Claude Debussy

FRENCH COMPOSER

WRITTEN BY: Edward Lockspeiser

LAST UPDATED: Aug 18, 2018 See Article History

Alternative Title: Achille-Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy, in full Achille-Claude Debussy, (born August 22, 1862, Saint-
Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25, 1918, Paris), French composer whose works were a seminal force in the
music of the 20th century. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed in
many respects the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers of his time aspired. His major
works include Clair de lune (“Moonlight,” in Suite bergamasque, 1890–1905), Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894;
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), and La Mer (1905; “The Sea”).

Early Period

Debussy showed a gift as a pianist by the age of nine. He was encouraged by Madame Mauté de Fleurville, who was
associated with the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, and in 1873 he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied
the piano and composition, eventually winning in 1884 the Grand Prix de Rome with his cantata L’Enfant prodigue (The
Prodigal Child).

Debussy’s youth was spent in circumstances of great turbulence. He was almost overwhelmed by situations of great
extremes, both material and emotional. While living with his parents in a poverty-stricken suburb of Paris, he
unexpectedly came under the patronage of a Russian millionairess, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, who engaged him
to play duets with her and her children. He traveled with her to her palatial residences throughout Europe during the
long summer vacations at the Conservatory. In Paris during this time he fell in love with a singer, Blanche Vasnier, the
beautiful young wife of an architect; she inspired many of his early works. It is clear that he was torn by influences from
many directions; these stormy years, however, contributed to the sensitivity of his early style.

This early style is well illustrated in one of Debussy’s best-known compositions, Clair de lune. The title refers to a folk
song that was the conventional accompaniment of scenes of the love-sick Pierrot in the French pantomime, and indeed
the many Pierrot-like associations in Debussy’s later music, notably in the orchestral work Images (1912) and the Sonata
for Cello and Piano (1915; originally titled Pierrot fâché avec la lune [“Pierrot Vexed by the Moon”]), show his
connections with the circus spirit that also appeared in works by other composers, notably the ballet Petrushka (1911)
by Igor Stravinsky and Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg.
Claude Debussy

"Debussy" redirects here. For other uses, see Debussy (disambiguation).

Debussy in 1908

Achille-Claude Debussy[n 1] (French: [aʃil klod dəbysi];[3] 22 August 1862 – 25

March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he
rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to
be admitted at the age of ten to France's leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He originally
studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the
Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40
before achieving international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande.

Debussy's orchestral works include Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes (1897–1899)
and Images (1905–1912). His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against Wagner and the German
musical tradition. He regarded the classical symphony as obsolete and sought an alternative in his "symphonic
sketches", La mer (1903–1905). His piano works include two books of Préludes and two of Études. Throughout
his career he wrote mélodies based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own. He was greatly influenced
by the Symbolist poetic movement of the later 19th century. A small number of works, including the early La
Damoiselle élue and the late Le Martyre de saint Sébastien have important parts for chorus. In his final years,
he focused on chamber music, completing three of six planned sonatas for different combinations of
instruments.

With early influences including Russian and far-eastern music, Debussy developed his own style of harmony and
orchestral colouring, derided–and unsuccessfully resisted–by much of the musical establishment of the day. His
works have strongly influenced a wide range of composers including Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, George
Benjamin, and the jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. Debussy died from cancer at his home in Paris at the age
of 55 after a composing career of a little more than 30 years.
Maurice Ravel
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This article is about the composer. For other uses, see Ravel (disambiguation).

Ravel in 1925

Joseph Maurice Ravel (/rəˈvɛl/; French: [ʒozɛf mɔʁis ʁavɛl]; 7 March 1875 – 28
December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often
associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude
Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s
Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not
well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the
conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements
of baroque, neoclassicismand, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-
known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. He made some orchestral
arrangements of other composers' music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the
best known.
As a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his
works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas
and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a
piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally
difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in
performance.
Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public.
From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his
works; others were made under his supervision.

Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, 18 kilometres (11 mi) from the Spanish border.
His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born
in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border.[1][n 1] His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in
Madrid. In 19th-century terms, Joseph had married beneath his status – Marie was illegitimate and barely literate –
but the marriage was a happy one.[4] Some of Joseph's inventions were successful, including an early internal
combustion engine and a notorious circus machine, the "Whirlwind of Death", an automotive loop-the-loop that was
a major attraction until a fatal accident at Barnum and Bailey's Circus in 1903.
Maurice Ravel
FRENCH COMPOSER

Alternative Title: Joseph-Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel, in full Joseph-Maurice Ravel, (born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France—
died December 28, 1937, Paris), French composer of Swiss-Basque descent, noted
for his musical craftsmanship and perfection of form and style in such works
as Boléro (1928), Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899; Pavane for a Dead
Princess), Rapsodie espagnole (1907), the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (first performed
1912), and the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925; The Child and the
Enchantments).

Ravel was born in a village near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, of a Swiss father and a Basque mother. His family background
was an artistic and cultivated one, and the young Maurice received every encouragement from his father when his
talent for music became apparent at an early age. In 1889, at 14, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained
until 1905. During this period he composed some of his best known works, including the Pavane for a Dead
Princess, the Sonatine for piano, and the String Quartet. All these works, especially the two latter, show the astonishing
early perfection of style and craftsmanship that are the hallmarks of Ravel’s entire oeuvre. He is one of the rare
composers whose early works seem scarcely less mature than those of his maturity. Indeed, his failure at the
Conservatoire, after three attempts, to win the coveted Prix de Rome for composition(the works he submitted were
judged too “advanced” by ultraconservative members of the jury) caused something of a scandal. Indignant protests
were published, and liberal-minded musicians and writers, including the musicologist and novelist Romain Rolland,
supported Ravel. As a result, the director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, was forced to resign, and his place was
taken by the composer Gabriel Fauré, with whom Ravel had studied composition.

Ravel was in no sense a revolutionary musician. He was for the most part content to work within the established formal
and harmonic conventions of his day, still firmly rooted in tonality—i.e., the organization of music around focal tones.
Yet, so very personal and individual was his adaptation and manipulation of the traditional musical idiom that it would
be true to say he forged for himself a language of his own that bears the stamp of his personality as unmistakably as any
work of Bach or Chopin. While his melodies are almost always modal (i.e., based not on the conventional
Western diatonic scale but on the old Greek Phrygian and Dorian modes), his harmonies derive their often somewhat
acid flavour from his fondness for “added” notes and unresolved appoggiaturas, or notes extraneous to the chord that
are allowed to remain harmonically unresolved. He enriched the literature of the piano by a series of masterworks,
ranging from the early Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and the Miroirs of 1905 to the formidable Gaspard de la
nuit (1908), Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), and the two piano concerti (1931). Of his purely orchestral works,
the Rapsodie espagnole and Boléroare the best known and reveal his consummate mastery of the art of
instrumentation. But perhaps the highlights of his career were his collaboration with the Russian impresario Serge
Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he composed the masterpiece Daphnis et Chloé, and with the French writer Colette,
who was the librettist of his best known opera, L’Enfant et les sortilèges. The latter work gave Ravel an opportunity of
doing ingenious and amusing things with the animals and inanimate objects that come to life in this tale of bewitchment
and magic in which a naughty child is involved. His only other operatic venture had been his brilliantly satirical L’Heure
espagnole (first performed 1911). As a songwriter Ravel achieved great distinction with his imaginative Histoires
naturelles, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, and Chansons madécasses.
Arnold Schoenberg
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Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (/ˈʃɜːrnbɜːrɡ/, US also /ˈʃoʊn-

