- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
There's a long tradition of music evoking images,
specific pictures and one of the greatest practitioners
of that tradition was Claude Debussy,
the French composer who flourished in the last years
of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th.
Here to give us some insights into the genius
of Debussy and share some of his music with us
is Catherine Kautsky, professor of music
at Lawrence University, and author of the book
Debussy's Paris, Piano Portraits of the Bell Époque.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Thank you Norman, it's a pleasure to be here.
- What was it that made Debussy so original?
He must have had some kind of inspiration
leading into this originality.
- I'm sure he did, although it's interesting
that he came from a family with no education
and was always sort of completely
on his own individual path, but surely he grew up
hearing, for instance the music of Chopin
in Paris, that's where Chopin had been living
50 years earlier, and that use of the piano
with its pedaled sounds and sounds all blurring together
to some degree, though not nearly to the degree
that Debussy did, surely had an impact.
And then, to his eternal regret, Richard Wagner
had an enormous impact on him as well.
His use of harmony and his blending
of various mediums, the use of text, the use of music,
the use of staging.
That was something that Debussy
for the longest time couldn't resist.
He made great pilgrimages to hear Wagner's operas,
and then in the end, he turned it all overboard
and said no, no, no, the Germans don't
have anything to teach us, it's only the French.
But it took a while, and he had absorbed a lot
by that time.
- And he had a lot of company
with his fellow French composers in that, too.
- He did.
There was a long-lasting animosity dating back
to the Franco-Prussian War, and certainly
heading into World War I, as well.
- Another French phenomenon seems to have been,
and going back all the way to the Baroque
if not further, colorful titles for pieces of music,
and Debussy fell right into that tradition.
- Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
Bach doesn't name most of his pieces,
but you look at Couperin, Rimbaud,
and suddenly you're looking at cuckoos
and mysterious barricades and all sorts
of interesting things.
Yes, but with Debussy I'd say it's more helpful
than with any other composer I've ever encountered
in that his titles tell us so much about what he was seeing
and hearing at Paris at that time.
So they provide a kind of social history of the entire epoch,
of the Belle Epoch and of the years
before and after as well.
- And that would include things ranging
from fashions of the time, what women in particular
were wearing, the dances of the time and Debussy
kind of wraps it all together with this wonderful
sort of subtlety and delicacy.
- Yes, what people were reading, the nationalism
that we talked about with the sort of anti-German sentiment,
his last prelude, you hear the strains of Marseilles.
Certainly the art that people were looking at.
Even the children's books that were in fashion at that time.
Golliwog was a children's book.
So yes, he's just he's a sponge, he absorbing it all.
Archeological digs, sculptures that appear in the Louvre.
It's everything.
- So his piece, Voiles is also evocative
of specific things that were happening in Debussy's time.
- Yeah, Voiles is nice because it offers an opening
into so many different avenues.
If you look at the photo of Loie Fuller,
you'll see that she's ensconced in veils.
She was a dancer from the United States
who immigrated to Paris and as much more successful there
with her dances of veils.
And the shape of those veils, the arabesques that they form
was sort of a fixation among poets and painters
and Debussy as well, so he wrote a lot of pieces
that are filled with arabesques, as well as pieces
titled Arabesque, and if you look at the veils,
you might think of this piece,
The Maiden with the Flaxen Hair that sounds like this.
(dreamy classical piano music)
You hear that down motion answered right away
by the up motion.
All these curvaceous ideas the art nouveau painters
loved those, and Debussy loved them as well
because they weren't straight lines,
they didn't go to a logical end.
Instead, they curved round and round.
So, hear this piece.
We think is about Loie Fuller's veils.
We don't know for sure because voiles can mean sails, too.
But Loie Fuller choreographed several of Debussy's pieces,
so we know that they knew each other,
and we know that she was sort of a star
in popular theatrical venues in Paris at this time.
So, as you listen to the piece, you can think
about that photo on the enormous kind of mystery
that she ensconced herself with,
and you hear it in the music as well, cause Debussy chooses
to build the whole piece around whole tone
and pentatonic scales, so it starts like this.
(fast piano scale)
That's the whole tone scale, and later on you hear this.
(dreamy piano music)
And that's a pentatonic scale, and one of the things
that's so important about Debussy is that he's
moving away from the tonal system that had dominated
the last two centuries of quote classical music.
Right, and he's looking for alternatives,
and he finds them all over the place.
One place he finds them is in different kinds of scales,
and in sounds that evoke the gamelan.
And so we'll here more of that in the next piece,
but you hear it already here.
- Voiles, by Debussy.
