Portrait of Debussy. I: Debussy and Stravinsky

Jeremy Noble

The Musical Times, Vol. 108, No. 1487. (Jan., 1967), pp. 22-25.

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Portrait of Debussy-I Jeremy Noble

DEBUSSY AND STRAVINSKY 'Today Debussy is n o longer considered a revolutionary o r a n iconoclast . . . the present generation revere h im as Mozart revered Philipp Emanuel Bach: "He is the father of us all" ' (Edward Lock- speiser in Debussy, 1951). I n this series of articles we attempt t o build a composite portrait of Debussy the musician through examination of the very different impressions he left o n the music of other composers: in general, and also in particular by documentation of what works they heard, a n d when, their statements, and the reflections found in their own compositions.

The inusicians of my generation and I iny-s e r owe the most to Debussy.-Stravinsky

Debussy's acquaintance with Stravinsky was not of long duration, but its course is unusually fully docu- mented by references in the former's correspondence (such of it as has yet been published) and in the latter's several memoirs.' The information derived from these and other sources has been ably pre- sented by Edward Lockspeiser in the second volume of his Debussy: his life and mind (London and New York, 1965), p.176-88, but since Lockspeiser's interpretation of this evidence tends to favour the subject of his book, and since he concentrates on the personal aspects of the relationship between the two composers rather than on their mutual musical influence, it will perhaps be worthwhile to recapitu- late what we know as well as to speculate on what we do not.

Debussy first met Stravinsky after the first per- formance of The Firebird (25 June 1910), when Diaghilev took him backstage to offer his congratu- lations to the young composer.' He was nearly 48, Stravinsky just 28, and it seems fairly certain that this was the first music by the young Russian that he had yet heard. Nor had Stravinsky heard a great deal more of his. On his own testimony3 there were few opportunities of hearing the modern French composers in St Petersburg in the first decade of this century. The quartets and songs of Debussy and Ravel were included in the programmes of the Evenings of Contemporary Music founded by Stravinsky's friends Ivan Pokrorsky and Walter Nouvel, but for orchestral concerts he could rely only on the concerts organized by Liszt's pupil Alexander Siloti, who was conducting in St Peters- burg from 1903 onwards. 'Siloti's performances of the Debussy Nocturnes and of L'aprds-midi d'un faune were among the major events of my early years'. says Stravinsky, but adds that he did not hear La nzer (first performed in 1905) until Debussy took him to a performance in 1911 or 1912.

'Clironicle of my lifir (London, 1936)-the English translation of the original French edition1 n two volumes

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft: Com'rrsations with Igor S l r a v i n ~ k j (London and New York. 1959)

Stravinsky and Craft: .%fenrorir.s and Commentaries (London and New York, 1960)

Stravinsky and Craft: Erpositions and Developments (London and Nem York, 1962)

Page references are t o the London, not New York, editions. Thron ic le p.55; E&D p.130-31

3Chronicle p.36; M & C p.28-9; E & D p.59-60

In view of this, it is not surprising to find that in the St Petersburg works, written before their first meeting, the 'Debussyisms' amount to little more than an awareness of current Paris fashions, above all for melodic and harmonic formations derived from the whole-tone scale such as those which worried Rimsky-Korsakov in Faun and Shepherdess when it was first given a t a Belayev concert in 1907.4 Stravinsky's handling of the orchestra in the Scherzo fantastique and in the orchestral fantasy Fireworks (1907-8) may owe something to the French school (though still more to Rimsky-Korsakov), but the most obvious borrowing in the latter piece is not from Debussy but from Dukas: the phrase at figure 9 is inescapably reminiscent of L'apprenti sorcier, composed ten years before.

The only comparably strong reminiscence of Debussy occurs a t the very beginning of The Nightingale (1909). whose alternating fifths and thirds are very similar to those which open Debussy's Nuages. But it was pointed out long ago that both passages might have a common origin in the third song of Mussorgsky's cycle Smlless. At any rate it is quite certain that both composers shared a high regard for Mussorgsky. Stravinsky recalls that on his very first visit to Debussy, after the Firebird premiere, 'we talked about Mussorgsky's songs and agreed that they contained the best music of the whole Russian school'. What both of them recog- nized in Mussorgsky was the genuineness, the truth of his imagination; and this was the quality in the French composer's own music that enabled Strav- insky to write, years later, the words5 at the head of this article.

