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Updated: June 22, 2025
His resort to Gregorian principles is, it has been observed, far from being a matter of recent history with him. Almost twenty years ago we find him writing in the spirit of the old modes. Examine the opening phrases of his song, Harmonie du Soir (composed in 1889-1890), and note the felicitous adaptation to modern use of the "authentic" mode known as the Lydian, which corresponds to a C-major scale with F-sharp. Observe the use of the same mode in the introductory measures, and elsewhere, of his setting of Verlaine's Il pleure dans mon coeur , the second of the "Ariettes." Five years later, in Pelléas et Mélisande, the trait is omnipresent too extensive and obvious, indeed, to require detailed indication. One might point out, at random, the derivation from the seventh of the ecclesiastical modes (the Mixolydian) of the phrase in the accompaniment to Arkël's words in the final scene, "L'âme humaine aime
The French steamer Harmonie was attacked in the Mediterranean by an Austrian aeroplane, but none of the six bombs which were dropped struck the vessel.
Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pré-établie' of Leibnitz; it is borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man, says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their union?
He collaborated with F. Halleck in the Croaker Papers, and wrote "The Culprit Fay" and "The American Flag." Historian, b. at St. Helen's, Lancashire, emigrated to Virginia, and was a prof. in the Univ. of New York. Poet, b. in Warwickshire, was in early life page to a gentleman, and was possibly at Camb. or Oxf. His earliest poem, The Harmonie of the Church, was destroyed.
In 1884, when he was in his twenty-second year, his cantata, l'Enfant prodigue, won for him the Prix de Rome by a majority of twenty-two out of twenty-eight votes it is said to have been the unanimous opinion of the jury that the score was "one of the most interesting that had been heard at the Institut for years." While at the Villa Médicis he composed, in 1887, his Printemps for chorus and orchestra, and, in the following year, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," of which the authorities at the Conservatory saw fit to disapprove because of certain liberties which Debussy even then was taking with established and revered traditions. He performed his military service upon his return from Rome; and there is a tradition told, as bearing upon his love of recondite sonorities, to the effect that while at Évreux he delighted in the harmonic clash caused by the simultaneous sounding of the trumpet call for the extinguishing of lights and the sustained vibrations of some neighboring convent bells. From this time forward his output was persistent and moderately copious. To the year 1888 belong, in addition to La Demoiselle Élue, the remarkably individual "Ariettes," six settings for voice and piano of poems by Verlaine. To 1889-1890 belong the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra and the striking "Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire" (Le Balcon, Harmonie du Soir, Le Jet d'Eau, Recueillement, La Mort des Amants). In 1891 came some less significant piano pieces; but the following two years were richly productive, for they brought forth the exquisite Prélude
I was told that it was not considered unpleasant, and that the only wooden floor in the island was in the Governor-General's palace at Buitenzorg. The Harmonie is a large square building, surrounded on two sides with porticos and verandahs, standing at the corner of Ryswyk. The main entrance leads into an extensive hall with white walls and a lofty roof supported by ranges of pillars.
But in this latter capacity he is gifted indeed, and is peculiarly fitted to furnish forth with music Ebling's "Lobgesang auf die Harmonie." In his setting of this poem he has used a soprano and a barytone solo with male chorus and orchestra. The harmonic structure throughout is superb in all the various virtues ascribed to harmony. The ending is magnificent.
He adds: Thus it appeareth both Eloquence and Poetrie to have had their beginning and original from these exercises, beeing framed in such sweete measure of sentences and pleasant harmonie called ῥυθμός which is an apt composition of wordes or clauses, drawing as it were by force the hearers eares even whether soever it lysteth, that Plato affirmeth therein to be contained γοητεία, an inchantment, as it were to persuade.
Debussy's ancestry is not easily traced. Wagner, whom he has amused himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped certain aspects of his style. In some of the early songs one realizes quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of Tristan; yet in these very songs say the Harmonie du Soir and La Mort des Amants (composed in 1889-1890) there are amazingly individual pages: pages which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the time these songs were written the score of Parsifal had been off Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting forth such tentative things as his Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung, that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence. Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and Mussorgsky a discovery which one finds some difficulty in crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree, by César Franck; and there were moments happily infrequent during what one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the perfumed sentiment of Massenet blew disturbingly across his usually sincere and poetic pages. But for traces of Liszt, or Berlioz, or Brahms, one will search fruitlessly. That he does not, to-day, touch hands at any point with his brother musicians of the elder school in France with such, for example, as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative Saint-Saëns goes almost without saying. With Vincent d'Indy, a musician of wholly antipodal qualities, he disputes the place of honor among the elect of the "younger" school (whose members are not so young as they are painted); and he is the worshiped idol of still younger Frenchmen who envy, depreciate, and industriously imitate his fascinating and dangerously luring art. He has traveled far on the path of his particular destiny; not since Wagner has any modern music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art; yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art of Pelléas et Mélisande, of the Nocturnes, even of the comparatively early Prélude
So at least it appears to us; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the Harmonie Pré-établie might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful.
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