Suschitzky 398 448

Music and Culture
Debussys Rameau: French Music

and Its Others
Anya Suschitzky
[Debussys] features were hollow, his face was pale. He was forced to stay
in his room, then his bed. Oh this bed, this bed, this bed, he would say
in despair. The Opra, in the meantime, was preparing the revival of Castor et Pollux, whose rptition gnrale took place on Thursday 21 March
1918: in the afternoon, not at night, because we were concerned about
aircraft alerts. It was one of [Debussys] last regrets that he could not be
there. Trying to smile as he saw me go, he said in a half whisper, Say
goodbye to M. Castor! Two days later on Saturday morning, the bom-
The Musical Quarterly 86(3), Fall 2002, pp. 398448; doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdg016

2004 Oxford University Press
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Paris, March 1918. The Opra mounts the first fully staged modern revival of Jean-Philippe Rameaus tragic opera Castor et Pollux (1737, rev.
1754), their only new production during the war. It is a bold, expensive
gesture of defiance. Ticket prices have been low since 1915, so new costumes and scenery are a particular indulgence. Other attempts to attract
an audience include widely advertised precautions: in the event of an
attack by Big Bertha, designated areas of the Palais Garnier, including
the basement, will be available for shelter.1 Even the cast is a fruit of
patriotic resourcefulness. Soldiers have been recruited to play sailors
in the first act. And the heroine Tlare is sung by Germaine Lubin,
a fiercely patriotic soprano with close ties to Marshal Philippe Ptain.2
Owing to the German offensive, most performances are eventually postponed until after the war; but the rptition gnrale alone sends an important message from the nations foremost musical institution: celebrations of Frances history are part of the war effort. Rameau, the most
revered French composer of the eighteenth century, will play a vital part
in boosting morale and confirming the greatness of the nations past.3
Elsewhere in Paris, near the Bois de Boulogne, Claude Debussy is
on his deathbed. He receives a visit from his friend Louis Laloy, a noted
musicologist and secretary general at the Opra.4 Recalling this visit in
his pseudo-Proustian memoir, La musique retrouve, Laloy describes Debussys last days, poignantly but hopefully, as an exchange of roles between a dying modernist and a composer of the ancien rgime who is
simultaneously brought to life:
Debussys Rameau 399
bardment of Paris began. During his last days he listened to the lugubrious
sound of the explosions, and his suffering ceased on Monday 25 March.5
Laloys account has the force of melodrama. Debussys death and