So although Stravinsky's acquaintance with Debussy's music may have been slight at the time of their first meeting, he can have been in little doubt as to the French composer's artistic stature. In Russia as elsewhere, Debussy's deliberate jettisoning of academic formalism had made an immediate appeal to the young and provoked an equally intense reaction among their elders. Even so comparatively broadminded a man as Rimsky-Korsakov mis-trusted Debussy's influence profoundly. Stravinsky twice tells us how, when he asked his teacher whether he were going to attend some performance of a piece by Debussy, the great man replied: 'I had

Pbussy and Stravinsky, photographed by Satie (see Expositions and Developments' p.138)

better not go: I shall start to get accustomed to it, and end by liking it.'6

But if the musical establishment was alarmed by Debussy's music, Stravinsky and his friends were excited by its freedom and freshness. So when Debussy not only congratulated the young com- poser of The Firebird, but followed this up with a cordial invitation to dinner and the presentation of an inscribed photograph ('A Igor Strawinsky en toute sympathie artistique'), i t must have set the seal on his triumph. Nor is the sincerity of Debussy's admiration impugned by the faint reservation implicit in a letter written to his publisher Jacques Durand a fortnight later, in which he says of Stravinsky's score: 'It is not perfect, but in many ways it is nevertheless very fine because the music is not subservient to the dancing.. .'. It is hard to believe that the offhand witticism quoted by Stravinsky in his later account of these events7 ('Que voulez-vous, il fallait bien commencer par quelque chose') represents Debussy's considered judgment, although it does give Stravinsky the opportunity of a retaliatory dig at Pellias. Whatever faint criticisms are implicit in the letter to Durand, there is every reason to believe that Debussy recog- nized Stravinsky's genius and admired it from the first.

This admiration was only increased by Petrushka, first performed on 13 June 1911. In the following December Debussy wrote to his old friend Robert Godet, who was staying in Savoy, warmly recom- mending h i to meet Stravinsky, then in his winter retreat at Clarens. He praises Stravinsky's 'instinc- tive genius for colour and rhythm', his ability to create directly in terms of the orchestra. 'I1 n'y a ni prhutions, ni prktentions. C'est enfantin et sauvage. Pourtant la mise en place en est extrgme- ment dkli~ate.'~ In a rather later letters to Stravinsky in which he appears to be acknowledging an in- scribed copy of the full score of Petrushka, Debussy singles out the 'tour de passepasse' section, and goes on to say that 'there is an orchestral infallibility that I have found only in Parsifal'. High praise, if a rather unexpected comparison. Much of Debussy's own musical imagination seems to have been bound up with his phenomenal powers as a pianist, and it was no doubt his heartfelt admiration (even envy) of Stravinsky's ability to think orchestrally which led him to consult the younger man over certain pro- blems of orchestration in Jeux, on which he was working during the summer of 1912. All the same, it would be a rash critic who could claim to detect how much of the 'mise en place dklicate' of that score was due to Stravinsky's advice.

