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21 MARCH 1963
Chairman
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50 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 51
4 *
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52 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
6 Neuchitel, 1950.
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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 53
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54 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
In Alex Cohen's translationg this is rendered:
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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 55
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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.
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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.
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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
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60 DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM
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DEBUSSY'S CONCEPT OF THE DREAM 61
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