Rameaus resurrection are connected by more than coincidence: the
mingled sounds of German bombardment, Rameaus music, and Debussys sotto voce farewell to his hero signal a real and symbolic connection. Laloy may adopt the language of hagiography, yet his scene points
to an image of succession and revival cherished by Debussy himself.
Composer and musicologist met in the wake of the controversy surrounding Pellas et Mlisande in 1902, which caused an important debate
about Debussys relationship to Wagner.6 Their friendship, which
marked the end of Debussys intimacy with the Wagnerian Pierre Loys,
was cemented by Laloys support for Debussys music and by a common
interest in Rameau.7 Many reviews of Pellas exonerated Debussy of ties
to Wagner and romanticism and praised the originality of the musical
and declamatory style. But as a champion of Rameau, Laloy was unrivaled in Debussys circle, and he became an obvious ally in 1903 when,
as we shall see, Debussy launched a campaign to revise common perceptions of music history, reject the influence of German music, and establish his own kinship with Rameau.
Laloy supported Debussys position to the last. Even his obituary,
published on 30 March 1918, was combined with a review of Castor.
He celebrated the production as a memorable victory for French taste
in which the greatest musician of old France was resurrected and
restored to glory amidst the ruins of war and bloodshed. And he
solemnized Debussy, the most worthy successor, who prolonged
Rameaus tradition and enriched it with modern sensibilities.8 Laloys
memories again appear to mingle fantasy and biography, histories both
real and possibly imagined. But if they were fantasy, they were Debussys
fantasies too. Although Debussys activity as a critic had only been intermittent, his essays paid particular attention to Rameau. He had also
given enthusiastic accolades in interviews and letters to friends and colleagues. It is abundantly clear from his writings that Rameau was his favorite symbol of French music and his chosen foundation for a national
tradition differentiated from Germany.9 Thus, according to Laloys account of Debussys historical imagination, Rameau and Debussy emerge
phoenixlike from the ruins to serve a monolithic national style. The two
composers are indissolubly linked: Rameau finds continuance in Debussy
just as Debussy remains present in a revived Rameau.
Embellishments, omissions, and other distortions of memory reveal
the impact of the present on perceptions of the past; they also give life
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The Musical Quarterly
to hope for the future as they transmit their ideals to successive generations. Thus, while Laloys memories attest to this suggestiveness in Debussys ancestral claim, they also serve as a reminder that Debussys own
understanding of his place in history influences our perceptions of his
achievement. If we want to understand Debussys relation to the French
tradition as well as the public persona that arises from it, we must confront his insistent bid for kinship. This article attempts that confrontation. In taking Debussys position seriously, I want to consider the significance of his criticism in our assessment of his music and aesthetic
position, and the importance of his historical imagination in his vision
of modern music. Though in different ways from Laloy, I too want to
suggest that by looking at Debussys public persona within the French
tradition, we may come closer to understanding the controversial and
ambivalent nature of his national identity.
My interest in Debussys essays is hardly new. Some have minimized
his concern for the past: Edward Lockspeiser insisted that the composers
friends were the impetus behind the writings on Rameau. Franois
Lesure went further, claiming that Debussys alliance with Rameau, a
position of principle that had no coherent relationship with the majority
of his opinions, was merely designed to secure allies after the premiere
of Pellas.10 At the opposite extreme, Debussys essays have been taken as
a gloss on archaic features in his music: Dieter Winzer finds Rameaus
presence in almost every aspect of Debussys music, from periodic structures and bass progressions to melodic shapes, declamation, and harmony.11 But the ubiquity of such evidence ultimately weakens the argument. A third group of scholars has suggested that tensions between
Debussys critical output and his music reveal a more complex attitude
toward French cultural identity. Scott Messing finds the origin of Debussys archaic musical style not in Rameau but in recent music dans le
style ancien by Erik Satie, Camille Saint-Sans, and Lo Dlibes; this
helpfully places Debussy within a broader context of early moves toward
neoclassicism.12 And although Michael Downes and Jrg Stenzl do not
discuss Debussys music at length, they rightly suggest that his theories
about national identity emanated from deep ambivalence toward German styles, particularly that of Richard Wagner.13
The most sustained discussion of these issues is Jane Fulchers examination of Debussys position in its political context. Fulcher begins
with critics of Pellas, who alleged that Debussys declamatory style derived from Rameau. She argues forcefully that as this stylistic connection
drew support from critics on the Right and the Left, so Debussy learned
to manipulate public debate in the hope of rescuing himself from the
margins of the musical and social world.14 I agree with Fulchers suggestion that the essays on Rameau bear the traces of Debussys emerging
Debussys Rameau 401
public voice, which he found in a dialogue with critics of Pellas; this dialogue drew him into a broader debate about French cultural identity,
through which he refined his self-understanding in relation to questions
of nationalism, classicism, and antiromanticism.15 But her treatment of
possible connections between Debussys criticism and his music contains
unresolved contradictions. She claims that the text setting in Pellas
emulated Rameau.16 But she also insists that Debussys position on
Rameau had little to do with his music, and that Debussy, the most subtle of artists, found it impossible to be doctrinaire in his art.17 Given
that she also identifies Debussy as a political thinker who was sympathetic, ultimately, with the far Right, her treatment of this paradox could
be interpreted as an attempt to rescue good music from bad politics.18
But there are other reasons for separating Debussys music from
his prose. It is notoriously difficult to make direct correlations between
a composers theory and practice, or, conversely, to draw definite conclusions from the absence of such proximity. In this essay, therefore, I will
not discuss Debussys Hommage Rameau (from Images for piano, 1905).19
The personas that take shape in Debussys essays seem to differ in kind
and significance from the identities that populate his music; indeed, connections between prose and music, where they exist, may not be at the
level of detail, stylistic features or ideas, but may be more general and
perhaps doubly and even deliberately elusive.20
My question is not whether Debussys interest in the past was
political (in the sense of political organization), nor whether Rameau
directly or perceptibly influenced Pellas and later works. This article is
less about the real or purported links between ancient and modern composers than about Debussys effort to construct his own and his nations
history and his relationship to contemporary historiography and cultures
of revival. I will address two questions: how did Rameau become a central preoccupation of Debussys historical imagination; and how did Debussy understand himself in relation to contemporary ideas of French
history? I will first place Debussys essays about Rameaus operas in a new
intellectual and cultural context; I will then discuss Debussys contribution to an edition of Rameaus Les ftes de Polymnie, which has not yet
received adequate attention.
Pursuing the Past

