Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
The Tradition of Sensibility
By Virgil Thomson
Debussy: His Life and Mind (Volume II)
by Edward Lockspeiser
Macmillan, 337 pp., $8.00
Georges Bizet: His Life and Work
by Winton Dean
Dent (London), 304 pp., 42 shillings
Alban Berg
by Willi Reich, translated by Cornelius Cardew
Harcourt, Brace & World, 231 pp., $5.95
The Path to the New Music
by Anton Webern, edited by Willi Reich, translated by Leo Black
Theodore Presser Co. and Universal Edition, 67 pp.
Claude Debussy, our century's most original composer, was ill-born, ill-bred, and virtually uneducated save in music. In that he had the best (Paris Conservatoire) and earned his prix de Rome. Though an autodidact in the non-musical branches, he was alive to painting and to poetry, including the most advanced. Already in youth he had made friends with the difficult and demanding Mallarmé; and he himself had literary gifts. He wrote about music as Monsieur Croche, antidilettante (a personage fabricated after the Monsieur Teste of his friend Paul Valéry); he indited 'proses lyriques' and set them; and he carried on with all those close to him a correspondence phrased in racy language. Those close to him included the poet Pierre Louys, the romancers Marcel Proust and André Gide, the composers Ernest Chausson and Erik Satie, later Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Edgar Varèse. And if eventually he broke with virtually all of these but Satie, or they with him, Debussy was for all his bearishness, bad temper, and constant money dramas, a delicious friend and tender companion, even to his wives and mistresses, two of whom tried suicide when he moved out.
Review, 2626 words
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