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And we have, too, a little band of musicians; among them, in the first rank, that great painter of dreams, Claude Debussy; that master of constructive art, Dukas; that impassioned thinker, Albéric Magnard; that ironic poet, Ravel; and those delicate and finished writers, Albert Roussel and Déodat de Séverac; without mention of the younger musicians who are in the vanguard of their art.
It is to be noted that Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history.
Choir-masters and organists of great erudition, such as Andre Pirro and Gastoué, and composers like Vincent d'Indy, Dukas, Debussy, and some others, analysed their art with the confidence that the intimate knowledge of its practice brings. A perfect efflorescence of works on music appeared.
His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris Godounow has much influenced French music, as I have pointed out earlier in this volume a source at which Claude Debussy drank not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others whose more sophisticated scores prove this.
After Debussy comes Dukas, Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Rogier-Ducasse, men who seem to have caught anew the spirit of the eighteenth-century music and given it to us not through the poetic haze of Debussy, but in gleaming, brilliant phrases. There is promise in Schmitt.
If people wish to institute a joust between French and German art, let it be a fair one, I repeat; let Wagner be matched with Berlioz, and Strauss with Debussy, and Mahler with Dukas or Magnard. Such were the conditions of the combat; and they were, whether intentionally or not, unfavourable to France.
And if one thinks, too, of the artists who, though not his pupils, felt his power artists such as Gabriel Fauré, Alexandre Guilmant, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Paul Dukas one may see that nearly the whole musical generation of Paris of that time took its inspiration from César Franck.
His daughter had married an Emperor of Byzantium, Juan Dukas Vatatzés, the famous "Vatacio," when he was fifty and she fourteen. She was a natural daughter soon legitimized like almost all his progeny, a product of his free harem, in which were mingled Saracen beauties and Italian marchionesses.
Musicians nowadays are no longer entirely absorbed in their notes, but let their minds go out to other interests. And it is not one of the least interesting phenomena of French music to-day that gives us these learned and thoughtful composers, who are conscious of what they create, and bring to their art a keen critical faculty, like that of M. Saint-Saëns, M. Dukas, or M. d'Indy.
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.
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