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Debussy's Concept of the Dream

Author(s): Edward Lockspeiser


Source: Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 89th Sess. (1962 - 1963), pp. 49-61
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
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21 MARCH 1963

Debussy's concept of the dream


EDWARD LOCKSPEISER

Chairman

PROFESSOR SIR J. A. WESTRUP (PRESIDE

IN HIS STUDY of Turner's great picture of the s


Sir Kenneth Clark draws attention to Turn
with 'visions' and 'dreams'. These words, he says, 'were
commonly applied to Turner's pictures in his own day, and in
the vague, metaphysical sense of the nineteenth century they
have lost their value for us. But with our new knowledge of
dreams as the expression of deep intuitions and buried mem-
ories, we can look at Turner's work again and recognise that
to an extent unique in art his pictures have the quality of a
dream. The crazy perspectives, the double focuses, the melting
of one form into another and the general feeling of instability,
all these are forms of perception which most of us know
only when we are asleep. Turner experienced them when he
was awake'.'
I propose to investigate in this paper Debussy's knowledge
of the works of Turner and to suggest aesthetic parallels in their
concept of the dream. But before doing so it is desirable t
approach this concept in Debussy's work from a purely
musical viewpoint even though, despite many attempts at
analysis, his technique and methods of composition remain
extremely elusive. This is inherent in Debussy's musical
character. He wrote no musical treatise; he occasionally gave
a few lessons but his pupils, Nicolas Coronio and Raoul
Bardac whom I was privileged to consult, were able to say
very little about his methods, and indeed his correspondence
with them speaks of composition only in generalities; and his
musical criticisms rigorously avoid any mention of technique.

1 Sir Kenneth Clark, 'Turner's Look at Nature', The Sunday Times, 25


October 1959.
49

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50 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM

We know from searching statements in


he was concerned with the power of memo
of fantasies, the interpretation of symb
nificance of dreams, in particular the dr
the labyrinth dream. These are matter
psychological and partly aesthetic, and i
they affected his ideas on harmony, or rh
are bound to confess that this new spir
through, this keener awareness of the life
mind, was so novel that any technique d
could only be evolved experimentally.
We have a valuable source, however, in
between Debussy and his former master Er
took place early in Debussy's career, and
ulously recorded with musical examples
and fellow pupil Maurice Emmanuel.2 D
Guiraud not so much a system but an a
allow for an expression of the ambiguous
the use of ambiguous chords, the aim of
mine the rigidity of the tonal system and
to enlarge the range of harmonic experi
since the octave consists of twenty-fou
ascending and twelve descending, arb
twelve to meet the requirements at the
temperament, any kind of scale could i
without any allegiance to the basic C m
not disappear, but it should be enriched
other scales, including the whole-ton
cryptically calls the twenty-one note sca
the name of its enharmonic counterpart
D sharp E flat, there are in fact twenty-on
octave.) Enharmony should be used abun
made for a distinction between notes of the same enharmonic
value, that is to say between a G flat and an F sharp. The
major and minor modes are a useless convention. There
should be great freedom and flexibility in the use of major and
minor thirds, thus facilitating distant modulations, and
evasive effects should be produced by incomplete chords in
which the third is missing or other intervals are ill-defined.

2 Published in A. Ho6r6e, Inidits sur Debussy, Paris, 1942.

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 51

By thus blurring or drowning the sense of


ton) a wider field of expression is en
unrelated harmonies can be approach
detours.
In illustration of this search for floating or incomplete
chords, Debussy played these successions of ninths and common
chords which, divorced from any sense of tonality, Guiraud
found theoretically unsound and meandering.
(Here was played a musical example from the notebook of
Maurice Emmanuel.3)
Such successions quickly became a commonplace, and we
may therefore have some difficulty today in seeing their
original purpose which was to create that sense of ambiguity
or of multiple associations which, as I shall presently attempt
to show, was peculiar to the dream. The outcome of this
approach was twofold. The forms of music based on tonality
were disrupted, particularly the aspects of form concerned
with thematic development; and within the chord sequences
themselves a deliberate imprecision prevailed, (described by
Verlaine in his Art Poitique as the state in which 'l'indicis au
pricis se joint'.) This presented an entirely new phenomenon.
A given note or chord in say La Cathidrale engloutie or Les Sons et
les Parfums tournent dans l'air du soir may, if we wished, be
replaced by another note, another chord, without the work
suffering in an essential way. The alternative version would be
more or less beautiful but it would not shock or surprise. In the
Boston manuscript of Pellias et Milisande' there are often
examples of single notes with many alternative versions, and
indeed at the rehearsal of this opera, when asked whether he
meant a C or a C sharp to be played, the composer himself
was not quite sure. Understandably, though he was unable
to see its significance, Saint-Saians described L'Apris-midi
d'un faune as the equivalent in music not of a painting but of
the sight of an artist's palette with its chance associations of
primary colours.,
These features of Debussy's musical language are we I
known. But what do they signify and what were the ideas
3 See Note 2.
4 At the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston.
5 'Correspondance entre Saint-Saens et Maurice Emmanuel', La Revue
Musicale, No. 206, 1947-

