The Opera That Never Was: Debussy's Collaboration with Victor Segalen in the Preparation of Orphée

Abstract

T HE relations between composers of opera and their librettists form a chapter apart in the history of music a chapter that can be amusing, or the reverse but the subject is one that has always been of interest to musicologists. Perhaps one of the strangest partnerships was the collaboration of Claude Debussy and his doctor-sailor-poet-explorer friend, Victor Segalen, in the preparation of an opera to which the composer's sole contribution was to suggest improvements in the libretto. No note of music was even put on paper during the three years in which they worked together on the text. The Debussy-Segalen relationship is well known to musicologists, and was the subject of a study compiled by Andre Schaeffner and Mme Annie Joly-Segalen (the librettist's daughter) and published in Monaco about sixteen years ago. It is doubtful whether the book reached a very large public; and on reexamining it recently it occurred to me that the new light it throws upon yet another facet of Debussy's complex personality would be worth a fuller analysis than has hitherto (to my knowledge) been attempted. It was in 1906 that Victor Segalen first came into Debussy's life under somewhat unusual circumstances. The composer was then forty-four and already famous; Segalen was his junior by sixteen years. Having spent the greater part of his life on the high seas as medical officer in the French Navy, he was at that time practically unknown in France, and had few links of any kind with the world