The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (review)

Abstract

Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Edited by Simon Trezise. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [xxviii, 326. ISBN 0-521-65478-5. $70 (hbk.); ISBN 0-521-65478-5. $26 (pbk.).] Music examples, analytical charts, bibliography, index. As a publishing concept, the Cambridge Companion series of music handbooks presents an editorial challenge. Seeking on the one hand to relate basic biographical and historical information about the subject under study (topics thus far include composers, instruments, genres, and institutions) and to offer a review of the literature, it provides on the other hand a forum for new research and new critical perspectives -including those that might, in the dialectical nature of scholarship, stand at odds with established opinion. Caught, in short, between conflicting urges to summarize and innovate, the series runs the risk of falling between two stools and disappointing generalists and specialists alike. Happily, the new Cambridge Companion to edited by Simon Trezise, avoids this pitfall. scholars appear to be in basic agreement about the nature of the composer's achievement, with the result that even new research tends to reinforce received judgments. Such is certainly the case here, where the most novel items constitute refinements of, rather than challenges to, existing viewpoints. Not that contributors offer no difference of opinion. unusual historical position on the cusp of nineteenth-century traditionalism and twentieth-century modernism effectively ensures that any consensus is itself somewhat elastic; accordingly, we find considerable variation over such questions as artistic influence (impressionism, symbolism, or art nouveau?) and stylislic orientation (traditionalist or modernist?). Such a range of opinion, testifying to protean nature and appeal, lends the book a synoptic quality and makes it a useful introduction to the composer. volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 (Man, Musician and Culture) offers an introduction to the composer and his times, and begins with an admirable biographical overview, Debussy the Man, by Robert Orledge. Traversing well-known primary and secondary sources, Orledge emphasizes the dark side of personality and makes a persuasive case for the sinister undercurrents thai lurk beneath [the music's] surface, and which contribute so much to its mystery and profundity (p. 23). Barbara Kelly's essay, Debussy's Parisian Affiliations, sets up an opposition between the radical symbolist poets and the conservative musical establishment (the Conservatoire, the Societe Nationale), and proposes that involvement with both embodied a tension never completely resolved, perhaps, until his championship of early French music later in his career. suggestion meshes well with Deirdre Donnellon's Debussy as Musician and Critic, a survey of the prose writings and published interviews, not least because both investigations demonstrate, to a degree rarely discussed, the importance of French nationalism to aesthetic and to his critical reception. Part 2 (Musical Explorations) constitutes a loose group of essays on different aspects of music and career. David Grayson's Debussy on Stage discusses the composer's many dramatic projects, finished and unfinished, and usefully describes forgotten works like Zuleima and Rodrigue et Chimene in detail. Better-known works like L'enfant prodigue are engagingly placed in context-the politics surrounding the Prix de Rome are particularly interesting -and even that old war horse Pelleas et Melisande is given a fresh reading. Roger Nichols's essay, The Prosaic Debussy, considers the nine settings of nonmetrical texts that the composer made in the 1890s, possibly as a tune-up for Pelleas, and concludes that such verse inspired him to write freer vocal lines but also, as a counterbalancing measure, to provide less rhythmically adventurous piano parts. …