In 1903 Debussy attended a performance of the first two acts of Rameaus
Castor et Pollux at the Schola Cantorum.21 It changed his views on
French music. Immediately afterward he published an essay in Gil Blas
in which he held up Rameau as the paragon of the French style: In
402
Rameaus oeuvre we find the pure French tradition: delicate and charming tenderness, correct accentuation and rigorous declamation in the
recitatives, without that German affectation of profundity, without the
need to underline . . . or explain everything.22 Debussy acknowledged
that Rameau had been superseded by Christoph Willibald Gluck. But
he saw Rameau as the last harbinger of a truly French music, celebrated
for its luminosity, elegance, clear expression, [and] precise and compact form.23 Closing the stylistic and linguistic chasms that separated
his own work from that of Rameau, Debussy concluded that, in Castor,
the Spartans cry like you and me; Tlares air is a translation of the
gentle and profound mourning of a woman in love; and the monologue
air of Pollux . . . [is] so personal in tone, so new in construction, that
space and time are defeated and Rameau seems to be [our] contemporary.24 His review ended evangelically: I hope to be forgiven for writing
so much. . . . My first excuse is Rameau, who is worth it; my second is
that times of real joy are rare in life and I didnt want to keep them to
myself.25
Three weeks later, Debussy published an open letter to Gluck, labeling him a composer of spectacle, luxury, and ceremony, who inaugurated the French fashion for the lugubrious word setting and heavy orchestration that led to romanticism. Condescending to instruct Gluck in
that manner of text setting in which, again, he located a central characteristic of French identity, Debussy quipped: Just between the two of us,
you set words really badly; at the very least you make French into an
accentuated language when it is in fact a nuanced one. (I know . . . you
are German).26 This gibe should not mask the seriousness of Debussys
claim, which was an attack on Glucks ideological associations. According to Debussy, Gluck was a court musician and would never have succeeded in France without the intervention of an Austrian, Marie Antoinette. By vociferously promoting Rameaus revival, Debussy hoped a
century of aberrant compositional behavior would be curtailed and foreign styles expelled. In this context, Rameau was more French than his
successors. Debussy hailed him as the originator of the modern nations
music, and, condemning Glucks claims to the French classical heritage
as btises, he concluded, Rameau was infinitely more Greek than
you.27
By emphasizing Rameaus Greek restraint and comparing it to
Glucks Germanic grandeur, Debussy was drawing on a critical commonplace, according to which French writers had long cherished the socalled classical rationality, lightness, and elegance of their native style.28
Ideas about classicism began as claims for Frances links to Greek antiquity, republicanism, and universality; but, as Zeev Sternhell has shown,
Debussys Rameau 403
in the 1880s and 1890s they became part of a narrower definition of the
French nation based on blood, soil, and race.29 Fulcher places Debussys
statements on the French tradition within yet another manifestation of
the classical ideal, which emerged just before the war as a preoccupation
with specifically Latin virtues, such as purity, proportion, order, and
anti-individualism. Again she finds his musicthis time the late works
at odds with his theoretical ideals.30 But although Debussys wartime
essays attest to patriotic feelings sharpened by external circumstances,
his statements in the early 1900s suggest that his preoccupation with national identity was nurtured for other, more long-standing reasons.
Beneath his veneer of optimism, Debussy harbored secret fears,
which were arguably the most important motivation for his interest in
the past. Thanks to you, he continued in his fantasy conversation with
Gluck, French music enjoyed the unexpected benefit of falling into the
arms of Wagner; I like to imagine that, without you, this would not have
happened, and, furthermore, French music would not have sought the
way to its future in the work of the very composers who most longed to
see it disappear.31 Debussy returned obsessively to the corruption of
French taste from the French Revolution to the present.32 And as his attacks on Gluck modulated into vitriol against Wagner, so their modern
relevance was revealed. By casting Wagner as Rameaus nemesis, and
Rameau, in turn, as a panacea against Wagnerism, Debussy made the
case for his own music as the embodiment of a renewed French tradition.
As is well known, Debussy had struggled to minimize Wagners
influence in his own music, the greatest challenge being Pellas, whose
nevertheless Wagnerian style was debated well into the 1900s.33 Meanwhile, Wagners music dramas had since the 1890s become associated
with the most progressive styles and were a permanent fixture in the
repertory.34 This created a crisis: a conflict between audiences who
wanted to hear Wagner and composers who wanted to forge a distinct
French identity. Debussy was hit directly. The launch of Pellas was
overshadowed by a performance of Gtterdmmerung in May 1902, and
although Debussys work enjoyed support from the Parisian avant-garde,
it was by no means the most popular work at the Opra-Comique in its
time.35 Debussy was beset by financial difficulties.36 His job as a music
critic took him to London in 1903 to review the Ring at Covent Garden,
and, like many French composers, he was caught between admiration
and fear.37 But whereas some argued for an assimilation of Wagners
ideas and saw no contradiction in performing Gluck, Debussys proposed
solution was more radical.
At the premiere of Pellas, Debussy had asserted that, rather than
destroying melody, his anti-Wagnerian style was an evocative language
404
that restored a forgotten sense of beauty and declamation; the orchestra provided the dcor and the characters tried to sing like real people.38 Most important, he had summoned the notion of succession and
claimed that in Pellas he divined a way to come after Wagner, but not
to follow Wagner.39 But only after seeing Castor in 1903 did he reassert
the historical and stylistic tradition as well as the cultural and ideological context that would serve, albeit retrospectively, as a compelling
precedent for his work. His claim of kinship with Rameau should therefore be understood as a continuation of his exegesis of Pellas. By securing his place at the head of an emergent living history, Debussy could
claim to have come after Wagner by, as it were, coming before him.
As with so many acts of revival, it was less the adored object of the past
than a feared contemporary presence that impelled fanatical claims of
kinship with long-dead composers.
Debussys self-interest was served in a wider sphere too. His relationship to Rameau brought him into contact with a broader trend of revival, which opposed the Revolution, the Enlightenment, individualism,
and other preromantic ideals, but with an important corollary: renewed
fascination with the ancien rgime. This conservative interest in history
was encouraged by the Third Republic, which negotiated compromises
between new civic elites and old political factions while also encouraging reassessments of the prerevolutionary period by scholars and teachers; by the 1900s, a broad classical revival drew support from most circles.40 As Philip Nord has shown, ralliement and the sense of continuity
between past and present built consumer loyalty, supported French business, boosted workers morale, and invigorated education; republican
institutions emerged not from a revolutionary rejection of the old order
and its supporters, but from an alignment of various political groups
and a recovery of self-confidence on the part of Frances conservative
elites.41 Debussy participated in this recovery. His characterization of
Rameau and Gluck emphasized rifts between early- and late-eighteenthcentury aesthetics and national identity; and, as we shall see, he also
placed Rameau alongside other cultural figures of the ancien rgime.
This is not to deny the importance of politics in Debussys work. Rather,
it suggests that by participating in the nonrevolutionary spirit of some
contemporary thinking, he found a compelling alternative to Wagnerian
nationalism and German influence and contributed to a striking revision
of French cultural history, which imagined a modern national identity in
harmony with a recuperated prerevolutionary past.
Debussys second experience of a staged performance of Rameau
took place only four months after he saw Castor. This time, the Schola
Debussys Rameau 405
offered an open-air performance of Rameaus La guirlande (1753).42 This

