Who Was Claude Debussy? The Rebel Behind Clair de Lune Who Hated Being Called an Impressionist

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a French composer who changed the sound of Western music by treating harmony as colour rather than as a set of rules, and Clair de lune is famous because it captures that new sound in five quiet minutes of piano music. The piece is the third movement of his Suite bergamasque, begun around 1890 and named after a poem by Paul Verlaine; it is one of his best-loved works. Critics labelled his style "Impressionism", after the painters. Debussy hated the word and once said that anyone who used it was an imbecile.

A boy from Saint-Germain and a father in prison

Achille-Claude Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just west of Paris, the eldest of five children. During the upheaval of 1870–71 his father joined the Paris Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government of the city. When it was crushed he was sentenced to four years in prison and served one.

Despite this chaos, the boy's talent was obvious. In 1872, at the age of ten, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire.

A difficult student

While still a student, he spent the summers of 1880 to 1882 as a household pianist for Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness of Tchaikovsky, travelling with her family around Europe and to Moscow.

In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome, the famous French award for young composers, with a cantata called L'enfant prodigue. The prize came with a stay at the Villa Medici in Rome. Debussy found it suffocating and later called the accommodation "abominable". It was not the last time he would rebel against the musical establishment.

Wagner, and the sound of Java

Like many young composers of his time, Debussy fell under the spell of Richard Wagner. He heard Tristan und Isolde and went to the Bayreuth Festival in 1888 and 1889. But he soon concluded that there was no future in imitating Wagner.

An entirely different sound pointed him forward. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 he heard a Javanese gamelan, an ensemble of gongs and metallophones with its own scales and shimmering layers. The experience left a lasting mark on the textures of his later music.

Moonlight and a faun

Around 1890 he began the Suite bergamasque for piano, whose third movement became Clair de lune. It was originally titled Promenade sentimentale, and the suite was only published in 1905, after revisions. Its fame has reached far beyond concert halls: it was planned for Disney's Fantasia in 1940 but cut for length, and the animation was later reused in another film.

In December 1894 came the orchestral Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Many musicians regard it as his first orchestral masterpiece. Its floating, unhurried opening is often heard as one of the first sounds of modern music.

Pelléas, La mer and Monsieur Croche

Debussy's breakthrough with the public was his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 30 April 1902. Instead of big arias, its characters speak almost in sung conversation, wrapped in a hazy, mysterious orchestra.

He also had a sharp pen. From 1901 he wrote music criticism under the pen name "Monsieur Croche", a grumpy imaginary critic whose essays were later collected as Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante.

In October 1905 his orchestral portrait of the sea, La mer, premiered in Paris to mixed reviews. Audiences took time to warm to it, but it has since become a cornerstone of the orchestral repertoire.

A private life full of scandal

Debussy's personal life was turbulent. He lived for years with Gabrielle Dupont, then left her and in 1899 married Lilly Texier. Within a few years he left Lilly for Emma Bardac, who had earlier been the mistress of the composer Gabriel Fauré. In October 1904 Lilly shot herself in the chest; she survived, but the bullet stayed in her body for the rest of her life. The scandal cost Debussy many friends.

He and Emma had a daughter, Claude-Emma, nicknamed "Chouchou", born in 1905. They married in 1908, and that same year he dedicated his playful piano suite Children's Corner to her.

Why he refused the word "Impressionism"

Critics had applied the label "Impressionism" to his music since his early orchestral work Printemps. Debussy strongly rejected it. For him the term was lazy: it borrowed a painter's word for something he saw as a new musical language, with its own logic of scales, chords and timbre. Between 1909 and 1913 he wrote two books of Préludes for piano, short, vivid pieces that each conjure a single image or mood.

Illness and a death under bombardment

In 1909 Debussy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. In 1915 he underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations. He died at his home in Paris on 25 March 1918, aged 55, while German shells were falling on the city. Because of the war there was no public funeral.

The last chapter is the saddest. Chouchou died of diphtheria in 1919, scarcely a year after her father. Her father's music, from the moonlit piano to the restless sea, remains one of the doors through which twentieth-century music entered the world.

Learn with Debussy: English phrases about mood and atmosphere

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to set the mood	to create a particular feeling	Clair de lune sets the mood for a quiet evening.
to break the mould	to do something in a new way	Debussy broke the mould of French music.
to march to the beat of your own drum	to act independently	He always marched to the beat of his own drum.
hazy	not clear, soft at the edges	The harmonies sound hazy and dreamlike.
to grow on someone	to become more liked over time	La mer grew on audiences after a mixed start.

Try this: Play Clair de lune and write three English sentences about the picture it creates in your mind, using "set the mood" and "hazy".