderness, Mark 1:13 (also Matthew 4 and Luke 4).

43. See the discussion of two eighteenth-century non-European tyrantfigures—Handel’s Belshazzar and Rameau’s Huascar—in chapter 5 of my MusicalExoticism or in my “Broader View.”

44. Further on musical features of this prelude and the one to act 2, see Eiko Kasaba,“I due preludi orchestrali del ‘Martyre de Saint Sebastien,’ ” trans. Joanne Maria Pini, in“I consigli,” 374–9.

45. B-flat–C-flat–E-flat–F: a B-flat eleventh chord missing its third degree (and withthe ninth degree flatted). In one of the earliest books on Debussy’s music, DanielChenneviere (a young composer who later became better known under the name DaneRudhyar) specifically praised this passage as one of the work’s “melodies [qui] serepandent en ondes larges et vibrantes”—Claude Debussy et son oeuvre (Paris:A. Durand et fils, 1913), 42.


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46. This passage is lacking in the Fragments. Text in D’Annunzio, Martyre, 93–94,vv. 1442–59.

47. Albright, Quantum Poetics, 255–57. Stoıanova mentions the Bulgarian nestinarias an equivalent phenomenon (“Saint-Sebastien,” 136). On the origins and functionof firewalking as a means of healing oneself and as a sign of union with God and/ora particular saint, see Loring Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: TheAnastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1989), e.g., 58–63 (spirit possession, i.e., an individualestablishes a “positive, permanent relationship with a spirit other”), 207–12 and285–88 (scientific explanation that the relatively fluffy embers have low thermalconductivity).

48. In the Fragments symphoniques, the two mezzo-sopranos singing in unison arereplaced by four unison trumpets.

49. Transferred in the Fragments symphoniques to high winds and strings. Movement 2of the Fragments then concludes with the march, fanfares, and grand crescendo accom-panying Sebastian’s vision of the arrival of the Seven Seraphim, and a brief few chordsfor chorus (reworked for orchestra alone) welcoming the Seraphim.

50. A photograph reproduced in several places (e.g., Orledge, Debussy, 222) shows sixof the seven magiciennes wearing this costume. (The coarse-looking backdrop seems tohave nothing to do with Le martyre. Stage designs by Bakst and photographs from thefirst production—e.g., in Orledge, Debussy, 219—show an impressive throne room.)Several people who have looked at that photo have asked me, with some reason,whether at least one or two of the sorceresses were played by male actors en travesti. Butthe program from the 1911 performances (see n. 36) plainly names seven women(Mlles Dalci, Gonzales, and so on).

51. It is a more purely modernist chord (or, as some music theorists would have it,“simultaneity”), being truly bitonal and therefore not reducible to a single triad withvarious additions and alterations. This pedal chord is notably more puzzling than otherpassages in Le martyre that involve harmonically static arpeggios, tremolos, and/or pedalpoints, e.g., Ex. 2 discussed above (which has one half-step in it, not two; the Archersof Emese then sing this eleventh-chord-without-third as a rising melody—act 1, no. 2,mm. 2–3). The pedal chord suggested at the beginning of the prelude to act 4 is, likeEx. 2, an eleventh-chord (now on A-flat), but more angst-ridden, because the fifthdegree is raised to an E-natural, and the flatted eleventh (D-flat) creates a dissonantclash with the chord’s major third (C).

52. Ravel originally composed Ma mere l’oye for piano duet (1908–10), then orches-trated and expanded it as a ballet sometime in 1911. The first performance ofthe orchestral version was in January 1912.

53. Though excluded from the Fragments, this prelude is of course included on allrecordings of the complete score. Caplet’s (often ineffective) piano version of this andother excerpts from Le mystere is recorded by Boaz Sharon on Unicorn-KanchanaDKP(CD) 9103.

54. There are two Erigones in Greek mythology, but only one seems to have remaineda virgin. Icarius was taught by Dionysus to make wine; two shepherds, thinking he hadpoisoned them, killed him; Icarius’s daughter Erigone found his body and hanged


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herself on a tree. The other Erigone was daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra; shebore a child (Penthilus) with her half-brother Orestes. The text’s reference to the aspho-dele probably refers to the Asphodel Meadows of the underworld and thus to the earlydeath of Icarius’s daughter Erigone. (Yellow asphodel flowers were reputed to be thesole food of the dead.)

55. This perhaps explains a remark by Mervyn Cooke: “In only one work of Debussy’s[“Pagodes”] does the pentatonic scale occur prominently in a specifically Orientalcontext”—“‘The East in the West’: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music,” inJonathan Bellman, The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern UniversityPress, 1998), 258–80, 347–50 (260). Hirsbrunner, like most commentators on Lemartyre, omits mention of Erigone (Debussy, 120–23).

