New-York tribune., 1918-09-08
The Most Sen
Sitive Musical
Frenchn1an
AWRENCE GILMAN, in the
August number of "The Cen
4 tury Magazine" characterizes

DeOuSSy as 1.-The most sensitive
musical Frenchman of his generation,
creative artist who has done more to en-
rich and deepen the aesthetic traditions
of hse country than any modern master
save Rodin." The cvs.ia continues with
his study of the soul and expression of
this last great figure among great music
makers:
"Rodin died in the funess of general
public appreciation of the nature and value
of his achievement. Debussy died in the
fulness of general misunderstanding as
to the scope of his genius and the sgnii-
cance of his contribution to musical art
Indeed Debussy's Importance might be con-
veniently indicated to those familiar with
the history of creative innovation by simply
remarkng that he has provoked all the
familiar reactions caused by the exhibition
of aesthetic novelty He has been denied
the virtues which he securely possessed,
and has been burdened with sins of which
he was wholly guiltlcss To have produced
work of art that in the same year was
hailed by one distinguished appraiser as a
revolutionary masterpiece, and repudiated
by another equally distinguished, as abom-
Unable Rubbish is to have established ones
right to an Olympian passport clearly as
Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner estab-
lished theirs.
ut seems to US merely amusing that the
'Eroica' Symphony should have been a hard
nut for many of Beethoven's contemporaries
to crack; and the anti -Wagnerites of the
early sos who could find no melodic beauty
in 'Sicgfried' and Die Meistersinger' ap-
pear absurd dnd incredible at this re-
move as the opponents of Calico. Yet the
contemporaries of Claude Debussy have
bravely incurred the laughter of posterity
by describing as "a miniaturist' the COM
poser who found intense and large moulded
utterance for the tragic passions of the
fourth act of 'Pelleas ct Melisande'; who
filled his 'Rondes de Printemps' with the
green tides of May, with the freshness of
orchards and gusty skies, and the lovely
merriment of dancing and singing children;
who captured the rhythms and colors of the
sea and set them pusing and shmmering
on his orchestral canvas leaving us pct-
of sunrise over lonely waters that
stands almost alone in tonal impressionism
for breadth and spendor of imagination.
And this 'anti-lyrcal composer who taught
modern music how to weave new spells of
nelodc loveliness, that dozens Of his
contemporaries, enchanted by these fresh
and limpid songs, dedicated their pipings
exclusively to the task of an attempted
duplication-this little MASTER engrossed,
they said, by veporous subtleties,' given
to delicate trif1ing and the search for
new sensations,' who searched out the souls
of Melsande and Golaud and Arkel and Pei
leas and made them speak in his music
with a poignant veracity and q sustained
intimacy of revelation that can never be
forgotten by those who have felt its power
this grotesquely misunderstood composer
had to endure the crowning affront of hear
ing himself dismissed as one unfaithful to
the best traditions OF French art.
"The music OF France had witnessed no
such spectacle as Debussy. A few pioneers
sof modernism like Cesar Franck, Chabrier
Faure, dIndy, had begun their work of re-
demption, but French music was still what
it had been made by the sentimentalism of
Gounod, Thomas, Delbes, Mass&net, Bizet,
and the simiap insincerites Of Saint
Sasns. 1t was, for the most part, thin
and insipid brew, owing what strength it
had to dilute infusion of Magnetism and
to the growing, but limited, influence OF the
followers Of Cesar 'Franck.
"Debussy's fundamental originality is un-
escapable; even his most strabismic de-
tractors concede this. He is as original and
\ as individual as Chopin. Yet he obtained
aesthetic annexations and indemnities from
varied sources-from Wagner and the Rus
slams; from Cesar Franck; from Chopin;
from the old church modes; from the music
of the gipsies that he heard in the taverns
of Moscow; from exotic music, the music of
the East, which fascinated him at the
Paris Exposition of 1889. But always his
voice is unmistakable.
Lord Rosebery said Of Burns that he wa.
a soul bathed in crystal 1t is hard to
imagine Debussy saying that of any one
He would have preferred rather to think of
the soul as wrapped always in shadow. He
? might have echoed the warning OF the Old
Man in Interieur,' Take care; we do not
know how far the soul extends beyond man.
Debussy was concerned not with what
Maeterlinck contemptuously called the IA
nous real life the outward life, the life
we see and hear but with that other life
which lies at the bottom Of mems hearts
and in the privacy of their conscience and
in the unknown mysteries Of this world
that life which is silent TO our ears
but not to our sympathies' His most indi-
vldual achievement is to have given us. for
the first time in music, a sense of those
twilight domains of consciousness those
secret regions of the soul which, as William
James tells u.s. arc parted from our normal
waking, rational consciousness by the
fimiest screens, and into which most men
project themselves only through dreams and
gimpses. Debussy, having the piercing
vision Of the mystic, found nothing obscur-
ing in those 'hlmy screens His imaginn-
ton passed into and dwet at in that
crepuscular world of emotional resonances