The Composer as Critic

...On Stage THE COMPOSER AS CRITIC BY JOHN SIMON This is a tribute to a man who, although he disclaimed being a critic, wrote dazzling snatches of criticism, and who, although principally a composer of pure music, wrote one of the landmarks of the musical theater, perhaps the very one that turned it away from opera in the previously accepted sense to lyric drama Indeed, his may well be the greatest contribution to theater thus far by an operatic composer I refer to Claude Debussy, whose music criticism—which has, I think, considerable relevance to dramatic criticism—was collected and introduced in French by Francois Lesure, it has now been translated into English by Richard Langham Smith as Debussy on Music (Knopf, 353 pp , $15 00), complete with further annotations The notes contain a good many quotations from letters and reminiscences, shedding additional light on Debussy's opinions From 1901, when he was 39, almost to his death in 1918, Debussy wrote about music and musical events for various publications—not so much to give vent to any compelling love of criticism, as to explain his new musical ideas and propagate his kind of music He began with an admirably modest and useful disclaimer "I prefer to keep to 'impressions,' for only these can give me the freedom to keep my feelings immune from parasitic esthetics " This was particularly remarkable coming from a Frenchman, since France has had, through the ages, no more thriving industry than the manufacture of theories of art (or philosophy, or science), new models make their appearance every few years, to be exported worldwide with depressing regularity Yet here was a Frenchman of genius proposing not to evolve any kind of theory of criticism, and in the next 15 years Debussy gallantly abided by his promise But before we advert to Debussy the critic, we must briefly examine his contribution to musical theater—his steering it away from the theatrical to the dramatic Of course, no one man, great as he may be, can be said to have done that singlehandedly There was a false dawn of the movement in the work ot Richard Wagner, but his operas, lor all their panoply ot leitmotifs and talk of Gesaintkunshwii, remained constructed aiound old theatrical notions ot elaborate, uolent plots that stop in mid-action for characters to pour out grandiose emotions in set pieces—anas Debussy, who had been impressed by Wagner at first, turned more and more away from him "Wagner, if one may be permitted a little of the grandiloquence that suits the man, was a beautiful sunset that has been mistaken for a sunrise " In that direction, there was nothing more to be pursued The new idea—to be crystallized by Debussy—was to make opera more realistic and psychological, more about the way people express their feelings and, to the extent that music can encompass them, their thought processes That required making opera more like a play, more dramatic, less of a grand spectacle, less theatrical Different composers arrived at this in different ways The Slavs did it by basing their music and singing in the rhythms and cadences of popular speech Mous-sorgsky was the first successful practitioner, especially in Boris Godunov (1874) as he wrote it, not as Rimsky-Korsakov was later to prettify it Significantly, too, the libretto closely followed a play (by Pushkin), which was to become the strategy of most of these composers setting to music a play that either did not have long monologues or could be stripped of them Debussy was a lifelong champion of Moussorgsky One evening he told a friend, "Ah' You are going to Boris You will find all of Pelleas there " But there were still anas in Boris Godunov In 1893, old Verdi produced his last opera, Falstaff, based on The Mem Wives of Windsor, with an unusually low ana content, and music that very freely, often jocularly, followed the contours of speech Debussy probably did not know this score, tor earlier Verdi, such as La Tra\iata, he had scant use "There are a tew pleasures and here and there real passion "Yet "it's all just facade," and "the esthetics ot this type of art are certainly-founded, for real life is not best expressed in songs " It is in this sense that we must take Debussy's boldest paradox "Melody, if I dare say so, is antilyrical It cannot express the varying states of the soul, and of life " Lyrical, as in lyric drama, clearly meant for him a kind of psychoreal-lsm He said that m his music drama Pelleas et Mehsande (1902), which closely adheres to the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, he had "tried to obey a law of beauty that seems notably ignored when it comes to dramatic music the characters of this opera try to sing like real people, and not in an arbitrary language made up of worn-out cliches " And, of course, there are no anas in Pelleas The nearest thing is Arkel's monologue in Act IV, but even that is only the rambling chatter of an old man, musically halfway between an arioso and reatativo