Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was born in 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town near Paris. His parents kept a small china shop, which failed, and the family was poor. He never went to school, and his mother taught him at home.

In 1871 his father took part in the Paris Commune, an uprising against the government, and was put in prison. There he met a musician whose mother was a piano teacher, and she began to teach Claude. She soon saw what he could do, and in 1872, at only 10, he entered the Paris Conservatoire.

His classmates never forgot how he played. He attacked the piano as if he were angry with it, breathing noisily on the strong beats, and yet at times he drew from it sounds of a softness nobody else could make. As a young man he liked to sit at the piano in other teachers' classes and play chains of chords that the rules of harmony did not allow. The students crowded round, and the teachers were horrified. He told his old teacher: "There is no theory. You only have to listen. Pleasure is the rule."

From 1880, at 18, he spent three summers as the house pianist of Nadezhda von Meck, a rich Russian widow who supported Tchaikovsky. He played duets with her, taught her children, and travelled with the family to Switzerland, Italy and Moscow. He even arranged some dances from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake for her. When she sent Tchaikovsky a short piano piece by the young man, Tchaikovsky wrote back that it was very pretty, but too short. In 1880 Debussy also wrote Nuit d'étoiles, the first of his works to be printed.

Back in Paris he worked as a pianist for a singing class. There he met Marie-Blanche Vasnier, a married singer with a very high, light voice, and for four years he spent almost every evening at her family's home. He wrote many songs for her, among them his first Clair de lune and Voici que le printemps. In this educated family he became aware of how little he knew, and he read every kind of book, even the dictionary. Her daughter remembered him composing at the piano, or walking up and down the room, humming, with a cigarette in his mouth.

He loved music with a passion. In 1882, at 19, he was at the Paris Opéra for the first night of a new ballet, and he cheered it so loudly that the director had him thrown out. Twenty years later he told the story with pleasure.

In 1884, at 21, he won the Prix de Rome, France's top prize for young composers. He was waiting for the result on a bridge over the Seine, watching the boats, when someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, out of breath, "You've won!" He wrote later: "Believe it or not, all my joy disappeared. I felt that I was no longer free."

The prize meant two or more years at the French Academy in Rome, and he hated it. The other winners, he wrote, were stiff and full of their own importance, and years later he joked that the food had been so bad it almost made them ill. He left early, in 1887. The judges in Paris did not like the music he sent back either. They warned him against "vague impressionism." That word followed him all his life, and he always hated it. In 1908 he wrote that only fools used it for his music.

Like most young musicians of his time, he worshipped Wagner, and he went twice to Wagner's festival in Bayreuth. But soon he did not want his own music to sound like Wagner's, and he looked for new sounds. At the Paris World's Fair of 1889 he heard a Javanese gamelan orchestra for the first time, and he remembered its shimmering sounds all his life.

After he came back from Rome, and all through the 1890s, he was poor. He spent much of his time in the cafés of Paris, talking with poets and painters. In about 1890 he met Erik Satie, who became a close friend. Later Debussy arranged two of Satie's Gymnopédies for orchestra. In those years he wrote a piano piece called Clair de lune (Moonlight), named after the same poem by Paul Verlaine that he had set as a song. Today it is his best-known work. He also set the poem a second time, as Clair de lune.

In 1893 the composer Ernest Chausson, seven years older and rich, became his close friend and helped him with money. But the next year Debussy broke off an engagement to a singer who was a close friend of the Chausson family, and the friendship ended.

At the end of 1894, at 32, he had his first great success. His Prélude to the Afternoon of a Faun, a piece for orchestra based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, pleased the audience so much that they called for it again, and the orchestra played the whole piece once more. The poet told him: "I did not expect anything like this!"

All this time he was working on his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, the story of two young lovers. He had begun it in 1893, and it took him ten years. At the first performances in 1902 the fashionable audience laughed, and a critic wrote that the music sounded like a creaking door, furniture being moved, and a child crying in the distance. But young people came back again and again. The young Ravel went to all of the first fourteen performances. Soon the house was full. Debussy joked to a friend that people respected him now, not because he had written a good opera, but because it was making money.

Mary Garden, a Scottish soprano, sang the heroine of the opera. Debussy wrote that when he first heard her sing the heroine's death scene, it was exactly the voice he had heard in his head. The next year he dedicated a new edition of his early songs to her. Among them are C'est l'extase langoureuse and Green.

He was always short of money. In 1899 he married Lilly Texier, and it is said that on the morning of the wedding he gave a piano lesson to pay for the wedding meal. In 1904 he left Lilly for Emma Bardac, a singer with whom he had fallen in love. Lilly tried to kill herself, and many of his friends turned away from him. In 1905 he and Emma had a daughter, Claude-Emma, whom they called Chouchou, and three years later they married.

Debussy adored his daughter. In 1908 he wrote a set of piano pieces for her, Children's Corner. He gave the pieces English titles, because she had an English nanny.

He loved beautiful things, such as fine clothes, rare books and small, precious objects. A friend wrote that he could be very warm, but that his mood could change suddenly. He spent more money than he had, so he was always in debt. To pay his debts, he travelled to London, Vienna, Budapest and Moscow to conduct concerts of his own music. He did not enjoy conducting.

In 1909 he learned that he had cancer. When the First World War began, he wrote almost nothing for a year. Then, in the summer of 1915, as if he knew he had little time left, he wrote a set of twelve piano pieces, a work for two pianos and two sonatas in just a few months. Musicians count them among his finest works. After an operation that winter he grew weaker. He wrote that some mornings, just getting dressed felt like a huge task.

He died at home in Paris on 25 March 1918, at 55, while German guns were shelling the city. Because of the war there were no public honours, and his funeral procession passed through empty streets. Chouchou died of an illness the next year, at 13.

Debussy was shy and spoke softly, but he had a sharp tongue. In music, in love and with money, he followed what he felt at the moment, without thinking much about what would come next. He would not be bound by the rules of his time. In his life this sometimes hurt the people closest to him. In his music it set him free. Composers before him, such as Wagner and Mussorgsky, had already begun to loosen the old rules of harmony, but Debussy went further. He chose chords simply for how they sounded, and let them float without leading anywhere. This new freedom changed the sound of music for the composers who came after him.