4 *

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52 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM

that prompted them ? As an expression of


concept of the dream towards the en
century was first of all a poetic concept an
works of Freud, a scientific concept. It wa
this concept belongs in one form or anoth
sion of all time. The novel aspect of the dr
the work of artists of Debussy's period,
Debussy himself, derives from a rising to
fantasies together with their symbolical an
The writer who principally orientated thou
was Edgar Allen Poe, who was in a sens
French, while in French literature the o
this movement was Mallarme, possibly t
the nineteenth century. The ideas of the
the root of Debussy's inspiration.
Musicians have not been greatly concerned with the
meaning of Mallarme's poem L'Apris-midi d'unfaune, held by
literary people to be the principal achievement of Symbolist
poetry. This is partly because it is a work of some obscurity,
but it is also because the music of Debussy is thought to speak
for itself and need not be referred, in detail, to the imagery of
Mallarm6 by which it was inspired. I do not think Mallarme's
ideas can be ignored. Mallarme's eclogue is an exploration of
the processes by which physical impulse first originates in the
imagination, is later defined in reality, and is eventually
transformed into a work of art.
Buried in its abstruse language is a philosophical treatise on
the life of the senses and the psychology of sublimation. It is
also an exploration of the borderlands between the conscious
and the half-conscious, the waking state and the state of
reverie. In his Introduction 'a la Psychanalyse de Mallarmd'
Charles Mauron observes the deliberate confusion in L'Apres-
midi between these various degrees of consciousness and
unconsciousness. The faun emerges from a dream, plays like a
child with the fantasies of his dreams, but satisfies his desires
only by plunging into sleep. The poet's art consists of never
allowing us to be quite sure if the faun is dreaming ('Aimai-je un
reve?') or whether, when awake, he is aware of the distinction
between primitive desire and the sublimated artistic vision.

6 Neuchitel, 1950.

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 53

Another critic, Wallace Fowlie, similarly


duality of meanings in the poem. The d
opening line, 'Ces nymphes, je les veux pe
suggests, represents a condensation of
'Copulation', he explains, 'may well be one
afternoon's quest-the word 'perpetuat
elegance; and preservation by means of art
Indeed, duality of one kind or another is re
the poem. There are two nymphs, one chast
the other experienced, sighing for lov
reality two fauns, both the lascivious fa
objective faun watching himself wrestli
faun actually addresses himself as another
of neither are fulfilled; nor can they be
quest for the nymphs, as in his flute-pla
stant interplay between action and indole
There is a difference between the dream
musings of reverie. The latter are conside
be adolescent and even impotent. And fro
faun, too, is the adolescent artist anxious
conquests but remaining more truly a po
emphasizes that L'Apris-midi is 'Mallarm
inquest into the perplexing but omnip
between the sexual dream world of the p
life as a practising artist'. The imagery in t
faun as an 'ingenuous lily', playing with blo
his passion bursting like the purple pom
shot through with erotic associations. Yet th
is in a definition of sublimation. Mallarm6 a
lines, which I should like to read in Frenc
of the choice of words, the process in which
into the dream and is then transformed into music:

Et de faire, aussi haut que l'amour se module


Evanouir du songe ordinaire de dos
Ou de flancs purs suivis avec nos regards clos
Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne.

SWallace Fowlie, Mallarmd, London, 1953-

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54 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
In Alex Cohen's translationg this is rendered:

At just the height to which love modulates,


Pursuing them with veiled eyes, I'd expunge
The common dream of flank and back, to change
It to a monotone of sounding line.
I think we may see in the image of 'a sonorous, vain and
monotonous line', the origin of the flute solo at the opening of
Debussy's score. In the preceding lines the faun's flute-
playing is actually described as 'a long solo':
Qui, detournant a soi le trouble de la joue,
R ve, dans un solo long, ...
In lingering arabesques dreams of amusing
The beauty hereabout by falsely confusing
Its charm with the illusion song creates.