was a short acte de ballet, a genre invented during the eighteenth century
that satisfied tastes for spectacle and light comedy. Rather than classical
tragedy, La guirlande drew on the bergerie: a simple tale of love lost and
regained in a world of shepherds, shepherdesses, birds, flowers, and
meadows. On this occasion Debussy reputedly uttered his famous cri de
guerre Vive Rameau! bas Gluck!43 But in an essay he recommended
that the Opra-Comique perform another comedy: the opra-ballet Les
Indes galantes (1735, rev. 1736).
Like La guirlande, Les Indes concerns amorous intrigues in an
eighteenth-century setting, but there are four acts, each one featuring a
different exotic location: Turkey, Peru, Persia, and a North American
forest. Les Indes explores the possibility of a universal human nature
whose cultural differentiation is revealed by love and nature in myriad
forms, and it includes spectacular passages of musical pictoralism, such
as storms, an earthquake, and a volcano, as well as a more civilized nature in the form of gardens and flowers.44 While Debussys comments on
the work again emphasized the elegance of Rameaus style, his principal
argument drew on a comparison with another artist of the period:
[Rameau] suffered much the same fate as Watteau. He died and the years
went by in a silence organized by colleagues who knew full well what they
were doing. Now, the name of Watteau is illuminated by a glorious sun,
and no period of painting can overshadow the greatest and most moving
genius of the eighteenth century. In Rameau we have the perfect counterpart to Watteau. Is it not time we gave him the place he alone deserves,
instead of obliging French music to rely on heavy cosmopolitan traditions
that inhibit its genius from developing freely?45
Debussys comparison is not simply a statement about the similar fates of

