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Debussy, letters to the sound of music

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Pelléas and Mélisande

The letters – very numerous – in which Debussy describes the composition of Pelléas and Mélisande I am a beautiful example of this coming-of-age novel; in them we see the composer who confides to his friends the pain of a poetic intuition that fails to translate into music: attempts, defeats, restarts and suddenly the sudden illumination. The story of the Pelléa narrated day by day by the letters to Chausson and Henri Lerolle which seemed to me more eloquent than any analysis of the work, to the point of making it a separate chapter.

“Prix de Rome”

With the letters written during his stay in Rome, due to the achievement of the “Prix de Rome” in 1884, we enter the heart of our Bildungsroman and from those pages the personality of the young musician emerges with all its contradictions and sudden mood swings. Sometimes it is the wonder caused by a sudden discovery such as that of the counterpoint of Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso heard almost by chance in a church not far from Piazza Navona (that of Santa Maria dell’Anima), at other times the impression aroused by the way of playing by Liszt who went to visit the Villa Medici.

The young Debussy is restless, not at all happy to live in Rome, which he unceremoniously defines as a city “full of marbles and fleas”, but in the evening in his room we see him declaiming Shakespeare’s plays with a couple of colleagues. The letters of that period show him grumpy and melancholy but a reminiscence of the Spring of Botticelli, contained in the painting of a colleague of the Villa Medici, to make him write to the Parisian bookseller Emile Baron a sentence like this: “I would like to express the slow and painful genesis of beings and things of nature and subsequently the ascending development that culminates in an irrepressible joy of being reborn and in a new life … I don’t know if I will be able to adequately carry out such a project ».

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Return to Paris

The long-awaited return to Paris provokes in the young Debussy a sense of painful bewilderment; he suddenly realizes that that city is the place of ruthless competitions and so he describes it in a letter to the director of the Villa Medici, for which he already feels nostalgia, as a “Bazar à Succès”, anticipating by a few years the Rilkian definition of ” Ville douleur ». (…)

What better than the verses of Théodore de Banville, Paul Bourget and Paul Verlaine can tell the ardent passion that bound the musician not yet twenty to a lady of good society equipped with a beautiful voice like Marie-Blanche Vasnier? Debussy composed lyrics for voice and piano practically for his entire life (the first is from 1880 and the last from 1915) showing from the very beginning a rare ability to musically metabolize the poetic word. The phenomenon is complex and even a little mysterious; Debussy knows how to treat the poetic word musically like very few composers in the entire history of music but the result is not only that of a perfect musical exegesis of the verses of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé or Tristan L’Hermite. Those verses are set to music with a most faithful prosody and their sound rhythm shines in such a natural light that we have the impression of finding ourselves in front of their most secret depth for the first time. Describing in a letter a good performance of the Three poems by Mallarmé, Debussy said that it was all so light and perfect that it didn’t even seem written. Thus starting from the verses of Théodore de Banville and from Five poems by Baudelaire we can follow the evolution of our composer’s musical and literary education. (…) The mystery takes shape through a compositional strategy so clear that it induces Pierre Boulez to affirm that “The notions of mystery, poetry and dreams acquire their profound value in Debussy only thanks to precision and in full light”. In this inseparable complementarity of mystery and supreme precision lies the secret nucleus of Debussy’s music; the composer was so aware of how difficult it was to grasp this intimate connection that he confided to his friend Pierre Louÿs: “I am working on things that will only be understood by the grandchildren of the twentieth century”.

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