stromentato Debussy had created the ana-less opera, the music drama of the future A year later, Janacek completed the first version of Jenufa, again based on a play, and nearly ana-less Soon they were to come thick and fast Strauss' Salome (1905), Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (1911), Prokofiev's The Gambler (1917) The new mode was entrenched What Debussy meant by characters singing like real people was not so much espousing the rhythms of the French language (they are, in any case, not particularly pronounced compared to those of, say, the Slavic tongues) He meant, rather, a vocal line that aimed to convey the rhythm of feelings and thoughts, and orchestral writing that would not simply duplicate it, but expand on it, probe beyond what the voices uttered This makes sound dramatic sense, as befits a man who had a keen interest in every kind of theatrical event, from the circus to the music hall, from clown shows to Greek drama Debussy proposed "uniting the Theatre Populaire with the Opera Populaire by going back to the theatrical ideas of the ancient Greeks Let us rediscover tragedy, and enhance its primitive musical accompaniment with all the resources of the modern orchestra and a chorus of innumerable voices' Let us not forget the possibilities of a combined use of pantomime and dance, heightened by an extreme use of lighting effects to render it more suitable for a large body of people One could learn much from the entertainments given by Javanese princes, where the command and seduction of a language without words is taken to its furthest extremes It is the pity of our theater that we have limited it to verbal means of expression " Elsewhere he even advocated making use of the cinema to bolster symphonic music From such ideas and from Debussy's praise of outdoor spectacles, direct paths lead to Piscator and Reinhardt, but also to more recent concepts of nonverbal theater Above all, Debussy's criticism was full of barbs against the conventional 19th-century opera About the Pans Opera, he wrote in 1901 that its "business is noise " In 1913, he returned to the theme, comparing the old minstrels favorably to opera "in which there is certainly more music, that is to say, it makes more noise, this inconvenience is compensated for by the use of lavish scenery " Much in the spirit of Brecht and Grotowski, Debussy made fun of opulent decor "M Jusseaume's scenery has been called Shakespearean But don't you think that Shakespeare would have gone berserk if he could have seen the pole that, in the theater of his youth, bore the simple indication, 'A Forest,' transformed into one of the luxurious forests for which M Jus-seaume is famous9" Economy is the thing, and directness, relevance About a now forgotten historic opera, Debussy writes, "Its subject matter is the assassination of the Due de Guise—not one of the better moments in French history, and it doesn't seem to me to do much good to aggravate the situation by setting it to music " In an opera by Vincent d'lndy he ridicules "the need to explain and underline everything," and wonders wryly about overelab-orated secondary characters, "What is the good of so much music for a customs officer9" About Saint-Saens' Henry VIII, he remarks, "It is, perhaps, the last historical opera of all time At least, we must hope so " And he continues, with sublime irony "If Henry VIII has to sing cavatinas that are rather too sugary, believe me, it's because Saint-Saens wanted them to be so and understood why Everybody knows that the most bloodthirsty tiger is still capable of softening a child's heart These all too sugary cavatinas are thus scrupulously based on historical fact, for the bloodthirstiness of Henry VIII is well-known " Debussy recognized the consanguinity between the modern temper and Offenbach, whom he praised for "rediscovering] hidden treasure the high art of farce " Simultaneously, in extremely un-French but very modern fashion, he deplored a comic opera by Claude Terrasse for remaining "within the bounds of good taste to the detriment of the laughter " His rebellion against the grand, the proper and the stodgy led Debussy to precomze opera buffa, and, in his very last piece of criticism (December 1916), to declare, "let us concentrate on operetta " But it did not make him forsake his high esthetic tenets "Beauty has always been taken by some as a secret insult," he wrote in 1913 "People instinctively feel they need to take revenge on her, defiling the ideal that humiliates them We should be grateful to those few critics who do not hate her " Debussy was one of them, keenly aware even of the importance of physical beauty on stage He could write a lengthy tribute to a singer's comeliness and grace, culminating m a paean to her violet eyes Of another singer, he remarked that she sang "with a fine solid tone, while her arms testified to the excellency of the 'San-dow method '" (Sandow was the Charles Atlas of his time ) Truly, a critic after my own heart...