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"You mustn't talk that way" said Sheffield hurriedly. "So you are a musician, are you?" He asked the question with a jaunty confidential air. "I used to play the piano a little, if that's what you mean," said Andrews. "Music has never been the art I had most interest in. But many things have moved me intensely.... Debussy and those beautiful little things of Nevin's.
Isn't Debussy the man who always makes me want to howl like a dog at the sound of the gong? Where did you get these from?" "Olga lent me them," said Georgie negligently. He really did call her Olga to her face now, by request. Lucia's bugles began to sound. "Yes, I should think Miss Bracely would admire that sort of music," she said.
Ravel always goes directly through the center. But compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Ibéria" to perceive how direct he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive.
But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his master, Gabriel Fauré. He is too sturdily set in his own direction.
This manifesto reflects in its own way the spirit of Debussy and his untrammelled musical impressionism; and though it shows a good deal of naïveté and some intolerance, there was in it a strength of youthful enthusiasm that accorded with the great hopes of the time, and foretold glorious days to come and a splendid harvest of music.
Debussy has defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the drama.
And yet the great opera composer who is to come in great likelihood will be a disciple of Gluck, Mozart, and the Wagner who wrote "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger" rather than one of the tribe of Debussy. The great opera composers of the nineteenth century were of one mind touching the greatness of "Don Giovanni."
The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and that he simply went through the routine of composition.
But, above all, it was the figure of Mélisande herself that made him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For that figure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation of his ideal image. The music is all Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman.
From the first Claude Debussy showed himself a rare spirit, who looked at the subject of musical art from a different angle than others had done. For one thing he must have loved nature with whole souled devotion, for he sought to reflect her moods and inspirations in his compositions.
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