/; German: [ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k] ( listen); 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an
Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He
was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second
Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music,
because they were modernist, atonal and what even Paul Hindemith called "sonic orgies" and "decadent
intellectual efforts" (Petropoulos 2014, 94–95). He emigrated to the United States in 1934.
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of
20th-century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations have
consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it.
Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed
German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations
in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of
20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential
compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also
coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of
developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.
Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton
Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Roberto
Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices,
including the formalization of compositional method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think
analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views
of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century musicologists and critics,
including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur
Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann,
Arnold Schoenberg
AMERICAN COMPOSER

Alternative Titles: Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg, Arnold Franz

Walter Schoenberg, Arnold Schönberg

Arnold Schoenberg, in full Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg, Schoenberg also

spelled Schönberg, (born September 13, 1874, Vienna, Austria—died July 13,
1951, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), Austrian-American composer who
created new methods of musical composition involving atonality,
namely serialism and the 12-tone row. He was also one of the most-
influential teachers of the 20th century; among his most-significant pupils were Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Early Life

Schoenberg’s father, Samuel, owned a small shoe shop in the Second, then predominantly Jewish, district, of Vienna.
Neither Samuel nor his wife, Pauline (née Nachod), was particularly musical, although, like most Austrians of their
generation, they enjoyed music. There were, however, two professional singers in the family—Heinrich Schoenberg, the
composer’s brother, and Hans Nachod, his cousin. Nachod, a gifted tenor, was the first to sing the role of Waldemar in
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (first performed 1900–01).

Before he was nine years old, Schoenberg had begun composing little pieces for two violins, which he played with his
teacher or with a cousin. A little later, when he acquired a viola-playing classmate, he advanced to the writing of
string trios for two violins and viola. His meeting with Austrian musician and physician Oskar Adler (later the famed
astrologer and author of The Testament of Astrology) was a decisive one. Adler encouraged him to learn the cello so
that a group of friends could play string quartets. Schoenberg promptly began composing quartets, although he had to
wait for the “S” volume of Meyers Grosses Konversations-Lexikon (an encyclopaedia that his family was buying on the
installment plan) to find out how to construct the sonata-form first movement of such works.

Schoenberg’s father died in 1890. To help the family finances, the young man worked as a bank clerk until 1895. During
that time he came to know Alexander von Zemlinsky, a rising young composer and conductor of the amateur orchestra
Polyhymnia in which Schoenberg played cello. The two became close friends, and Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg instruction
in harmony, counterpoint, and composition. That resulted in Schoenberg’s first publicly performed work, the String
Quartet in D Major (1897). Highly influenced by the style of Johannes Brahms, the quartet was well received by Viennese
audiences during the 1897–98 and 1898–99 concert seasons.

First Major Works

A great step forward took place in 1899, when Schoenberg composed the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured
Night”), a highly romantic piece of program music (unified by a nonmusical story or image). It was based on a poem of
the same name by Richard Dehmel and was the first piece of program music written for such an ensemble. Its
programmatic nature and its harmonies outraged conservative program committees. Consequently, it was not
performed until 1903, when it was violently rejected by the public. Since then it has become one of Schoenberg’s most-
popular compositions, both in its original form and in Schoenberg’s later versions for string orchestra.
Igor Stravinsky
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"Stravinsky" redirects here. For other uses, see Stravinsky (disambiguation).

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs;

the patronymic is Fyodorovich and the family name is Stravinsky.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (/strəˈvɪnski/; Russian: И́горь Фёдорович

