Debussy Studies 2 follows on from the first volume under that title a little over a quarter of a century later (1997) and enters a field of extraordinarily rich recent research activity devoted to Claude Debussy. The co-edited OUP collection Rethinking Debussy (2011)1 appeared just before several international conferences for Debussy’s birth sesquicentenary in 2012. Indeed, the commemoration of Debussy in 2012 and then in 2018, to mark the centenary of his death, gave rise to a number of events in France, Belgium, Canada and the UK, providing multiple opportunities to reflect on Debussy over the century, and to stimulate new research by well-established scholars and by a whole new generation of researchers. Jann Pasler carried out the clearest reflective survey of the state of Debussy research in 2012 in an article published in Notes entitled ‘Debussy the Man, his Music and his Legacy: an overview of current research’.2 She used it as an opportunity to take stock on Debussy scholarship and how it had changed since the composer’s centenary in 1962, focusing in particular on the last ten years.

This chapter reappraises Debussy’s Piano Trio of 1880 and his two substantial cello pieces of 1882, in the light of having edited them for the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy. Surviving documentation suggests that Debussy, while working for Nadezhda von Meck in summer 1880, aimed at producing a Trio in Russian character, one that may even have played a part in prompting Tchaikovsky’s Trio of two years later. The structural cohesion and character of the work are also reassessed, including the editorial challenge of completing a passage for which only a cello part survives. Similar reappraisal is applied to Debussy’s two cello pieces of 1882, and clarification offered of the titling of one of the pieces, which has long been labelled Nocturne et Scherzo (despite being neither): that title appears to have been mistakenly carried over from a pair of entirely different violin pieces now lost.

Early twentieth-century French critics often characterised Debussy’s music as ‘natural’. A seemingly banal descriptor of a radically novel musical language, the attribution of ‘naturalness’ drew from a broad range of ideas in the burgeoning human sciences of the time, from post-Helmholtzian acoustics and the physiology of hearing to theories of emotion in the emerging nouvelle psychologie. At the same time, the supposed ‘naturalness’ of Debussy’s music stood in tension with a recognition among some Debussyist critics that ‘natural’ music remained, at bottom, a contradiction in terms. Surveying accounts of music and naturalness in the writings of three critics active in Debussyist conversations – Paul Landormy, Lionel de la Laurencie, and Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi – this essay explores both the intellectual borrowings and influences that informed their accounts of Debussy’s music and, more broadly, the ways in which these specific conversations contributed to changing ideas about the elusive category of ‘music’ itself.

Why study music manuscripts? Historical musicologists are often interested in ascertaining accurate details within a musical score and in investigating the composer’s creative process. Collectors, on the other hand, may view manuscripts in wide-eyed wonder of the genius behind their creation and as beautiful works of art in themselves. Yet another reason to examine composers’ autographs – because they offer a potent wellspring for informed musical performance – prompts the present study.

Accordingly, we scrutinise some of the thorniest passages in Debussy’s Recueil Vasnier manuscript and illustrate various ways in which the insights gleaned from such an inquiry can illuminate musical performance. The editorial process – involving the establishment of an authentic musical text, with pitches whose clefs and accidentals reflect Debussy’s compositional intent, an understanding of rhythmic nuances and deciphering of idiosyncratic rhythmic notation and tempo indications, and the parsing of poetic text – raises questions and suggests solutions that directly impact interpretive choices.

The music of J. S. Bach clearly had a powerful impact on Claude Debussy. As a student, Debussy studied figured bass and fugue, and even performed several pieces by Bach, such as the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and Toccata and Fugue in G minor. Later in his career, he signed a contract with Durand in April 1915 to edit several chamber works by Bach, completing one for the six sonatas for violin and keyboard (BWV 1014–1019) in April 1917 around the same time as his own Sonata for Violin and Piano. Although Debussy did not explicitly quote any material from Bach’s music in his Violin Sonata, this chapter examines some of the ways in which the former inspired him when composing the latter. These include favouring highly decorated melodic lines, creating complex contrapuntal textures, especially those involving parallel voice leading, and disguising the movement’s formal structure.

The years 1908 and 1909 were vital for establishing the reputation of Claude Debussy in Britain because of three significant events: Debussy’s visit to Britain to conduct Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La mer at the Queen’s Hall in February 1908, the shambolic performance of Nocturnes in February 1909, and the long-awaited première of Pelléas et Mélisande in May and June 1909. British audiences and critics had already sought to find a language to describe Debussy’s ‘atmospheric’ orchestral music. This chapter gives insights into the advocacy work to prepare the British public for Pelléas, which was unlike any opera they had heard before. Focusing on the Symbolist writer, Arthur Symons, Debussy’s first biographer, Louisa Liebich, and influential critic, Edwin Evans, it considers how an understanding of Debussy in Britain was distinctive from that in France and influenced the wider reception and international standing of Debussy in the pre-war years.

In Debussy’s mélodies, the placement of poetic stresses within a bar frequently contradicts the natural rhythm of the French language. In the case of his early songs, scholars have rationalised these occurrences through his ‘casual regard for the text’, his youthfulness, or his ‘budding fascination with the poetry’. However, the irregularities present in his later songs have not been explained. While confirming that Debussy’s translation of the prosody into the musical metre and rhythm is anything but strict, my study of meter and rhythm in his mélodies suggests that an exact rendering of versification was not even intended in many of the songs. To demonstrate this aspect of Debussy’s technique, I compare a few poetic lines from the 1882 and 1892 settings of Verlaine’s ‘En sourdine’ and focus on a single rhythmic alteration, whose location, in the light of the song’s other rhythmic and metrical events, reveals its purpose.

The long century of Debussy research since 1918 has featured competing insights into his ‘arabesque’ idea (Zenck 1974, Eigeldinger 1988, Bhogal 2013). Was this a melodic, polyphonic, or polysemic concept? Supporting Bhogal’s view of arabesque as diachronic and variable, we explain its three-decade-long evolution in Debussy’s music via early, intermediate, conventional and late stages. Our study applies music-analytical rigour to compositional evidence from across his output, representing a significant and original contribution to interpreting his development. Beyond explicating technical differences between his early and mature techniques, we show how arabesque taxonomy must extend past the L’Après-midi period into Debussy’s final decade, when he developed a ‘late’, transformed version of this practice. Finally, we argue that arabesque represents one of Debussy’s central stylistic discoveries, enabling him to link material to process, to conceive of melody, heterophony, and polyphony suited to the new formal principles that would inspire generations of future composers.