Rewriting Modernism
By 1910, Debussy occupied a very different position in Parisian musical culture from where he had been at the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902—now the acknowledged patriarch of modern French music rather than its intrepid trailblazer. Debussy’s writings in the decade after the Pelléas premiere, emphasizing the importance of listening and reevaluating the relationship between music and emotion, betray a significant debt to the critical discourse of debussysme. At the same time, debussysme, even for such Debussy stalwarts as Jean Marnold and Louis Laloy, was itself losing its relevance after 1910, overshadowed by other modernist currents that were then taking hold of critics’ attention. As a new music aesthetics defined by logical universals redefined the significance of Debussy’s music, the work of Henri Bergson and Albert Bazaillas inspired a new intellectual-historical relationship between the practice of music criticism and a modern psychology of the unconscious.