two ancien rgime artists, rejected under the austere classical aesthetic
and extreme political ideologies of the Revolution.46 Nor is it merely a
call for their revival in the name of future artistic regeneration. As an
examination of Antoine Watteau (16841721) and his reception at the
fin de sicle will show, Debussys argument reveals his sensitivity to a
broader debate about the nations history and future.
After the death of Louis XIV, the French aristocracy migrated from
Versailles. Philippe dOrlans and Louis XV moved to Paris, and, criticizing the grand got and ceremony of earlier regimes, cultivated private entertainments, grce, and playfulness. The nobility also explored social
freedoms associated with urban life, particularly popular theater.47 One
of their keenest observers was Watteau.48 His ftes galantes were symbolic
representations of the elites, who rejected seventeenth-century classicism
406
and imagined their leisure in theatrical terms. As Thomas Crow explains, Parisian aristocratic life . . . evolved into an intensely personal
theatre of social and erotic intrigue,49 which was played out in the decorative interiors of the new rococo htels and petites maisons, and in the
pleasure gardens of their estates, where music and theater explored new
identities and social freedoms.
The Italian commedia dellarte, expelled by Louis XIV and restored
by his more liberal successors, resembled the modern leisure activities of
the aristocracy: both mixed high and low art and explored truth
through masks and disguise.50 And as Michael Levey has shown, Watteau employed images from the commedia when he renounced the playful surfaces of rococo art for a more serious view of human nature in the
ftes.51 For example, a group of comedians rehearse a song in the background of Voulez-vous triompher des belles? (Fig. 1). But Watteau draws
our attention to the foreground, where a serious scene of lovemaking unfolds between a masked man and a woman in colored silk. Harlequin is
here transformed from street entertainer to rococo suitor, his mask symbolizing his social freedom; he reaches out to draw Columbine into the
dark undergrowth; and their emotional engagement is staged beneath
an austere classical statue, which is turned away, perhaps suggesting the
serious and enduring aspects of their interaction.52 Watteaus emotionally charged juxtaposition of symbols was new; and his preference for
popular entertainment (rather than aristocratic patronage and royal
institutions) suggested his role in a growing public sphere for art. He
harnessed a courtly style to a critique of the court, and as he subverted
classical order, he explored modern conditionsinteriority, expressiveness, privacy, and individualism.53
Debussys fascination with rococo art is evident from his characterization of music and passion in Castor, and from his enthusiasm for
Rameaus comedies, which focus on love and disguise in exotic and
natural locations. His comparison between Rameau and Watteau suggests that he saw them as modern artists, similarly placed to break with
seventeenth-century styles and develop new ideas about human expression and nature.54 But Debussys attention to this particular moment in
the eighteenth century was also an intensification of earlier interests.
As is well known, in the late 1880s and early 1890s he composed songs
about the commedia dellarte and used eighteenth-century styles in
pieces for the piano.55 At the same time, he cultivated a taste for
eighteenth-century painting. In Italy in 1882 he met Count Giuseppe
Primoli, owner of a large collection of Watteaus works; Primoli invited
him to compose at his house at Fiumicino.56 On his return to Paris,
Debussy encountered a city in the grip of a rococo revival. Since the
Debussys Rameau 407
Figure 1. Watteau, Voulez-vous triompher des belles? (Harlequin and Columbine). Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection.
Goncourt brothers had published their essays on eighteenth-century art