Страви́нский, IPA: [ˈiɡərʲ ˈfʲɵdərəvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj]; 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian-born
composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of
the 20th century.
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with
three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the
way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's
enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase"
which continued with works such as Renard, the Soldier's Tale and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a
period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional
musical forms (concerto grosso, fugueand symphony), drawing on earlier styles, especially from the 18th century. In
the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his
earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and
clarity of form, and of instrumentation.
Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum, a suburb of Saint Petersburg, the Russianimperial
capital,[1] and was brought up in Saint Petersburg.[2] His parents were Fyodor Stravinsky (1843–1902), a well-
known bass at the Kiev opera house and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and Anna (née Kholodovsky;
1854-1939), a native of Kiev, one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Kiev Ministry of Estates. Fyodor
was "descended from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners."[3] It is believed that Stravinsky’s
ancestry is traceable back to the 17th and 18th centuries, to the bearers of the Soulima and Strawinski Coat of
Arms.[4] Stravinsky's family branch most likely came from Stravinskas, polonized Lithuanian (or Belarussian) land
owners, and nobles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. According to Stravinsky himself, his family originally had a
Soulima-Stravinsky surname, and the name "Stravinsky" originated from the word "Strava", which is one of the
variants of the Streva Riverin Lithuania
Igor Stravinsky
RUSSIAN COMPOSER

Alternative Title: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky, in full Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, (born June 5 [June 17, New Style],
1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 6,
1971, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary
impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and
whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long
working life. (Click here for an audio excerpt from Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for
Clarinet.)
Life And Career
Stravinsky’s father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the musical, theatrical,
and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on the composer. Nevertheless his
own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given lessons in piano and music theory. But then he
studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of
his vocation for musical composition. In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-
Korsakov(whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to
take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional
academic training.
Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer’s mentor, discussing
each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil’s music performed. Several of
Stravinsky’s student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, and two of his works for
orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr
Pushkin—were played by the Court Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but
brilliant orchestral piece, the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg at a concert attended by the
impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was so impressed by Stravinsky’s promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned
some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet season Diaghilev
approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-length ballet on the subject of the
Firebird.
The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known
overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he
had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of
spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s
premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka, with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical
score. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great
Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years
(1911–13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked
one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual and suggestive
choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among
themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly
original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist
landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive
modernist par excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world
events of the next few years only hastened that process.
 ALFRED WEGENER

Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift – the idea that Earth’s
continents move. Despite publishing a large body of compelling fossil and rock
evidence for his theory between 1912 and 1929, it was rejected by most other
scientists. It was only in the 1960s that continental drift finally became part of
mainstream science.

Alfred Wegener: Beginnings

Alfred Wegener was born on November 1, 1880, in Germany’s capital city,
Berlin.His father, Richard Wegener, was a classical languages teacher and pastor.
His mother, Anna Wegener, was a housewife. The Wegener family of two adults and five children – Alfred was the
youngest – was quite well-off financially.

Alfred was an intelligent boy. He received a conventional education, attending grammar school in Berlin. His
academic ability at school marked him for a university education.

He began university in Berlin in 1899, age 18, taking a variety of science classes. He specialized in astronomy,
meteorology, and physics. In 1902 he began a PhD degree in astronomy. He spent a year at Berlin’s famous Urania
Observatory, whose purpose was (and still is) to bring astronomy to a wider public.Alfred Wegener completed his
astronomy PhD in 1905, age 24. Although qualified to become a professional astronomer, he worried that he might
not discover anything new or interesting in astronomy. He believed he could make a greater contribution in
meteorology – the study of weather and climate.

Alfred Wegener’s Scientific Career

A first job and a world record
After completing his doctoral degree, Wegener started work in 1905 as a scientist at a meteorological station near
the small German town of Beeskow.

There, working with his older brother Kurt, he carried out pioneering work using weather balloons to study air
movements. If there had been a Guinness Book of World Records in 1906, the Wegener brothers would have won
the record for the longest continuous balloon flight ever: 52.5 hours in April of that year.

Greenland
Wegener was delighted to be appointed as the official meteorologist for the Danmark scientific expedition to
Greenland, the world’s largest island, which took place from 1906 to 1908. The expedition’s principle aim was to
chart the coastline of Greenland’s unexplored northeast coast. During the expedition, Wegener made his mark by
building Greenland’s first meteorological station and taking a large number of atmospheric readings using kites and
balloons.

The expedition’s work in uncharted territory was dangerous – three expedition members died of starvation/exposure!