The Russian Ballet's Paris season of 1913, during

'Chronicle 1.35; Conversations p.39 ' E m p.131

BDebussy: Lettres d deux amis (Paris, 1942) p.129-30

sConversations p.49

which both Jeux and The Rite of Spring received their first performances, marks the climax and the watershed-of the Debussy-Stravinsky relationship. Debussy. as we have seen. consulted Stravinskv over the sco;&g of his ballet. I n the same way, ~travin- sky tried out his four-hand piano arrangement of The Rite with Debussy some time before the orches- tral rehearsals began. (Just when is uncertain. Louis Laloy, in whose house the play-through took place, gave spring 1913 as the date, and this seems plausible. Stravinsky, on the other hand, assigns a letter from Debussy, which refers to this play- through as having already happened, to 8 November 1912.)1° Stravinsky's contemporary reaction to Jeux does not seem to be preserved, but more recently he has gone on record as still regarding it 'as an orchestral masterpiece, though I think some of the music is "trop Lalique" '?I Debussy's reaction to The Rite was from the first marked by a certain ambivalence. In the above-mentioned letter to Stravinsky he writes: 'It haunts me like a beautiful nightmare and I try, in vain, to reinvoke the terrific imuression.' The first stage ~erformance (28 Mav 19i3) hardened Debussy's resistance to the music-- or was it perhaps the contrast between the succ2s de scandale provoked by Stravinsky's score and the rather tepid reception of his own ballet a fortnight earlier? At any rate, when writing to Caplet on the date of the first performance (he had attended rehearsals) he describes The Rite in a characteristic- ally barbed mot as being 'primitive with every

l0Conversations p.50. The letter is here dated 8 November 1913, but this is corrected in E&D p.162 (New York edition only). The 'correction' does not solve the problem, however, slnce the same passage states that the play-through with Debussy took place after 17 November.

12Conversations, p.50

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modern convenience', while according to Stravinsky he referred to it disparagingly as 'une musique negre'.I2 T o the composer himself he was more tactful. The letter with which he acknowledges Stravinsky's gift of the score is almost embarrassing in its mixture of veiled self-pity and grudging recognition :

For me, who descend the other slope of the hill but keep, however, an intense passion for music, for me it is a special satisfaction to tell you how much you have enlarged the boundaries of the permissible in the empire of sound.13

Already palpably puzzled by the music of the brief cantata Zvezdoliki (The King of the Stars), which Stravinsky had dedicated to him shortly before," Debussy must have been quite aware that he was in the presence of an imagination more vigorous than his own, capable of carrying his methods and dis- coveries to far greater lengths than he himself any longer had the strength to do. And this conscious- ness of his relative impotence can only have been exacerbated by the painful and humiliating progress of the cancer which was eventually to kill him.

After the implicit trial of strength of 1913 a veil descends over the relations between the two com- posers during the following year, but it says a great deal for the genuineness of Debussy's continuing admiration for his young rival that he should dedi-

'=M&C, p.81 "Conversations, p.52 ''Conversations, p.51

cate to him the last movement of his two-piano suite En blanc et noir, completed in the summer of 1915. Was this a deliberate reciprocation for Zvezdoliki? The rather Debussyan closing bars of that work seem to refer back to the Nocturnes, rather than to anything more recent, while the nearest Debussy comes to quoting Stravinsky in the En blanc et noir piece is the phrase first heard at figure 1, which closely resembles the horn melody that opens the final section of The Firebird. In these two mutually dedicated works it is as though Debussy and Stravinsky were concerned, consciously or uncon- sciously, to recapture one another's images a t the time of their first meeting rather than those they had since come to know.

A brief exchange of letters from October 1915 provides a clear example of how Debussy, ill in Paris, had lost touch with the way in which Stravin- sky had been developing since he had taken up residence in Switzerland. In a letter to Godet he writes, with reference to the alleged un-Russianness of the young Russian composers, 'Stravinsky him-self is leaning dangerously in the direction of Schoenberg'.15 And a few days later he is urging Stravinsky to be true to his national heritage:

Dear Stravinsky, you are a great artist. Be with all your strength a great Russian artist. It is so wonderful to be of one's country, to be attached to one's soil like the humblest of peasants!16

'jLettres B deux amis, p.145; E&D p.68 "Conversations, p.54

It is ironical to think of the hyperaesthetic Debussy lecturing Stravinsky, at the very moment when he was working at Les noces, on the need for roots in the soil. His opinion must have been based on such pre-war compositions as the Japarzese Lyrics and the completion of The Nightingale, of which the former, at any rate, could be said to lean (though not far) in the direction of Pierrot lunaire. Debussy could hardly know that Stravinsky had already sensed any dangers there might be in that path, and had taken a different turning.

About the end of the year Stravinsky came to Paris to conduct The Firebird at a gala for the Diaghilev company before it left for America. On this occasion he seems to have succeeded in irritating Debussy beyond measure. In a letter to Godet dated 4 January 1916 the ailing composer gives vent with all the considerable malice at his command to his mistrust and annoyance.

