Music for my own pleasure

At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries tend to be popular. We generally think of radicals as being primarily like Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, whose works, after decades, still mainly appeal to a small group of sophisticates. But if one takes the larger view, there is no doubt that most composers who transformed the art of music were almost always immediately popular. Monteverdi, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner commanded substantial audiences, with often beguiling surfaces and revolutionary substance. Schumann said that Chopin’s music was ‘a cannon buried in flowers’.

The same might be said of Debussy, who could not have broken more decisively with the past. His major works were written over not much more than 20 years, from the prelude ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ in 1894, to the piano etudes and the three chamber sonatas dating from the middle of the first world war.