DEBUSSY Claude (1862-1918). MANUSCRIPT autograph... - Lot 1117 - Ader

Lot 1117
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7000 - 8000 EUR
DEBUSSY Claude (1862-1918). MANUSCRIPT autograph... - Lot 1117 - Ader
DEBUSSY Claude (1862-1918). MANUSCRIPT autograph signed " Claude Debussy ", La Musique. De quelques superstitions et d'un opéra, [1901]; 6 pages in-4, with erasures and corrections ( blue pencil typograph marks ). Spiritual chronicle of music featuring his double Monsieur Croche, and violently criticizing Saint-Saëns' last opera. This is the penultimate of the eight chronicles Debussy gave to La Revue blanche, from 1 April to 1 December 1901; the latter, published on 15 November 1901, was partially collected in the posthumous edition of Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Dorbon aîné and NRF, 1921, chap. II). The manuscript presents some variants with the published text. "I had lingered in autumn-filled countryside where the magic of the old forests invincibly held me back. From the fall of the golden leaves celebrating the glorious agony of the trees, from the hail angelus ordering the fields to sleep, rose a soft and persuasive voice advising the most perfect oblivion. The sun was setting on its own without any peasant thinking of taking, in the foreground, a lithographic attitude " . Far from Paris, from the "art discussions" and the "little artificial and bad fever of the 'firsts'", in solitude: "perhaps I 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, narrow symphonic or lyrical fragments". But he had to return to Paris, where, on Boulevard Malesherbes, he met Monsieur Croche. The latter criticized the ridiculous institution of the Prix de Rome: "I admit very well that it is easy for young people to travel quietly in Italy and even Germany, but why restrict the trip to these two countries? Above all, why this unfortunate diploma that assimilates them to fat animals? - Moreover, the academic phlegm with which these gentlemen of the Institute point out which of all these young people will be an artist strikes me by its ingenuit
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