<i>Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism.</i> Alexandra Kieffer

How did fin de siècle music critics make sense of Claude Debussy’s music? This simple question lies at the heart of Alexandra Kieffer’s remarkable book, a critical analysis of the various discourses that allowed for the emergence of an entire branch of musical thought known as ‘debussysme’. Whereas debussysme was developed throughout the first decade of the twentieth century as a sympathetic response to works like Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Kieffer examines how its articulation was also informed by various branches of artistic, aesthetic, psychological, scientific, and philosophical inquiry. She convincingly reveals that the process of coming to grips with the spectacular novelty of Debussy’s music relied increasingly on a ‘series of engagements with changing ideas of the human person’ (p. 11). Indeed, a primary theme of this book, as well as one of its fundamental contributions, is to show that the critical writing of debussystes about music and musical listening increasingly valorized both the discursive and experiential realms. Music critics not only understood but felt something new and destabilizing in the music of Debussy; their writings sought to articulate not only how something like Pelléas et Mélisande could be understood in terms of the traditions and conventions of French music and culture, but also how it stimulated unconventional, even unintelligible, somatic experiences of listening. Kieffer’s project therefore is to challenge some pervasive either/or dualisms by showing that in response to Debussy’s music, writers were often compelled to acknowledge both the gnostic mysteries and the drastic sensations that works like Pelléas elicited in them as listeners. But the book does not simply provide an account of musical commentary; rather it positions these thinkers into a larger context of intellectual debate at the fin de siècle and beyond. Interestingly, to reveal how these ideas had permeated the discourses of French musical life, Keiffer provides a transnational context for understanding the French evolution of musical thought, engaging, for example, with psychological developments from across the Channel or with musico-theoretical expertise from across the Rhine (all of which had been duly translated in France). Furthermore, while offering close readings of a broad swathe of critical commentary on Debussy, Kieffer substantially improves our appreciation of the contributions of a number of critics, devoting entire chapters to Jean Marnold and Louis Laloy, whose writings, when taken together, ‘map the essential contours of the intellectual landscape of debussysme’ (p. 21). Kieffer’s book quietly affirms that these writings, far from being the hurried scribblings of journalistic hacks, propelled French music criticism on a pathway towards a nascent musicological legitimacy, offering a prototype for latter twentieth-century conceptualizations of the relationships between history, science, criticism, aesthetic experience, musical conventions, and sonic materiality. The book is divided into five chapters. The first (‘Wagnérisme and the Aesthetic of Sentiment’) is concerned with re-assessing the critical contexts that preceded the premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, particularly that of Symbolist and pro-Wagnerian thought as it was articulated most prominently in the Revue wagnérienne during the 1880s. Kieffer’s discussion focuses on how critics associated with that journal articulated the relationship between music and emotion. She shows that, for figures like Téodor de Wyzewa and Édouard Dujardin, this relationship was being discursively reconceived during this period through the aesthetic prism of realism. Showing their indebtedness to Schopenhauerian philosophy, French readings of British psychology (by way of Théodule-Armand Ribot and Paul Janet), and the example of Wagner, these men re-conceived realism as an aesthetic category that could also incorporate interiority and emotion. Kieffer’s untangling of these strands of thought serves to establish a foil and assert a fundamental point: that Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande did not, in fact, constitute a fulfilment of Symbolism; and that the debussysme engendered by this opera ultimately came to stand for a completely different set of musical and aesthetic values (p. 27). Whereas Wagnerian Symbolists viewed one of music’s primary roles as allowing for the depiction of emotions—examined here through the polysemic French term ‘sentiment’—emerging debussysme focused on how Pelléas elicited ‘sensations’, understood as physical or emotional responses to a broadly conceived ‘music-as-sound’, one that incorporated both traditional musical elements, as well as effects akin to what fin de siècle critics heard as ‘noise’. This idea is further explored in chapter 2, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande and the Aesthetic of Sensation’. The conceptual heart of the book, this chapter shows that while individual critics were ill-equipped to account fully for the novelty of Debussy’s musical approach, taken together the critical record provides a catalogue of ways that this music, and music in general, could part ways with tradition and propose new and dynamic relationships with listeners. Critics articulated this novelty around a number of key concepts—exteriority, impressionism, noise—which constituted a splintering away from Wagnerian ideas of opera understood in relationship to interiority, symbolism, and traditional sonic conceptions of music. Kieffer is quick to remind that her reading is not about establishing who was right or wrong in their assessments of Debussy’s music, but rather to highlight and probe the various discursive strands that emerged from these critical writings. Whereas the reactions of writers like Émile Vuillermoz, Pierre Lalo, Camille Mauclair, and Gaston Carraud may be positioned on the vanguard of emergent debussysme, their ideas were nonetheless indebted to long-standing conventions of musical thought from which none were capable of entirely extricating themselves. Take, for example, their considerations of Debussy’s use of the orchestra in Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussystes noted that the composer avoided using the orchestra to represent the emotional states of characters and opted to reserve such expressions for moments of lyric declamation (p. 97). Debussy’s orchestra was seen as ‘augmenting’ (p. 101) the expressive content of these vocal utterances as well as suggesting a depiction not of interiority, but rather of the external world in which the characters exist. Seen this way, Debussy’s orchestra served as a musical