I1 dit :Mon Oiseau de Feu, mon Sacre, comme un enfant dit: ma toupie, mon cerceau. Et, c'est exactement: un enfant g i te qui, parfois, met les doigts dans le nez de la musique. C'est aussi un jeune sauvage qui porte des cravates tumul-tueuses, baise la main des femmes en leur mar- chant sur les pieds. Vieux, il sera insupportable, c'est a dire qu'il ne supportera aucune musique; mais, pour le moment, il est inouI! I1 fait profes- sion d'amitie pour moi, parceque je l'ai aide a gravir un echelon de cette echelle du haut de laquelle il lance des grenades qui n'explosent pas toutes. Mais encore une fois, il est inoui.li

There can be little doubt that in these words we hear the voice of Debussy's illness: within a few days of l7Lettresa deux amis, p.148

writing them he was to undergo a painful, and use- less, operation. All the same, before dismissing them as merely spiteful it is worth noting that the two key words-enfant and sauvage-are echoes of that first laudatory impression sent to Godet more than four years before. It is not so much that Debussy is describing a different object as that he is now describing the same object from a different viewpoint-the viewpoint of one who has, through no fault of his own, fallen behind in the race for self- renewal and feels himself outstripped in vitality and imaginative power.

Stravinsky and Debussy did meet again before the latter's death on 25 March 1918, but we know little of what passed, beyond the fact that Debussy looked ghastly and had, understandably, lost touch with recent musical events.ls If he still felt any of the rancour expressed in the letter to Godet, he gave no sign of it, though according to Stravinsky he made no mention of the En blanc et noir piece, so that its dedication came as a pleasant surprise to him after the composer's death. When Stravinsky was approached by the Revue tnusicale for a contri- bution to the collective Tombeau de Debussj, to be published as a supplement, he responded with the chorale that we now know as the closing section of the great Sj,tnphotzies of Wind Instruments. It is significant that this work, dedicated to Debussy's memory, should be at once so profoundly inspired and so completely independent of Debussy's style. It is the homage of one great composer to another, not that of a pupil to a master.

THE DISPLACED PRIMA DONNA Mrs Oldmixon in America

by Donald W. Krummel

Correspondence in this journal (Nov 1965, p.864) growing out of Frank Dawes's article, 'William, or The Adventures of a Sonata' (Oct 1965) prompts this brief report on the career of Miss George, later known in the United States as Mrs Oldmixon. Among several dozen English and continental musicians in early America, she stands out as the most celebrated and the most colourful. Hopefully her account u~ill encourage a greater study of the transatlantic musical ties during the years between 1793 and 1825, when these ties were especially strong.

Miss George, who began her career at the Hay- market on 2 June 1783, was in fact named Georgina Sidus, the daughter of an Oxford clergyman. 'Pre-vious to her debut,' one writer tells us, this 15-year- old girl 'had never seen a play and had received no theatrical education'. She very soon became a r e g ~ ~ l a rperformer, also in time appearing at Drury Lane: one night there, according to a contemporary

report, an unidentified man in clerical garb, sus-pected to be her father, stood up and hissed at her. Undismayed, and probably even encouraged, by such criticism, she soon continued her career, sing- ing at such concerts as those at the Freen~asons' Hall in November 1786. Thomas Billington, it will be remembered, was the conductor at these events, and Mrs Elizabeth Billington, his sister-in-law, was at this time the most celebrated singer in London. No doubt she strongly influenced Miss George, her exact contemporary. These two ladies appeared to- gether in 1788 in Dublin, precipitating events which were recalled some 48 years later by Parke:

A curious musical contest took place. . . be-tween Mrs. Billington and Miss George, who had a voice of such extent, that she sang up to B in alto perfectly clear, and in tune . . . Mrs. Rilling- ton, who was engaged on very high terms for a limited number of nights, made her first appear- ance on the Dublin stage in !he character of Polly, in the 'Beggar's Opera, surrounded by