When I interviewed Paul Lewis earlier this week, I felt a bit tongue-tied. He’s one of my favorite living pianists. What he does sounds so simple: his playing is persuasive, captivating, as if the score were sounding out unimpeded by any intermediaries. He revels in the beauteous potential of the piano, yet never makes a fetish of this. Everything he does is in service to the music. In a world consumed by vainglory, Lewis’ introspection and scrupulousness are all the more precious. You can read my interview with him here.
One of the things that Lewis said that stayed with me was his desire in middle age to head in a new creative path by returning home. Which led me to dwell on the Debussy on his Sunday afternoon program at Zipper Hall.
“Pleasure is the only law”, the composer famously retorted to one of his teachers. (Ernest Guiraud, I believe?) Perhaps that’s why my mind, more responsive to the recognizable architectural forms of music from the Austro-German lineage, struggled for years to fully appreciate Debussy. There was no difficulty in enjoying pieces like Clair de lune, the Arabesques, and Rêverie, which I first discovered via Rudolf Firkušný’s elegant Capitol recordings around 30 years ago. Pélleas et Mélisande was also an instant revelation. What proved more difficult for me to understand was the pleasure Debussy enjoyed from freedom of form, not just sensuousness of sound, and his surprising, idiosyncratic late rapprochement with the traditions he had long rebelled against. Where he would’ve headed next after his final proto-neoclassical works, in a transformed postwar France, is anybody’s guess. There are few greater musical “what ifs?”.
In 2014, when I read Eric Frederick Jensen’s biography on Debussy, the impression I got was of a composer whose visionary scope exceeded the span of time he was granted — he was dead barely past the mid-point of his 50s. Debussy’s mind brimmed with fantastic ideas, many of which, had they been realized, would’ve likely been as epochal as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, La Mer, and his single completed opera.
As I turned the pages of Jensen’s book, the Debussy that emerged therein was disconcertingly familiar, even contemporary. With each success, each rung climbed on the ladder of public esteem, his life was increasingly involved in personal dramas: love affairs, the public polemic over his divorce, bills and more bills. Reading about his struggle against time and a quotidian life greedy for his attentions left me feeling profoundly sorry for him; it also brought me much closer to his music.
Bruno Leonardo Gelber once said in a recent interview (the exact one escapes me at the moment) that he felt sorry for the youth of today, who, enmeshed in a society of distraction, very rarely have the opportunity to realize themselves. Had Debussy lived today, there would be no Debussy to speak of, at least none that deserved to be remembered by posterity. So that Debussy managed to create at all — in spite of tawdry personal dilemmas and endless hustling in search of material security that he never quite secured — is a miracle for which we should all be thankful.
Debussy’s life might even, perhaps, be a source of edifying solace for all of us in our harried 21st century.