Claude Debussy: music like colours and moonlight
Claude Debussy was a French composer who loved the sound of music itself. He wrote for the piano and for orchestra, and his pieces can sound like moonlight, rain, clouds or the sea.
In this lesson
A Frenchman in Paris
Debussy was born in 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town near Paris, in France. He went to the Paris Conservatoire, a famous music school, when he was ten years old, and he lived in Paris for much of his life.
Debussy became ill in his last years, and he died in Paris in 1918, at the age of 55.
A student with new ideas
Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1872. In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome, a big prize for young composers, with a piece called L'enfant prodigue. The prize let him spend time in Rome.
In 1889, a big world fair was held in Paris. Debussy heard music from Java there, played on a gamelan, an orchestra of gongs and metal bars. Many people think its shimmering sounds gave him new ideas.
In 1902, his opera Pelléas et Mélisande was first shown at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
Music like colours
Many composers build music from clear, strong tunes. Debussy often did something different. He liked soft, shimmering sounds, and chords that glow and drift like colours. Sometimes his chords move together like a line of bells, and sometimes they are more like the quiet sound of water.
People often call this style "impressionist", like some painters in France who painted soft, shimmering pictures of light. That is only a way to describe how the music feels, not an official group, and Debussy himself did not like the label.
Try listening for
These four pieces show how Debussy paints with sound.
- Clair de lune
- Listen for the slow, soft tune that floats gently, like moonlight on water.
- Footsteps in the Snow (Des pas sur la neige)
- Listen for a quiet, slow pattern that keeps coming back like steps, and the music that fades away softly at the end.
- The Engulfed Cathedral (La cathédrale engloutie)
- Listen for deep chords like far-away bells. In an old legend a cathedral rises from the sea, and the music seems to rise and sink again.
- Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
- Listen for the lone flute at the start, and how the orchestra then slowly wakes up around it.
Close your eyes while you listen to Clair de lune and picture moonlight on water. Then draw what you saw, or hum the tune.
Some pieces to know
Debussy wrote piano pieces, orchestra pieces and an opera. Here are four ways to start.
- Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
- A dreamy orchestra piece from 1894, about ten minutes long, inspired by a poem. Its first notes are played by a flute.
- Clair de lune
- A famous slow piano piece from the Suite bergamasque, published in 1905. The title means "moonlight".
- Préludes
- Twenty-four short piano pieces in two books, written between 1909 and 1912. Each one paints a little picture, like snow or sails.
- La mer
- Three pieces for orchestra about the sea, written from 1903 to 1905 and first played in Paris in October 1905. The first printed score had a famous Japanese wave picture on its cover.
Meanwhile, around the world
- 1889The Eiffel Tower opens
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower was built for the world fair, where Debussy heard the gamelan.
- 1893A symphony from the New World
In New York, Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World", was first played.
- 1899Ragtime on paper
In the United States, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" was published and became one of the most famous ragtime pieces.
- 1903The first airplane flights
In North Carolina, in the United States, the Wright brothers made the first flights in a powered airplane, the same years Debussy wrote La mer.
- 1913A ballet that caused a stir
In Paris, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was first danced, with music so new that the audience made a lot of noise.
Piano sound: Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0).