These lines, which bring us to the heart of Debussy's


inspiration, are interpreted by Mr. Fowlie thus: 'In the high
notes of the flute the entire experience of love may be reduced
into a single melodic line, vain and monotonous as all art is
when contrasted with the immediacy and necessity of ex-
perience. As he plays thus on his instrument, the faun is
master of himself and his feelings. He is able to follow inwardly
the dream of having seen the nudity of a nymph, her back and
side, and to sing of such a vision without experiencing the need
of acting upon it'.
(Here was played the opening of 'L'Apres-midi d'un faune'.)
Debussy's expression of the dream is seen too in his life-long
attraction to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Until recently it
was thought that Debussy's sketches for an opera on The Fall of
the House of Usher, were just one of the numerous ideas with
which he toyed during the latter part of his life. The publication
of the correspondence of Romain Rolland 9 allows us to form a
completely different view of this project. We learn here that as
early as i890, three years before Pellias et Milisande, Debussy
was writing 'a symphony using psychologically developed
themes' based on The Fall of the House of Usher.

s Published in E. Lockspeiser, Debussy (Master Musicians), 1963.


1 Cahiers Romain Rolland, Vol. V, Paris, I954-

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 55

Later this work inspired by Poe was to be a


production of which he signed a contract wit
of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 'Th
last days', he then wrote to his publisher Jac
have been busily at work on The Fall of the H
have found it an excellent means of strengtheni
against any form of fear. Yet there are mom
a sense of identity. When I am no longer able
familiar objects around one, and if the siste
Usher were suddenly to come in I shouldn
surprised'.1o The contract signed with the M
19o8 was for the production there of Usher tog
Devil in the Belfry, another opera on a tale of P
vein on which Debussy had begun to work
Pellias in 1902.
In his study Edgar Allan Poe and France T.S. El
the far-reaching influence of Poe on the French
and states, 'there are aspects of Poe which Englis
critics failed to perceive'." Poe was in fact al
creation of the French-none of the writers in the
from Baudelaire to Paul Val ry including Gid
Proust escaped his fascination-and the as
which they were drawn was the rising to the
conscious fantasies. 'His most vivid imaginativ
Eliot states, 'are the realisation of the dream'.
tales with their dark symbolism of corridors an
passages, stagnant water and enveloping whi
essence dream tales, and although Eliot, li
English critics is censorious of Poe as a stylist, h
that the Symbolist figures in French literature f
onwards saw in Poe an expression of the new
they were themselves seeking, and that they we
interpret Poe for English writers in his true ligh
Belonging entirely, in spirit and outlook, to
Debussy was similarly profoundly affected by
of the 'tyranny' the 'obsession' which Poe exer
Earlier critics of Debussy, Arthur Symons and J
drew attention to Debussy's affinity with Poe
10 Letter of 18 June 1908, in Lettres de Claude Debussy ia son
11 T. S. Eliot, 'Edgar Poe et la France', La Table ronde, Par
12 Lettres inidites t Andrd Caplet, edited by E. Lockspeiser,

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56 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
work as a counterpart of the deliberate vagueness cultivat
Poe, of his lugubrious moods, as a vision, too, of Poe's eth
women, Ligea and Morella, vanishing like M6lisande b
they can be embraced.
But, of course, neither Symons nor Huneker, excel
critics as they were, had quite the understanding of Poe's
nificance that we have now acquired. They were themselv
of the movement that had sprung from this French influe
Poe. And they were therefore unable to see, as we are
that the fantasies to which Debussy gave a musical exp
were almost Surrealist fantasies, the chaotic fantasies of dr
such as we hear in the scene of the vaults in Pellias.

(Here wasplayed the scene of the vaults from 'Pelliaset Milisande.')


This association of Poe with Pellias et Milisande is not
fortuitous. In the very month when he sets to work on Pellias
in September I893, Debussy in a letter describing his state
mind to Ernest Chausson goes so far as to quote almost wor
for word Poe's description of a sullen autumn day at t
opening of The House of Usher. Poe's tale opens: 'During th
whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the
year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I
had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singular
dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as th
shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancho
House of Usher'. And here is the letter of Debussy: 'It is a
very well; I cannot see beyond the sadness of the landscape
my mind. Sometimes I pass days that are dull, dark and sound
less like those of a hero of Edgar Allan Poe and I have wit
this the romantic soul of a Ballade of Chopin. Solitude
crowded with too many memories which we cannot shut out'.1
Later in a letter to Andre Caplet we read that Poe 'althoug
dead exercises over me an almost agonising tyranny. I forg
the simple rules of behaviour and close myself up like
brute beast in the House of Usher'. He told Robert Godet
that he could tell him things about Roderick Usher that wou
make his beard fall off. 'You are my only friend', h
exclaims, 'alias Roderick Usher'.14

13 'Lettres in6dites A Ernest Chausson', La Revue Musicale, Paris, Decem


1925.
14 Lettres de Claude Debussy a deux amis, Paris, 1942.