(slow, dreamy classical piano music)
- Well as you say, Cathy, you can hear the pentatonic
in there which is reminiscent of oriental themes,
and then the whole tones which may have more of a
harking back to earlier times, maybe.
Even ancient sounding music, which I gather
was also a bit of an interest in French composers,
Satie and Debussy, and I suppose Ravel, too,
but also with this Orientalism, it seems to have been
a major theme not just in terms of Chinese music
but also in Japan in particular seems
to have been an interest of these French composers.
- For sure, and actually the term Orient at that time
encompassed an enormous area, not just the area
we think of now, but Northern Africa, Spain even,
Southeast Asia, so when we talk about Orientalism
and its impact of on the painters and the poets
and the composers, we're talking to some degree
about colonialism as well, because those are the areas
that France was taking over as colonies,
but to start out with Japan, yes,
and if you look the image that Debussy chose
for the cover of La Mer, it's a Japanese print,
so Japanese prints had arrived in Paris
fairly recently at this point.
Debussy wrote the next piece I'm gonna play,
Estampes in 1903, and he was influenced both by those prints
and also by the world expositions
that had taken place in Paris,
so especially the first one in 1889 that he saw
where he encountered a gamelan for the first time,
and he saw--
- [Norman] The Indonesian instrument.
- Yeah, this symphony of gongs, orchestra of gongs,
and in the piece you're gonna hear next,
you'll hear things like.
(upbeat piano music)
You know you just hear those gongs being struck.
You hear the percussive element, but also the pedal
creates the kind of resonance that they have,
and also the scale that he uses.
Here again he uses pentatonic scale.
(fast piano scale)
And he's trying to imitate the scales of the gamelan,
so he was enormously influenced by those other cultures,
and by the kinds of both musical and visual cues
he could take from them.
So this piece Estampes, the first movement of the three
is called Pagode, so he had been looking,
he didn't ever travel to these places,
but he'd been looking at pagodas at this world exhibition,
and you encounter pagodas all over in Japan and in China
but also in Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam,
so that's the first piece.
The next piece is kind of interesting
'cause it's called Soiree Dan Grenade.
- So you mention the Spanish themes or influences
are very strong with many French composers.
- Exactly.
Yeah, and what's interesting here is that it's not
just Spain in general, it's southern Spain,
so Grenada is where the Alhambra is.
It's in southern Spain.
- [Norman] With more of a Moorish influence.
- Exactly, so here we're talking about Arab cultures
and that's of course what the French were also encountering
when they went to Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria,
the countries that they were taking over essentially,
as their sort of far-off satellites.
So you can see so many paintings by people like Matisse
and Renoir and even before that Delacroix, Jerome,
where they're looking at the sites, the colors,
the women above all, of these far-off places,
and they're looking with a kind of envy,
and you'll hear in this second piece
which starts out already
(upbeat piano music)
with the habanera rhythm and this very seductive tune.
(dreamy piano music)
Right, very chromatic and somehow insinuating,
and you can just imagine these beautiful women
who they were encountering and who they found so available.
So yes, this goes from one culture to another.
The third piece is in a sense French
because it makes use of two children's folk tunes,
but even children for Debussy are kind of exotic.
He writes a lot of music for and about children,
and I think he envies their innocence
and the way that they too seem to escape
from the sort of, the drudgery of daily life
and live in a kind of fairy tale world,
in a world of make believe,
and that's what all of this is, of course.
He didn't really see pagodas, he didn't really see harems
of women, and he wasn't a three year old child anymore,
but he wished for all of those things.
He said he lived among apparitions,
and this piece, in a way,
is a compendium of those apparitions.
- So this would be Gardens in the Rain?
- [Cathy] Yes, that's the third piece.
- And you mentioned La Mer, of course the sea.
And I was gonna say that water is another thing
that Debussy just was fascinated by and so great
at evoking in piano music.
- Absolutely, and I think again
because of the mystery, right?
Because it's clear and yet it distorts.
It reflects light.
It's always in motion.
It has all these different kinds of energy.
So yeah,, whatever was a perennial fascination,
and in fact, he said that if he hadn't been a musician,
he would've been a sailor.
(laughing)
- He actually wore, when he met the composer Albéniz,
Spanish composer, came to visit Debussy,
he didn't recognize Debussy, because Debussy
was dressed as a sailor.
- Well, there you have it. - He was that much into it.
- I think his father wanted him to be one,
so he thwarted his father's ambitions,
but he carried them with him.
- So for Estampes, which means sort of an etching
or engraving.
- That's right, it means basically a print,
and so the title is about Japanese prints.
