Mention the name of Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918) and immediately there springs to mind beautifully hazy works that calm and soothe the senses or rile an ocean to unbridled heights of emotion. Debussy was, indeed, all of this and much more. He was an important link in the progression of music from late 19^th century Romanticism to the Impressionist school of which he was the greatest known figure. The Impressionists were really painter oriented with the school of thought centering around trying to capture light and color as it exists now. The light infused paintings of Rodin and others signified a new approach to painting and art with Debussy providing the music.

Young Claude was the eldest of five children, his father being a salesman of china while his mother was a seamstress. When he was 7, young Claude studied piano with an elderly pianist named Cerutti, the lessons being paid by his aunt. By 1872, Debussy was gained the attention of one Marie Maute de Fleurville who claimed to have been a pupil of Frederic Chopin of which there is no evidence to support her claim. It didn't matter one way or the other to young Debussy for he began in 1872 to study at Paris Conservatory where he spent 11 years. He studied composition with Emile Guirad, music history and theory with Luis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, harmony with Emile Durand, piano with Antoine Francois Marmontel, organ with Cesar Franck, and solfege with Albert Lavignac as well as becoming friends with many of his fellow students including pianist Isidor Philipp. Although he was clearly a talented young man, Debussy was from the start always argumentative, experimenting with harmonies and tone colors, favoring dissonances and intervals which were then frowned upon. He was also becoming a great pianist with a wide repertory which included Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin.

After his sojourn at the Conservatory, Debussy lived in Russia from 1880 to 1882 as music teacher to the children of Nadezhda von Meck, the famous patroness of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In spite of the fact that Tchaikovsky and von Meck had a distant relationship, Debussy never actually met the great man due to the personal agreement between von Meck and the composer to never meet. However, she did send Tchaikovsky a Danse bohemian which Tchaikovsky returned later, expressing an interest in the work but said that it needed to have it themes developed further. The work was never published in Debussy's lifetime and was only published by the von Meck family in 1932. Of more influence was Madame Vasnier, a singer with whom he had served as an accompanist in her recitals. She in turn provided much needed financial assistance and provided him with some poems by her brother-in-law Paul Verlaine who was the son-in-law of his former piano teacher Mdme. Maute de Fleurville. Two years after leaving Mdme. Von Meck and returning to Paris, Debussy won the coveted Prix de Rome for his composition L'Enfant Prodigue which allowed him to study at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome where he stayed from 1885 to 1887. However, he complained bitterly to Mdme. Vasnier about his conditions, finding the accommodations horrible, the people boorish and he hated the music of Donizetti and Verdi but adored the keyboard works of Franz Liszt. He wrote of his desire to write music on his own terms, turning four contrasting works to the Academy: the symphonic ode "Zuleima" based on the works of Heinrich Heine, the cantata "La damoiselle elue" which was pronounced by the critics as bizarre and the Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra in which many of the future works of Debussy can be gleamed. The last named piece was composed in the style of Cesar Franck with whom Debussy had also studied. He also became a follower of Richard Wagner's music, finding much in the heavily sensuous music and striking harmonies. Add to this mixture a sampling of Javanese gamelan music with frequent use of the pentatonic scale and one has an idea of just how eclectic Debussy scores were becoming during the 1885-1890 period.

By 1890, Debussy began his most famous works, the first of which were the two Arabesques for piano where his musical language was already formed to perfection. Also written at this time was his Suite Bergamasque (1890) which takes the ornate Rococo period of the preceding century and builds a framework of cynicism and witty writing. The most famous movement of this work is "Clair de lune" which pianist and comedian Victor Borge always called "Clear the Saloon." The lovely colors which each of the tone rows display is a haven of peaceful and restful meditations on the effects of moonlight on passions and feelings. The String Quartet in G minor of 1893 paved the way for more experimental writing by Debussy who utilized the Phrygian mode and a whole tone scale to create a floating, ethereal harmony. However, his most famous of all works is the orchestral tone poem "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune" which was written on the poem by Mallarme about the daydreaming of a Faune, a half-goat, half-human creature. At the time of its first performance, it was regarded as a highly original work with no redeeming character.

The middle years of Debussy's life saw the composer widening his horizons in experimenting with older forms. The Three Nocturnes make much use of veiled harmonies and brilliant splashes of color including the use of a woman's chorus singing vocalize behind the orchestra, almost like a second group .in the final movement marked "Sirenes." Contrasting the current vogue of Wagnerian influences in opera, Debussy spent ten years writing an opera after Maurice Maeterlinck's play "Pelleas and Melisande" which the action is almost as vague as the music yet remains a hauntingly beautiful tragedy played to this very day across the world after its 1902 premiere in Paris with Scottish soprano Mary Garden in the title role.

Another experimental work from this period is "La Mer" (1903 - 1905) which was written not by the sea but in Debussy studio in Paris because he simply couldn't take his eyes off the cascading ocean swells. The resulting work is one of strong colors and atmosphere, a powerful evocation of the sea of one's memory.

There were many other pieces Debussy wrote for just piano including Estampes and most famously his two books of preludes as well as his "Children's Corner Suite" all written in the 1905 to 1910 period. All of these works literally explore the tonal possibilities of the modern concert grand piano, showing off its colors in subtle ways that make both technical and artistic demands on the pianist. Larger scaled works include a series of 3 "Images" for orchestra which includes the popular "Iberia" which is an exhibition of bright, flashy colors of the sights, sounds and aromas of the country of Spain. During this time, Debussy began touring as a conductor of his own music, usually conducting "Prelude to the Afternoon of a faun" and "La Mer" in addition to "Pelleas." He was also engaged as a music critic, known more his salty, barbed critical reviews of works by Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky as well as Chopin, Bach and Mozart.

The last years of Debussy's career are dotted with smaller scaled works which further explored dissonances without couching them in lush harmonies. One his last works of this final period are the Etudes of 1915. There were also a last set of songs for voice and piano of 1913 as well as the Sonata for flute, viola and harp from 1915. This period of experimentation and furthering his compositional style was cut short by both the First World War in 1914 and the onset of colorectal cancer which required morphine injections to ease the pain. His last major work was Jeux of 1912 for the Sergei Diaghilev ballet company which contains some of the most dissonant of his music that moves in a sort of free-form performance style. Although this work was overlooked for many years by that same year's production of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," it is only recently that this work has entered the regular ballet and concert repertory.

1916 brought colorectal surgery to Debussy's life which was the first ever attempted. The results further left him drained. The mere thought of dressing himself was likened by Debussy as a Herculean quest. He died from the disease on March 25, 1918 just as Paris being bombarded and the idea of a public memorial was out of the question. It was only after the War's end that Debussy was finally interred in the small Cimitiere de Passy beside his wife and small daughter.

"Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic." Thus wrote Claude Debussy about the art-form he chose to pursue. In doing so, he created many magical moments in music which, like a camera, caught the fleeting images of nature in an amazing tone row of magical meanderings that contained all of the colors of the rainbow.