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 57
The idea that Debussy had formed of Poe, both of his
personality and of his work, was very far from our present day
conception of him as a writer of creepy stories or as the
precursor of the crime story or the detective novel. It is clear,
from both the libretto of Usher and the musical sketches, that
Debussy was primarily concerned with the essentially soliptic
character of Roderick Usher; the enraged, self-devouring
lover guilty of loving his sister. 'Celle que tu aimais tant', Usher
says of himself in Debussy's libretto, 'celle que tu ne devais pas
aimer'."1 Parent of the indecisive, Hamlet-like Pelleas, Roderick
perishes with the rise of the red moon, the same blood-red
moon, we note, that appears so dramatically at the end of
Salomd and of Wozzeck, symbols in these operas, as in Usher of
love and of murder. The symbolism of this libretto with which
Debussy was so long concerned opens up an extraordinary
vision of what Debussy's art might have become had he lived
to bring fully to life Roderick's interior monologue. Because of
the illegibility of much of the musical manuscript it is difficult
to perform, but a few bars-literally a few bars-may give
some idea of its character.

(Here was played an extract from 'La Chute de la Maison


Usher'.)
It is my belief that a study of Debussy's unfinished Poe's
operas and of the ideas that they engendered offers an illum-
inating view of many subsequent musical developments. Not
for nothing was Poe's work the subject of an exhaustive psycho-
analytic study, by Marie Bonaparte, with a preface by Freud.1'
The sexual dream visions of Poe's tales, colliding as in a
nightmare, were at the basis of works by several later writers,
among them Villiers de l'Isle Adam's Axel, a scene of which
was also set by Debussy.17
Here it is worth drawing attention to Poe's own ideas, known
to Debussy, on the nature of music. 'I know', Poe writes, 'that
indefiniteness is an element of true music.. . a suggested
indefiniteness bringing about a definiteness of vague and
therefore of spiritual effect'. Commenting on this passage
15 The libretto and musical sketches for La Chute de la Maison Usher are
published in Debussy et Edgar Poe, edited by E. Lockspeiser, Paris, 1962.
16 Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, translated by
J. Rodker, London, 1949-
17 See L. Vallas, Claude Debussy et son temps, 2nd edition, Paris, I958.

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58 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
Edmund Wilson, in his book The Shores of Light
real significance of Poe's short stories does not lie in
purport to relate. Many are confessedly dreams; a
dreams. though they seem absurd, their effect on ou
is serious, And even those that pretend to the log
exactitude of actual narratives are, nevertheless, also
No one understood better than Poe that, in fiction and in
poetry both, it is not what you say that counts, but what you
make the reader feel (he always italicises the word 'effect'); no
one understood better than Poe that the deepest psychological
truth may be rendered through phantasmagoria. Even the
realistic stories of Poe are, in fact, only phantasmagoria of a
more circumstantial kind'."18 And he concludes with a statement
that shows at once the lasting appeal of Poe for Debussy: 'He
had elements in him that corresponded with the indefiniteness
of music and the exactitude of mathematics'.
I have dwelt on these literary origins of Debussy's concept of
the dream and you may think that this places rather too much
emphasis on this aspect of the work of Debussy who was, after
all, a musician. In fact, Debussy had no musical antecedents in
France. His friends were almost exclusively literary people, he
had strong literary leanings himself, and he was deeply
involved in the great literary movement that spread from Poe
and Baudelaire to Mallarme and to Marcel Proust and Paul
Valkry. He lived, moreover, at a time when, under the impact
in France of Wagner, there was a cross-fertilisation betwe
the arts. The poets themselves aspired to a state of music, and
so did the Impressionist painters. In their technique they wer
always using musical terms, 'scales of colours' and 'tones'
Debussy was greatly affected by painting-'I love pictures
almost as much as music',"1 he stated, and in regard
pictorial representations of the dream there was one painter t
whom Debussy was particularly drawn. This was Turn
whose later works were far more revolutionary and im
pressionistic than the later properly called Impressionist
painters, though the exact nature of his influence on th
French painters remains ill-defined. Turner is mentioned

18 E. Wilson, 'Poe at Home and Abroad', in The Shores of Light, New Yor
1952.
19 Unpublished letter of February, 1911 to Edgar Varese.