- So it'll be Pagodas, and the Soiree in Grenada, and then
- [Both] Gardens in the Rain.
- That's right.
All wonderful images.
(slow, dreamy classical piano music)
(dramatic classical piano music)
(slow, stately classical music)
(tense, eerie classical music)
(melancholy, mysterious classical music)
(upbeat, frantic classical music)
(uneasy, tense classical music)
- Some very evocative writing there from Claude Debussy
in his Estampes, he musical engravings
taking us variously to pagodas, wherever they may be
in the Orient exactly, and to the Alhambra in Spain
and then just now to the gardens in the rain.
Another thread that seems to run,
not just through French music, but music of composers
who have lived in Paris such as Stravinsky and Petrushka,
there's this fascination with clowns
and the commedia dell'arte.
How does that manifest itself in the writings of Debussy?
- Yeah, I think that's such an interesting question.
It's one of the questions that made me write the book
because commedia dell' was always this mystery.
Like, who care, right?
(laughing)
All these characters with masks, but they cared so much.
I think there were so many things about the commedia,
which, for those who don't know, was a group
of itinerant Italian actors who pantomimed their way
across Italy to different towns and eventually
migrated France and were actually much more successful
in France than they were in Italy,
and by the 19th century,
they were a huge attraction in France.
There were very famous people, mimes, who,
especially the one who played Pierrot.
So I think they liked the fact, the composers,
like the fact there weren't words.
Right, music doesn't have words and it tells you a lot,
so if can express everything through pantomime,
then you're coming close to that same sort of art.
Also, I think they liked, especially with Pierrot,
his fickleness, his changeability, the fact that you
never knew quite who he was.
So his face is covered in white powder.
Most of them were covered in masks.
And they're constantly transforming before you.
At one moment, he's aggressive and he's sticking needles
in a woman who's betrayed him.
At another moment, he's sad and lovelorn
and sort of a lost soul.
And I think it's that changeability that appealed so much.
- Even in the pieces you just played, the Estampes,
there was some changeability, some rapid changes,
stops and restarts.
- Yes, without any connecting tissue, right?
And I think that's one of the characteristics
of 20th century music altogether, not just Debussy, right?
That you're trying to evoke a sort,
a world of the subconscious
rather than the conscious, right?
Of the way our mind works internally, not the way
we present it to the world.
- I think that's why the French, including Debussy,
were so fascinated by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe.
- Yes, absolutely. - Subconscious.
- Absolutely, and the story of Edgar Allen Poe's
that I think is most evocative of what
appealed to them maybe is the one that's called,
that's about the perverted imp, the Imp of the Perverse.
It's called the Imp of the Perverse.
But it's the story of somebody who does something
that he knows is going to ruin him
and he can't help himself.
And so it's this, it's this sort of sense
that we're inhabited by other voices, by other people,
by desires that we have no control over.
Of course, this is also the age of Freud.
Right, and so I think that that's what appealed
about Poe too and in his world,
it was often a nightmare world,
but it's a world of dream,
it's again, a world of apparitions,
things that wouldn't really happen but might happen
inside your head.
- So if we look at this capriciousness
that you find with these masked characters
in the Commedia dell',
how does that manifest itself in Debussy?
- So, the next piece I wanted to play for your
is one of the etudes,
which are among the last pieces he wrote.
He didn't write that much during World War I.
He lived till the war was almost over,
but he wrote very little both because he was suffering
from cancer but also because the war
was so devastating for him.
But he wrote a set of 12 etudes for the piano,
which are amongst his greatest works.
- Were these made technical studies then
as etude implies. - Yeah, sort of.
I mean, they were probably taken after Chopin's etudes,
but they're quite different from Chopin's etudes.
And the one I'm gonna play for you is a great example
of that sort of fickleness that it starts out
in the most sort of lush, beautiful way.
(dreamy piano music)
It's called Pour Les Arpèges Composes
and you hear these beautiful arpeggios
and they just roll.
And then all of a sudden in the middle you get the.
(upbeat piano music)
Which just feels like it has absolutely nothing to do
with the other material.
- It feels clown-like, though.
- It's clown-like, exactly.
Exactly, it's like he's suddenly at a circus,
and then he recedes and he becomes the Debussy
that we know and love.
But I, the Debussy I know and love is actually this one
who is capable of those amazing transitions
without any preparation, that somehow nevertheless
seem to work, so they must mimic our minds.
- So this is called?
- This is called Pour Les Arpèges Composes.
So it's an etude about arpeggios,
which means you hear broken chords throughout,
except when you go to the circus.
