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.

Laloy

Louis Laloy, a close friend of Debussy and, along with Jean Marnold, one of his most prolific defenders in the Parisian press, drew from a wide range of intellectual influences in his writing on Debussy, intertwining his account of Debussy’s innovations with interests in musical archaism and exoticism. Like that of Marnold, Laloy’s writing engaged with recent ideas from the human sciences involving acoustics, sensory physiology, psychology, and affective experience; like Marnold, Laloy continually wrestled with questions of historical and cultural difference in his account of Debussy’s music. However, Laloy approached these questions very differently, shrouding Debussy’s music in a mystical haze that served as a rebuke to reductive scientific theorizing—even as Laloy’s account of Debussy had been uniquely enabled by the scientific discourse that was ostensibly under critique.

Wagnérisme and the Aesthetic of Sentiment

In the late 1880s, Édouard Dujardin’s Revue wagnérienne was a major contributor to early Symbolist discourse, reinterpreting Wagnerian aesthetics and Schopenhauerian metaphysics to support the innovations of forward-thinking French poets. Advancing this new Symbolist poetics, Dujardin, along with his friend and prolific contributor to the Revue wagnérienne Téodor de Wyzewa, proposed that music is an art of psychological “realism”—a claim that rested on a conception of human psychology drawn largely from British associationism and propounded in France (against the conservative academic tradition defined by Victor Cousin’s eclectic spiritualism) by Théodule Ribot. Consequently, the Revue wagnérienne became a point of contact between avant-garde music aesthetics and modern psychological notions of the self that were then gaining wide currency in France.

Marnold

One of the most vociferous of Debussy’s early defenders, Jean Marnold, the critic for the Mercure de France, bolstered his account of Debussy’s music with appeals to the acoustic discoveries of Hermann von Helmholtz. Debussy’s unconventional uses of seventh and ninth chords, Marnold claimed, represented the “artistic confirmation” of Helmholtz’s theories. Widely influential in early Debussy criticism, Marnold became a conduit through which recent developments in German acoustics and music theory were disseminated into Parisian musical culture. The technical nature of his arguments also instigated controversies within Debussy criticism, most notably with the homme de lettres Camille Mauclair. Marnold’s responses to these controversies demonstrate a sustained, and distinctively debussyste, engagement with a problem that had wide salience in musical discourse around the turn of the twentieth century: how to conceptualize the nebulous space between physiology and culture in which musical listening happens.

Pelléas et Mélisande and the Aesthetic of Sensation

The premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in late April 1902 occasioned a maelstrom of critical responses in the Parisian press—more than a hundred reviews over the course of a few months and eighty-eight in the month of May alone. A flashpoint of French modernism, the Pelléas premiere catalyzed a rethinking of the nature of music in this critical discourse, as prominent critics, such as Pierre Lalo and Robert Godet, shifted their account of music away from the Revue wagnérienne’s exclusive focus on sentiment and interiority and toward an aesthetics of noise, materiality, and outer sensation. While it was not uncommon for critics to compare the music of Pelléas to Impressionist painting or Symbolist poetry, such comparisons only served to highlight an overriding preoccupation with a specifically musical problem: how to negotiate the demands of musical convention and historicity against the nature of music as material sound.

Introduction

A reception history of Debussy’s music in the years after the 1902 premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande reveals the many interconnections between musical culture and early-twentieth-century intellectual culture in Paris, including recent developments in the human sciences, and can reorient the broader narrative of musical culture in this period away from comparisons to Symbolist poetry and Impressionist painting. This reception history likewise invites a reconsideration of musical experience in musicological scholarship and its relationship to hermeneutics, offering an alternative to the tendency in recent accounts of aesthetic experience to reify a problematic dualism between live, ephemeral “presence” and the inert historical artifact.