Hitting the high notes

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war. The funeral was poorly attended, and as the cortège halted, curious shopkeepers glanced at the wreaths: ‘It seems he was a musician.’

The classical music world is morbidly addicted to anniversaries of major composers. It’s still unclear whether the listening public feels the same way, and many anniversary celebrations try to fabricate an unearned sense of occasion around music that would have been played anyway (the memory of 2011’s Mahler feeding frenzy still brings on indigestion). That can’t be said for Debussy, whose revolution of sensibility has never quite lodged in the general imagination the way (say) Stravinsky’s has.