- (laughs) Here we go, Pour Les--
- And even there, you hear a few of them,
but they sound like they're strummed by guitars,
they're not that sort of lush sound of the piano.
- Bring on the Arpèges Composes.
- Okay.
(dreamy, lush classical music)
(upbeat classical music)
(dreamy classical music)
(upbeat classical music)
- When is an etude not an etude?
Well, when it's written by Claude Debussy.
That's something else entirely, isn't it?
- Yeah, it's still hard like an etude's supposed to be,
but it's all camouflaged, yeah.
- [Norman] Lot of color there.
- Yeah.
- Like Chopin, of course, we said Debussy wrote etudes
and like Chopin, Debussy also wrote preludes.
As did of course Johann Sebastian Bach,
which is probably where Chopin got the inspiration.
And Debussy got his inspiration
for writing preludes from Chopin?
- Probably.
I love the idea that the preludes were preludes to nothing.
(laughing)
I mean, when Bach--
- [Norman] A long tradition by Debussy's time.
- Yeah, I mean when, exactly.
When Bach wrote a prelude it was a prelude to a fugue
and it prepared you for that fugue,
it got that key in your ear.
Chopin threw that convention overboard
and for Debussy it was perfect because he loved the idea
that everything was open-ended.
So the preludes all end with, the title's always
at the end, but it's preceded by an ellipsis sign
as if you don't quite know if the piece is really over
and you're not quite sure if this is the title.
There's always this sort of, you want to live
in a universe of ambiguity is basically what's going on
and so a prelude that's just a fragment is perfect.
- Well yes, that's also a popular tradition
earlier among the Romantics.
- [Cathy] Right.
- Fragments were popular, not just in music
but in literature, too, and in architecture, too,
come to think of it.
- Yeah.
- So when Debussy sits down to write a prelude, though,
what should we expect?
Any consistency from one prelude to the next?
- No, not very much.
I mean, there are actually some key relationships
that are kind of interesting,
but basically the preludes more than any
of the other pieces are the pieces whose titles
tell us what's going on in Paris.
Um, so, the next piece that I'm gonna play
is called Général Lavine, eccentric,
and it's about a clown who was another, like Loie Fuller,
another emigre from the United States,
not successful there but greatly successful as a clown
at the circus, and you can see this image of him.
There are stories that he played the pianos with his toes
and he did other, he juggled and he stood on stilts,
but the toes, that's the most remarkable.
- Are we gonna get that effect in the Debussy.
- I'm so sorry.
It would've been perfect on TV,
but I'm really sorry to disappoint you.
- We'll use or imaginations.
- But you do certainly get, you get a lot of things
in this prelude, you get happy clowns
and you hear these chords at the beginning.
(upbeat piano music)
And then you hear them again in the middle
and they sound like this.
(slow, unsteady piano music)
So that clown has gotten quite melancholy
about something or other.
And then this same idea of those triads
come back like this.
(upbeat music)
Which is Camptown Races in camouflage.
- [Norman] Oh sure.
(upbeat music)
- Right. - Yeah, how 'bout that?
- So that takes us to the other aspect of this.
It's about the circus, but he says it's to be played
in the style of a cakewalk,
and minstrel shows were all the rage in Paris at this time.
This is written in the early part of the 20th century.
They'd arrived a few years before that,
and not only minstrel shows but the cakewalk
which came with the minstrel shows
was enormously popular both as an,
and the reasons take us into all sorts
of not happy associations with racism,
because of course the minstrel shows
came along with minstrel shows and lots
of really degrading stereotypes of blacks,
and the cakewalk itself was seen as this sort
of liberation from the traditional dances of France.
If you think about courante and the barre
and the minuet, they're all so proper, right?
- [Norman] So true.
- And they belonged to the monarchy.
And all of a sudden, you have this cakewalk
where people are prancing and kicking
and the steps aren't all preordained.
People loved it!
But it came with the association that Africa,
where the blacks came from, was the land
of wild animals and primitive cultures
and people who knew no rules.
- Well, Africa was still being discovered
at this point, too?
- Well, it was being colonized, too.
- That too, yeah.
- And this isn't that long
after Darwin's theory of evolution,
so you have this whole association with the monkeys,
so there's a lot of very distasteful associations
with cakewalks, and you know, Debussy
was probably no more culpable than 99.9%
of his countrymen, but they were all quite racist
and quite happy to see themselves as imbibing this culture
but nevertheless remaining vastly superior to it
in their advanced civilization.
- But if we strip this music down to its basic,
without all those associations,
a cakewalk is just a dance.
