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Updated: June 26, 2025
Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning. And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary.
From which it will be seen that there were limits to the aesthetic sympathy of even so liberal and divining an appreciator as MacDowell. The modern Frenchmen he knew scarcely at all. Some of d'Indy's earlier music he had heard and admired: but that he would have cared for such a score as Debussy's "La Mer" I very much doubt.
Helen's one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. It's very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what's gained, I'd like to know? Oh, it's all rubbish, radically false. If Monet's really Debussy, and Debussy's really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt that's my opinion."
The final scene of the act is treated with surpassing reticence, dignity, and simplicity, yet with piercing intensity of expression. Nothing could be at the same time more sparing of means and more exquisitely eloquent in result than Debussy's setting of the scene of Mélisande's death it is music which dims the eyes and subdues the spirit. value, but they may not easily be praised with adequacy.
This "vieille et triste légende de la forêt" is alive with images, such as the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lost amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneath Mélisande's casement, Mélisande's hair that falls farther than her arms can reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults and breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle of the child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy's imagination.
It responds to an unconscious yet profound need of the French spirit. I would even venture to say that the historical importance of Debussy's work is greater than its artistic value.
One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic texture which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of Debussy's score.
We can trace impressions of early life in Debussy's music, through his employment of the old modes, the bell sounds which were familiar to his boyhood, and also circumstances connected with his later life.
The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say. Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist.
As Debussy's art only attempts to give the impression of the moment, without troubling itself with what may come after, it is free from care, and takes its fill in the enjoyment of the moment. In the garden of harmonies it selects the most beautiful flowers; for sincerity of expression takes a second place with it, and its first idea is to please.
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