Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy contributed a great number of innovations to music which continue to influence composers even today. While he completed only one “conventional” opera, (Pelleas and Melisande) he was almost obsessed with dramatic works, making plans for numerous other operas and settings of plays (including Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher). His inspiration from literature is also evident in his interest in the French poetry of his time, from the Parnassians to the Symbolists. This language of suggestion and symbol, myth (Syrinx, Pelleas), and development typified by a stream-of-consciousness collection and recollection of small, evocative melodies, gives Debussy’s work its dramatic power and emotional heft. His harmonic language created a delicate balance between more familiar “Western” progressions and scales, and materials then more closely associated with Asian music. Debussy was an especially skillful orchestrator, and was very sensitive to the possibilities of particular instruments; his numerous piano works are a benchmark of the keyboard literature. His music has been widely considered as an aesthetic relative to the Impressionist movement in French painting; more likely both fields were responding to larger motivations in the culture of the time. His oeuvre consists of work of all genres, from opera, to chamber music, to orchestral works. Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, France in 1862, and died in Paris of colon cancer in 1918.