56. A 1943 recording, on Francis Poulenc, pianiste et accompagnateur (Pathe MarconiLP C04712538M [1973]).

57. D’Annunzio, Martyre, 209.

58. The first word, Paıan (paean), was both the word for a hymn and a name forApollo in his role as healer.

59. The marches, ceremonial processions, and grand choruses in “ancient” operas ofthe nineteenth century (e.g., Mose in Egitto, Semiramide, or Nabucco) tend not to differgreatly in style from those in operas set in much more recent times (e.g., Le prophete orFaust).

60. Michael Walter, “Exotik oder Farblosigkeit: Antikebilder in der Oper des 19.Jahrhunderts,” Humanistische Bildung 19 (1996): 117–25.

61. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, rev. Nicolas Slonimsky, 8th ed.(New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), s.v. Slonimsky, Nicolas.

62. Further on pandiatonicism, see Stephen Jaffe, “Conversation between SJ and JS[i.e., between the author and himself ] on the New Tonality,” Contemporary MusicReview 6, no. 2 (1992): 27–38.

63. Or some of the cadences in act 5, e.g., reh. no. 8, mm. 2 and 4.

64. Henry de Curzon, at the time of the work’s premiere, caught at least some of this:“Voici . . . bientot, synthetisant toute la revolte de l’ancien monde contre l’aube nou-velle, les voix paıennes chantant leurs vains symboles”— “La partition de M. ClaudeDebussy pour le Martyre de Saint Sebastien,” Le theatre 299 (June 1911): 18–19 (19).

65. The chorus’s “Ah!” is simply removed from the Fragments version (not reassignedto instruments), though what remains—the dissonant forte chords and the tritonetimpani beats discussed earlier—is amply powerful.

66. Laloy’s Claude Debussy was published in 1909. The Sadko aria does not seem tohave been published separately until the next year (1912). In the last years of his life,Debussy repeatedly discussed expanding Le martyre into an opera; Laloy was slated towrite the libretto, based freely on D’Annunzio’s text. The French words in the 1907score of Le coq d’or were by M. D. Calvocoressi, another prominent French music critic;Calvocoressi had published a pathbreaking book on Mussorgsky in 1908 and wasparticularly friendly with Ravel.

67. That is, degrees 3 and 4, if we hear the tune as implying the tonic note A.


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68. See earlier discussion, regarding Ex. 2.

69. Interestingly, there are two two-note repetitions in the “Paıan” chorus as well(Ex. 8); their being assigned to violins in harmonics (arco, plus the second violins pizzi-cato, plus a harp) gives them an etiolated character.

70. Before he is killed he enacts a vision of the Good Shepherd coming to carry awaya beloved sheep. The Shepherd is indicated by a broad-breathed melody, with confidentrising-fifth leaps (Martyre, No. 2, reh. no. 3, mm. 1–12; this became, with a short newcoda, the final eighteen measures of Fragments, mvt. 4, at Tres modere).

71. Chenneviere praises what I assume is this passage and the Act 4 statements of thesame material as “des lamentations d’une intensite de desespoir encore jamais atteinte”(Claude Debussy, 42).

72. See stage photo in Orledge, Debussy, 226.

73. On pentatonicism as a marker of ecclesiastical style, see Day-O’Connell,Pentatonicism, 8–9, 99–142. The three successive half-cadences (I–IV–V) come afterreh. no. 6.

74. Herlin, “Le martyre,” 225.

75. Subsequent religious works that follow in Debussy’s joyous footsteps includePoulenc’s Gloria (1959) and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (1965). See Ralph P. Locke,“[Berlioz:] The Religious Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. PeterBloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96–108 (esp. 96–97); trans-lated by Jean-Claude Teboul as “Les oeuvres religieuses,” in Ostinato rigore: Revue inter-nationale d’etudes musicales 21, special Berlioz issue (2003): 73–86.

76. On the Bernstein recording, the rising arpeggios seem to be taken by a full sectionof choral sopranos; on the Tilson Thomas recording, by one soprano (Sylvia McNair,superbly).

77. This reaction to the directness in sections of Le martyre was present from the start.Henry de Curzon, in a thoughtful review of the first performance, reported that “certain‘Debussyists’” were “disappointed” (decu[s]) not to find the composer’s usual features inthis score, such as “endless subtleties of dynamics, strange refinements in sonority, anda morbid search for unusual effects” (d’infinies subtilites de nuances, d’etranges raffinementsde sonorites, la curiosite morbide d’effets rares—“Partition,” 18).

78. For Debussy’s statement in Comoedia, on the day of the scheduled first perform-ance (May 18, 1911), see Monsieur Croche et autres ecrits, ed. Francois Lesure, 2nd rev.ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 326–27.


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