Debussy Rediscovered

The musical genius of France is something like a dream in the senses.

--Claude Debussy

When it comes to Debussy's own compositions, most interpreters stress the dream more than the senses. They see Debussy's rejection of the robust rhetoric of 19th century Romantic music as part of a drift into a fantasy world. They render his refined, precisely shaded instrumental effects as the perpetual murmuring of a soul in reverie. At best, this approach makes Debussy into an intriguing original of French music. At worst, it produces a kind of clair de lunacy: conductors seem to be using a stick of incense rather than a baton, and listeners are enveloped in a pastel effulgence of perfumed sound.

Conductor Pierre Boulez is trying to change all this. "Debussy performances are too much tied to this idea of elegance and sweetness," Boulez recently told TIME'S London correspondent, Christopher Porterfield. "To me, Debussy is more feline--the claws can suddenly come out and scratch you with a kind of cruelty. His is sensitive music, but it is very often on the verge of erupting. To conduct it, a sense of atmosphere is not enough. You must have the iron hand within the velvet glove."

Out of the Mists. For several years now, Boulez, who will become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1971, has been proving his point with a string of Debussy performances and recordings that are nothing less than revelatory. Without any loss of subtlety, he has brought Debussy out of the mists. His reading of La Mer shapes all the surge and ebb of the score into crystalline lines and proportions. He heightens the texture of L'apres-midi d'un faune by building a cunning pattern of contrasts in mood and dynamics. In the ballet score Jeux, Boulez delineates the surprising variety of rhythmic pulses to be found within Debussy's floating tempos.

The piece de resistance in Boulez's continuing campaign to rediscover Debussy is the London Royal Opera's new setting of Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy's only opera (1902). Debussy believed that in opera "nothing should impede the progress of the drama--all musical development not called for by the words is a mistake." In his rigorously faithful setting of Maeterlinck's moonstruck play about love and fratricide, Debussy ruled out full-blown arias as well as vocal ensembles, and restricted the singers largely to declamation, meanwhile raising the orchestra to a new importance as the main commentator on the action.

Some listeners regard the result as a denial of song. But last week, conducting a performance of the new production, Boulez turned Pelleas into a musical affirmation by treating the drama not as a fairy tale but a human story. Thus he brought passion and pain to a work that all too often seems pale. In the famous scene where Melisande (Soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom) looses her hair over the ardent Pelleas (Tenor George Shirley), Boulez whipped the music to a Tristan-like sexual intensity. Then, at the entrance of Melisande's jealous husband Golaud (Baritone Donald McIntyre), he cut through the sensuality with harsh, jabbing chords, tightening the singing until it strained with barely suppressed violence.

Pointillist Fragments. Such conducting underlines another of Boulez's crucial attitudes on Debussy: "Far from being a historical dead end, his music contains the sources of a great deal of 20th century music." To the ears of his ; contemporaries, Debussy's novelty lay in his exotic harmonies, in his use of the whole-tone scale, and in his impressionistic handling of instrumental color. Actually, Debussy shattered the concept of melody into pointillist fragments, emphasizing such qualities as rhythm and timbre. In each of his mature compositions he invented the form as he went along, thereby making it inseparable from the content of the piece.

It was innovations like these, says Boulez, that make him still contemporary today. Boulez should know. As a leading avant-garde composer himself (Pli selon pli), he is the outstanding exponent of Debussyean principles. "My performances of Debussy are not just historical reconsiderations," he says. "The only masterpieces that are vital today are the ones we can take a modern point of view about. Who can tell you about the reality of Debussy at the turn of the century? Nobody."

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