Claude Debussy

The composer and music critic, who was born in St Germain-en-Laye in 1862 and died in Paris in 1918, received his training at the Paris Conservatoire, including in Ernest Guiraud‘s composition class. In 1884, he won the Rome Prize with the cantata L‘enfant prodigue. Important musical influences were his visits to the Bayreuth Festival in 1888 and 1889 and the performances of non-European music at the Paris World Exhibition of 1889.
In 1893 Debussy began working on an opera based on Maeterlinck‘s Pelléas et Mélisande, which was not premièred until 1902. The opera projects Rodrigue et Chimène, Le diable dans le beffroi and La chute de la maison Usher remained unfinished and were partly brought into a performable version by other composers. In addition to L‘après-midi d'un faune, Debussy attracted great attention as an orchestral composer with the cycles Nocturnes (1901), La mer (1905) and Images (1913); his chamber music works include a String Quartet published in 1894 and the three sonatas for several instruments from 1915 to 1917, which were part of a larger sonata project.
Debussy‘s scores Khamma (1912), Jeux (1913) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were intended for a dance performance, although Debussy did not orchestrate all of these works himself. The ‘mystery’ Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1910, after Gabriele D'Annunzio) also has a dance context through its commissioner Ida Rubinstein.

Debussy pursued further ballet projects, including No-ja-li (Le palais du silence), Daphnis et Chloé, Aphrodite, Orphée and Masques et bergamasques, most of which, however, did not progress beyond the idea or scenario stage. Debussy's instrumental music became the subject of dance appropriation early on: Loie Fuller based her dances on two movements from the Nocturnes cycle as early as 1913, and in later decades Todd Bolender (Still Point, 1955), Erich Walter (La demoiselle élue, 1966), John Neumeier (Haiku, 1966), John Cranko (Brouillards, 1970), Jiří Kylián (Nuages, 1976), Roland Petit (Soirée D., 1982) and Miriam Mahdaviani (Images, 1992) created ballets on his music.