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And it is this crying, passionate tone, this directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps.
He has never sought to dominate Maeterlinck's poem, or to swallow it up in a torrent of music; he has made it so much a part of himself that at the present time no Frenchman is able to think of a passage in the play without Debussy's music singing at the same time within him.
The difference between the two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and profound awareness of beauty.
And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indys and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhauds that followed immediately on César Franck, an institution like the Société Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French music was. Debussy Debussy's music is our own.
"Among the transcriptions I have most enjoyed making were those of Debussy's Il pleure dans mon cœur, and La Fille aux cheveaux de lin. Debussy was my cherished friend, and they represent a labor of love. "Debussy came near writing a violin piece for me once!" continued Mr. Hartmann, and brought out a folio containing letters the great impressionist had written him.
It is precisely when his temperament is at the boiling point that his hand on the regulator is steadiest." At a concert in Carnegie Hall four years ago he gave a dramatic demonstration of self-control. He was conducting Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," when smoke from an incinerator fire in a neighboring building penetrated the hall. The smoke grew dense.
Debussy's music, Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his case with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon emotion as a basis for the art-impulse.
His lyric inspiration was here too strong; otherwise with Débussy. Each article of rebellion is more highly stressed in the French leader, save as to organic form, where the latter is far the stronger. Among the special traits of Débussy's harmonic manner is a mingling with the main chord of the third below. There is a building downward, as it were.
He quoted Prout, he quoted Vincent d'Indy; he minutely compared passages in Elgar's second symphony with passages in Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony; he dissected the delicate orchestral effects in Debussy's Nuages and Fête Nocturne, compared the modern French methods in orchestration with Richard Strauss's gigantic, and sometimes monstrous combinations.
By interest and temperament he was in sympathy with the impressionistic school in art, whether it be in painting, literature or in music. In Debussy's music the qualities of impressionism and symbolism are very prominent. He employs sounds as though they were colors, and blends them in such a way as literally to paint a picture in tones, through a series of shaded, many-hued chord progressions.
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