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Updated: June 27, 2025
The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic participation.
These feelings were fought against for association's sake, and because of gratitude for bygone pleasures but the former beauty and nobility were not there, and in their place stood irritating intervals of descending fourths and fifths. Those once transcendent progressions, luxuriant suggestions of Debussy chords of the 9th, 11th, etc., were becoming slimy.
The art of painting has taken at least twice as long to develop; yet the three centuries from Monteverde to Debussy cover as great a distance as that which separates Cimabue from Degas. In operatic history, revolutions, which in other arts have not been accomplished in several generations, have got themselves completed, and indeed almost forgotten, in the course of a few years.
The list comprises sixty-two opus numbers and one hundred and eighty-six separate compositions, not a remarkable accomplishment, in point of quantity, yet notable and rare in quality. He suggested, at his best, no one save himself. He was one of the most individual writers who ever made music as individual as Chopin, or Debussy, or Brahms, or Grieg.
We are doing nothing tomorrow. Let us have our little dinner tomorrow. I will send a line to dear Daisy at once, and say how enormously your account of the seance has interested me. I should like dear Daisy to have something to console her for that terrible fiasco about her Guru. And then, Georgino mio, I will listen to your Debussy.
She plays beautifully on the piano, and we had long hours together playing Chopin and Beethoven; we also played some of Moussorgsky's duets, but I love her best when she plays Chopin, the composer pre-eminent of love and passion. She has masses of music, as the Colonel gives her what she likes. We also played a lot of Debussy.
The whole world of musical compositions was his to conquer, and he conquered it at the rate of about two great masters a month. From Handel to Richard Strauss, even from Palestrina to Debussy, the achievements of genius lay at his mercy. He criticized them with a freedom that was entirely unprejudiced by tradition. Beethoven was no more to him than Arthur Sullivan indeed, was rather less.
The matter is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion. One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play.
Somehow, she stops short of the fulness of music. I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies. On the Third Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was. "You were talking of Debussy," she remarked. "I've got some of his stuff here. But I don't get into it. I don't understand it, and there is no use in trying.
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.
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