depiction of material reality, a painterly approach that naturally encouraged the use of the term ‘Impressionism’ to define this aspect of his compositional technique. Yet this term was used both in pejorative and positive ways. Despite the apparent ‘blurriness’ of Debussy’s orchestral language, it was nonetheless capable of creating powerful effects—sensations and impressions that Vuillermoz for one described as participating in the ‘evolution of nervous sensibility’. (p. 112) The presence of ‘noise’ further aligned Debussy’s orchestra with the real world of nature and objects and reinforced the idea that the composer’s aesthetic was committed to faithfully representing elements of the material world while still retaining—as critics like Lalo maintained—strong links to music’s historical logic of self-referentiality. Chapters 3 and 4 each focus on a prominent voice in the establishment of debussysme—Jean Marnold (né Morland) and Louis Laloy, cofounders of the Mercure musical, launched in 1905. Prior to this, Morland had written for the Courrier musical and, significantly, the Mercure de France, a journal known for its support of the avant-garde. Kieffer shows that, with regard to Debussy, Morland’s primary aim was to assert that—contrary to what the composer’s detractors claimed—his harmonic language could be justified by the laws of natural resonance (p. 138). Morland accepted Debussy’s famous ninth chords as consonants, conceptualizing dissonance in a manner that strongly recalls Helmholtz’s understanding of listening as historically contingent and predicated on the changing relationship of the human ear to empirical realities (p. 147). Kieffer shows how Marnol’s ideas gradually became hallmarks of debussyste thinking and informed defences of Debussy’s music, which saw it not as the expression of personal idiosyncrasies but rather as an historical inevitability. Louis Laloy eventually subscribed to Marnold’s claim that Debussy’s harmonies could be defended as natural in relationship to the harmonic series, but his defence of the composer was generally articulated along differing lines. For this critic—a former student of the École normale, and graduate of the Sorbonne with a PhD in music history—Debussy’s music was also ‘natural’, but understood so in relation to an ensemble of national and racial essentialisms. He understood Debussy’s harmonic language in relationship to the modality of plainchant, an affinity, he argues, that Debussy cultivated as a result of ‘the continuity of sensibility rooted in the nature of French spirit’ (p. 196). This form of racial essentialism became increasingly attenuated as Laloy’s ideas about Debussy developed during the first decade of the century. As Kieffer shows, Laloy’s project was to further refine and defend the natural in relationship to Debussy, positing that the composer jettisoned convention and learned artifices as a means to reveal music in all of its simplicity. As Laloy wrote in his article ‘Claude Debussy et la simplicité en musique’, Revue musicale, 4/4 (15 Feb. 1904), 106–11, the composer ‘adheres to the very nature of things, not to the rules of a genre’ (pp. 108–9; quoted on p. 206). Ultimately, Marnold’s view that Debussy’s music constituted a historical inevitability contrasted with Laloy’s idea that it actually rejected history. But, as Kieffer outlines, both of their readings of Debussy’s contribution presume that his compositional breakthroughs did not need to be reconceived in relation to pre-existing ideas of music. Rather, they demanded a reconceptualization that involved much more than simply updating history: a ‘true’ understanding of Debussy meant taking into account the historical, cultural, and even somatic situatedness of contemporary listeners. In chapter 5 (‘Rewriting Modernism’) Kieffer discusses how the articulation of debussysme impacted Debussy’s own understanding of his music. She charts the composer’s retrospective thinking about Pelléas et Mélisande, establishing that Debussy was clearly influenced by debussyste discourse and nuancing the established idea that Debussy’s growing refutation of Wagner throughout the century’s first decade must be read through a nationalist lens. What is apparent from Kieffer’s rendering is that debussyste criticism, in its rejection of Symbolist ideas, encouraged the composer to experiment more freely with compositional approaches meant to elicit sensation and to reserve a greater sonic space for noises. La Mer emerges as an example of such an approach, as Debussy’s entire musical aesthetic became more attentive to ‘the thousand noises of nature all around us’ (Claude Debussy, ‘La Musique d’aujourd’hui et celle de demain’, [interview in] Comoedia, 4 (Nov. 1909)). Kieffer also examines growing resistance to the debussyste paradigm by writers like Jean Lorrain, Charles-Francis Caillard, and José Bérys, who maintained that Debussy’s approach, as a result of its emphasis on sensation, was superficial in its aesthetics, and that its defenders were motivated purely by cultural snobbism. This chapter concludes with considerations about the writings of Henri Bergson and Vladimir Jankélévitch, whose reading of Debussy’s music, with its interest in mystery and the ineffable, is at a remove from early debussystes while all the same participating in its intellectual history. This book assumes a specialist audience already largely apprised of Debussy research and intimately familiar with Pelléas et Mélisande and, to a lesser degree, La Mer, and their associated bibliographies. The wide range of inquiry, and the close readings of particular texts, demand considerable commitment from the reader; while exact and elegant, the prose could have benefitted from more strategic sign-posting and effective concluding gestures. Expansive sentence lengths and over-indulgent footnotes could have profited from judicious pruning. Excellent translations of the most important quotations are accompanied by the original in the text. However, many primary sources are not listed in the bibliography and only referenced in the footnotes. For example, the name of Jean Marnold, a major figure across the entire volume, is not even cited in the bibliography. Given the centrality of Pelléas et Mélisande to the discussion, it is surprising that the dust jacket features a reproduction of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanawaga (itself reproduced on the cover of La Mer). But perhaps Alexandra Kieffer’s choice to foreground this wave is suggestive of something else: the force of ideas as they course, gain momentum, and subside through history, and of which this book, through its analysis of debussysme, provides such an intelligent and thought-provoking assessment.

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