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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.
When as a youth Debussy was serving with his regiment in France, he relates of the delight he experienced in listening to the tones of the bugles and bells. The former sounded over the camp for the various military duties; the latter belonged to a neighboring convent and rang out daily for services.
Hartmann kindly consented to the quotation of one bearing on the Poème for violin which Debussy had promised to write for him, and which, alas, owing to his illness and other reasons, never actually came to be written: "Dear Friend: "Of course I am working a great deal now, because I feel the need of writing music, and would find it difficult to build an aeroplane; yet at times Music is ill-natured, even toward those who love her most!
"Tout ca," said Genevieve, waving her hand across the table, "c'est Boche.... But we haven't any others, so they'll have to do." The older woman, who sat beside her, whispered something in her ear and laughed. Genevieve put on a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles and starting pouring out tea. "Debussy once drank out of that cup..... It's cracked," she said, handing a cup to John Andrews.
They found fault with Beethoven, and rapped Wagner over the knuckles. They laughed openly at Berlioz and Gluck. Nothing existed for them just then but Johann Sebastian Bach, and Claude Debussy. And Bach, who had lately been roundly abused, was beginning to seem pedantic, a periwig, and in fine, a hack.
Yes, the umbrella was the real trouble. Behind Monet and Debussy the umbrella persisted, with the steady beat of a drum. "I suppose my umbrella will be all right," he was thinking. "I don't really mind about it. I will think about music instead. I suppose my umbrella will be all right." Earlier in the afternoon he had worried about seats. Ought he to have paid as much as two shillings?
Music, of course from Frohberger and Haydn to Mendelssohn, Wagner, Raff, and Debussy abounds in examples of natural imagery. In claiming a certain excellence for his method one need scarcely imply that MacDowell has ever threatened the supremacy of such things as the "Rheingold" prelude or the "Walküre" fire music.
A young composer, André Caplet, with whom I had long been intimate, proposed to introduce me to Debussy; but the rumors I had heard about the composer's preferred seclusion always made me refuse in spite of my great desire to know him.
The Julien of Charpentier is on a lower literary and musical level than Louise, which, all said and done, has in certain episodes a picturesque charm; the new work is replete with bad symbolism and worse music-spinning. Debussy has at least a novel, though somewhat monotonous, manner. He is "precious," and in ideas as constipated as Mallarmé, whose Afternoon of a Faun he so adequately set.
These fatalistic ideas, reflecting the lassitude of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, have been wonderfully translated into music by Debussy; and when you feel the poetic and sensual charm of the music, the ideas become fascinating and intoxicating, and their spirit is very infectious.
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