DEBUSSY Claude (1862 - 1918)

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Lot n° 41
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DEBUSSY Claude (1862 - 1918)
MANUSCRIT autograph signed "Claude Debussy", La Musique. De quelques superstitions et d'un opéra, [1901]; 6 pages in-4, with erasures and corrections (typographical marks in blue pencil). Witty chronicle on music featuring his double Monsieur Croche, and violently criticizing SaintSaëns' last opera. It is the second to last of the eight chronicles Debussy gave to La Revue blanche, from April 1 to December 1, 1901; this one, published on November 15, 1901, was partially collected in the posthumous edition of Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Dorbon aîné et NRF, 1921, chap. II). The manuscript presents some variants with the published text. "I had lingered in campaigns filled with autumn where the magic of the old forests invincibly retained me. From the fall of the golden leaves celebrating the glorious agony of the trees, from the hail of the angelus ordering the fields to fall asleep, a soft and persuasive voice went up advising the most perfect oblivion. The sun was setting by itself without any peasant thinking of taking, in the foreground, a lithographic attitude"... Far from Paris, from the "art discussions" and from "the little artificial and bad fever of the "firsts"", in solitude: "perhaps I have never loved music more than at that time when I never heard about it. It appeared to me in its total beauty and no longer in small overheated and narrow symphonic or lyrical fragments". But it was necessary to return to Paris, where, on the boulevard Malesherbes, he met Mr Croche. This one criticizes the ridiculous institution of the price of Rome: "I admit very well that one facilitates to young people to travel quietly in Italy and even in Germany, but why to restrict the voyage to these two countries? Why, above all, this unfortunate diploma which equates them with fat animals? - Moreover, the academic fl egma, with which these gentlemen of the Institute designate the one among all these young people who will be an artist, strikes me by its ingenuity? What do they know? Are they themselves sure to be artists? Where do they get the right to direct such a mysterious destiny? [...] Let them be given, if they insist on it, a "certificate of high studies", but not a "certificate of imagination", it is uselessly grotesque! Then Mr. Croche evokes the Lamoureux concert where Debussy's music was whistled, who answers that "making music to serve it as well as I could and without other preoccupations, it was logical that it ran the risk of displeasing those who love "a music" to the point of remaining jealously faithful to it in spite of its wrinkles or its blushes!" But Croche points out the responsibility of the artists "who accomplish the sad task of serving and maintaining the public in a deliberate nonchalance... To this misdeed add that these same artists knew how to fight for a moment, just what was needed to conquer their place on the market; but once the sale of their product was assured, they quickly backslide, seeming to ask forgiveness from the public for the trouble it had taken to admit them. Resolutely turning their backs on their youth, they languish in success without ever being able to rise to that glory happily reserved for those whose life, devoted to the search for a world of sensations and forms incessantly renewed, has ended in the joyful belief of having accomplished the true task, those who have had what could be called a 'Last' success if the word 'success' did not become vile next to the word 'glory'. He comes to the performance of the opera Les Barbares by Camille SAINTSAËNS: "it is difficult to keep the respect to an artist who was also full of enthusiasm and search of pure glory... [...] How is it possible to go so completely astray? How did he forget that he had known and imposed the tumultuous genius of Liszt and his religion for the old Bach? Why this sickly need to write operas and to fall from Louis Gallet to Victorien Sardou, propagating the detestable error that one must "do theater", which will never agree with "doing music"... [...] This opera is worse than the others because it is by Saint-Saëns. He owed it to himself and to music even more not to write this ragbag where there is everything, even a farandole whose archaism has been praised; it is a faded echo of this "rue du Caire" which was the success of the 1889 Exhibition, as archaism, it is doubtful. In all of this, a painful search for effect, suggested by a text where there are "words" for the suburbs and situations that naturally make the music ridiculous. The mimicry of the singers, the staging for sardine cans which the Opera Theatre fiercely keeps the tradition, finish the show and any hope of art.
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