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 59

twice in Debussy's correspondence, in 1892 an


to say, at times when few French artists, apart
Pissarro, had any knowledge of his work
occasion Debussy refers to Turner in the superl
he uses elsewhere only for Poe. When working o
orchestra he writes: 'I am trying to achie
different, let us call it reality-what certain f
"Impressionism", a term used as incorrec
particularly by art critics who do not hesita
Turner, the greatest creator of mystery in art
seem to be echoing here the well-known op
also mentioned in Debussy's writings.21 We
which pictures of Turner Debussy had seen, n
seen them. But our evidence ofTurner's influen
particular his reputation established there by
critic, Philip Hamerton,22 as a painter of dream
seascapes shot through with dream memories, a
rate to draw a parallel between the associatio
numerous water pieces and those in the pain
At the opening of this paper I quoted Sir K
opinion that Turner's work conveyed in a un
qualities of a dream. Analysing Turner's t
picture The Snowstorm, Clark suggests that in
the ornamentation and tradition of the arabe
of the Japanese painter, Hokusai. 'The chaos
Clark writes, 'is portrayed as accurately as if it
flowers'."2 By a coincidence-and I do not
more than a coincidence, though it certainl
parallel line of thought-the cover chosen by
published score of La Mer consists of a hi
picture by Hokusai of a wave. La Mer in its won
detail has the same quality of the arabesque tha
pictures of Hokusai, the same quality of the 'bu
that we may see in the details of Turner's Sn
also has something of the visionary drama
scapes. Debussy uses a sense of the arabes
disturbing way. I do not think this parallel s
20 Letters to Robert Godet and Jacques Durand.
21 In the unpublished play of Debussy F.E.A. (Frhres en
22 Philip Hamerton, Turner, Paris, 1889. An abridged f
The Life of J.M.W. Turner, London, 1879.
23 Sir Kenneth Clark, op. cit.

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60 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM

further except to say that in a mind such as


receptive to both poetic and visual exp
musical symbols were bound to be create
sights which had impressed him so deeply
La Mer of vortexes and whirlpools, of the
and of the immensity of enveloping waves a
us all.

(Here was played an extract from the third movement of


'La Mer'.)
Such visions have a pictorial appeal but they also contribute,
in the minds of Debussy, Poe and Turner alike, to an awareness
of certain fantasies of the unconscious. The sea is frequently
identified in modern psychology with a mother figure. 'La mer
notre mere a tous', Debussy declared.24 And there have been
many studies of the significance of water in dream poetry,
notably 'L'eau et les r eves' by Gaston Bachelard,25 in which the
ideas of reflection and movement in water, one of the root
sources of inspiration in Symbolist poetry and Impressionist
painting, are brought to the frontiers of modern psychology.
Let me, in conclusion, quote an impression of Turner's
Snowstorm by Sir Kenneth Clark which may very well be
applied to La Mer and which goes far to helping us to under-
stand the new provinces of the unconscious mind which
Debussy's music had conquered. I have already referred to the
'new knowledge of dreams as the expression of deep intuitions
and buried memories' which, Clark suggests, should be brought
to Turner's work. And he goes on: 'This dream-like condition
reveals itself by the repeated appearance of certain motifs
which are known to be part of the furniture of the unconscious.
One of these is the vortex or whirlpool, which became more
and more the underlying rhythm of his designs. . . . It is a
dream experience'.26 The son of a sailor who in youth had
been destined to be a sailor himself, Debussy was drawn to the
sea not only by what he refers to as his 'countless memories',
but by his imaginative conception of the sea which could not
fail to have been prompted by the seascapes of Turner and also

24 Letter of 18 June, 1916 to an anonymous correspondent, Revue des Deux


Mondes, 15 May, 1958.
26 Paris, 1960.
26 Sir Kenneth Clark, op. cit.

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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 61

by the seascapes of Poe, notably in The N


Gordon Pym. The original title of the first m
Mer belle aux Iles Sanguinaires is in fact t
Camille Mauclair,27 author of the two
studies on Poe and on Turner. There we have it. As we look
back on the great Symbolist and Impressionist movement,
with its strong musical associations and of which Poe and
Turner were in a sense the godfathers, it was perhaps no
accident that the ideals of this movement, at any rate in its
dream aspects, were ultimately to be realised in the work of
Debussy, a musician.

27 Published in L'Echo de Paris illustri, 27 February, x893.

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