- That's right, and if you listen to this piece,
you can't help but being very enamored of General Lavine.
- General Lavine, eccentric.
(upbeat classical music)
- Living up to his name, the eccentric.
- Very eccentric, right.
- General Lavine.
- Yes.
- Among the works of Claude Debussy.
Now if we look, Cathy at all these things
we've experienced with the music of Debussy,
the rich harmonic language and this changeability
that you've demonstrated more than once now.
How compatible is all of that kind of language,
that originality, with text.
- Well I think that Debussy was extraordinarily sensitive
to text, and I think it's especially notable
since he didn't get any formal schooling.
So he grew up in this household where his parents
weren't well-educated.
He got farmed out a lot.
He finally went to the conservatory
starting at the age of 10,
but he never got a real, certainly not a literary education.
On the other hand, he's obviously incredibly sensitive
to words, so his songs are among his greatest works,
certainly his opera Pelléas et Mélisande
is one of the very greatest operas ever written,
and if you read his letters,
they're beautifully, beautifully written,
so I think of him like Schumann,
who's the other composer that I think of
as enormously interested in words,
and of course Schumann's father was a book publisher,
so no wonder, right, but with Debussy,
it's even more remarkable, so, yes,
very, very keyed in to language.
- And so have works by Debussy been put to the text?
- Ah, well he writes songs that put
other people's words to text, and he actually did
write a play, interestingly an anarchist play at one point.
- [Norman] So popular at the time, I guess.
- Right, so he tried his hand at writing himself,
but in general he wrote the text for a few songs,
especially one sort of famous one
very much at the end of his life
about children who had been ruined by the war
who don't have houses anymore,
but the piece I wanna play last for you
is a piece that incorporates lots of different texts.
It's by a living composer, a woman named Jessica Crash,
who lives in the Washington, DC area,
and I actually asked her to write me a piece
sort of giving some sense of the 21st century
looking back at Debussy's harmonic language
and also incorporating words.
So she chose, and I said, oh you can use
this letter or that.
Instead, she chose to take a collection
of texts from all different places.
Some of the quotes are from song texts.
Some are from newspaper articles at the time.
Some are from letter he wrote.
But I think all in all, you get a real sense of,
particularly of the sort of ambiguity that Debussy lived in.
You know, the first quote she uses is,
they don't, from a song text,
"They don't seem to believe in their happiness."
Right?
So yeah maybe you could be happy,
but you don't really believe you're happy.
What does that mean?
- Sounds very fin de siècle, doesn't it?
- It does, doesn't it?
And she uses quotes about moonlight.
Debussy hated the sun, it was much too bright and glaring.
- [Norman] Oh, one of his most famous pieces,
Clair de Lune.
- Right, that's right.
And Pierrot, who's associated with Clair de Lune,
is always associated with the moon
and the Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire, right?
And the association of lunaire with lunacy, right?
The work. - Absolutely.
- So you could go in so man different directions
with these texts, but I think they're really evocative
and the way she uses his sort of ambiguous harmonies
along with these somewhat perplexing texts
I think tells you a lot about Debussy.
- [Norman] And this is called?
- This is called Debussy Chez Moi.
Chez moi meaning in French...
- At my place. - At my place, exactly, yeah.
(melancholy, chaotic classical music)
- They don't seem to believe in their happiness.
And their song mixes with the moonlight.
They don't seem to believe...
in their happiness.
(slow, dreamy piano music)
And their song mixes with the moonlight.
(jazzy piano music)
And the moon descends.
(dreamy classical music)
And the moon descends on the temple that was.
(upbeat classical music)
Didn't Pierrot shake his fist at the moon?
Are we also puppets, heads of wood.
Heads of wood, stomachs of bran.
Marionettes!
(dreamy classical music)
We have nothing to say to each other.
We have nothing.
So close, so close are we.
To each other.
My melancholy thoughts.
Of fizzled fireworks.
(tense classical music)
No longer want to stop morning for trespassed Sundays.
(upbeat, cheery classical music)
My soul dies from too much sun.
(melancholy classical music)
Music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils
have been lifted.
His sounds and images turn in the evening air.
- Some of the composer's own titles
worked into the text there, Debussy.
- Yeah.
- Chez Moi, Debussy at my place, work of Jessica Crash.
Well, Catherine Kautsky, it's been a great pleasure
immersing ourselves for the hour in the work
and mind of Debussy and of course, to his times, too,
in the Belle Epoch.
- Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure
to talk to you.
- I'm Norman Gilliland and I hope you can
join me next time around for University Place Presents.