in 1856, Watteau had been associated with charm, grace, and elegance,
and was held as the epitome of ancien rgime painting and the galante
spirit.57 But while the Goncourts (and later Grard de Nerval and
Thodore de Banville) emphasized Watteaus proto-romantic melancholy and the centrality of the painters fantasy and imagination in the
408
ftes,58 fin-de-sicle critics and artists also began to see in the rococo a
connection between interiority, nature, and privacy on the one hand,
and modernity and nationhood on the other. They cherished this connection in their own culture too.59 Debora Silverman has shown that it
was first explored in the 1880s and 1890s, when the rococo interiors of
the Bibliothque Nationale and the palace at Versailles were restored,
and when the collection of rococo painting, design, and furniture at the
Louvre was expanded. Interest in ancien rgime art and design not only
encouraged widespread exploration of the expressive possibilities of a revived early-eighteenth-century aesthetic. It also helped foster a renewed
awareness of national history. Thus, by 1900, what began during the
Second Empire as an antiquarian interest in ancien rgime art and fashion had contributed to an important shift in modern art and national
identity: art nouveau was born.60
Members of the most important organizations associated with art
nouveauthe National Society of Beaux-Arts and the Central Union of
the Decorative Artslooked to Watteaus paintings as a source for the
affinity between nationhood and interiority.61 But the most important
symbol of this ideal was the arabesque, a principle of rococo design,
which Watteau implemented in ceilings, tapestries, fans, bookplates,
musical instruments, and even coach doors. He inherited it from Grard
Audran, decorator of the grandest rococo residences of the time; but, as
Donald Posner points out, Watteau (unlike Audran) experimented with
asymmetrical shapes and imaginative naturalistic imagery. Indeed, his
arabesques popularized the ftes galantes by combining genre scenes
(vignettes from the theater or pastoral scenes in old-fashioned costume)
with elements of fantasy (decorative borders of foliage, trellis work,
scrolls, and other symbols).62 For example, in Lescarpolette (Fig. 2), as
Crow explains, the central vignettea couple in formal stage clothes
merges with its frame by means of a path on which are strewn discarded
props: symbols of lust, including bagpipes, a hat, and an overflowing
basket of flowers. This path is linked to a bridge, which merges with
an outer border, decorated with classical symbols of pleasure.63 Classical
and modern are thus combined in a work that functions simultaneously
as stage, garden, and pastoral fantasy, and that creates a work of and for
the imagination.64
Art nouveau revived the arabesque in numerous forms;65 some of
these originated in direct association with Rameau. Perhaps the most
prominent was for the first fully staged revival of a work by Rameau at
the Paris Opra. A poster (Fig. 3) made in 1908 to publicize a production of the tragedy Hippolyte et Aricie (1733, rev. 1742) was based on an
eighteenth-century arabesque that showed a central vignette (Hippolyte
in a garden, lifted up by zephyrs and waved off by Diane and Aricie)
Debussys Rameau 409
Figure 2. After Watteau, Lescarpolete (The Swing), etched by L. Crespy. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert N. Straus, 1928. (28.113 vol. III, pl. 61)
Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
merging with a frame (an arch with female sculptures) by means of trees.
The outer border, added in 1908, borrowed eighteenth-century symbols
(bagpipes, flowers, and fruits) but neutralized their bawdy associations by
means of a decorative flat frame; the space between the two frames emphasizes the distance between modern pastiche and original design. The
Opras next production, Castor in 1918, also used an arabesque on the
ticket and the libretto.
410
Figure 3. Hippolyte et Aricie, Opra 1908, Courtesy of the Bibliothque Nationale de

France, Paris.
Much before this, the Scholas performance of La guirlande in 1903

drew on Watteaus symbolic economy in its placement of the stage in
relation to the orchestra, audience, and surroundings. Figure 4 is a photograph of the event, showing how the garden was an arabesque-like
frame that merged with the foliage and trellises on stage. Two statues
of masked theatrical figures mark the boundaries of the platform. But as
Debussys Rameau 411
Figure 4. La guirlande, Schola Cantorum 1903, Courtesy of the Bibliothque Nationale

de France, Paris.
they seem to emerge from the foliage and turn toward the actors, so like
spectators, they too blur the boundaries between actor and audience,
stage and offstage. In the center, singers stand on either side of a classical
statue adorned with flowers; they reflect the pose of the statues but look
out at the audience, as if to highlight the artificiality of their performance. The orchestra is placed in the garden and functions as a bridge
between performers and spectators. The audience is thus absorbed into a
rococo conceit, placed, like the stage, in a world that merges past and
present, reality and theater, self-consciousness and imagination.
I have deliberately described these images in terms borrowed from
scholars of Watteau. But the connection was also noted in 1903. Colette, Debussys colleague on Gil Blas, reacted in an extremely positive
way. A week before La guirlande she wrote that she planned to wear her
Pompadour dress and ftes galantes soul.66 And in an essay afterward,
she reveled in the nervous tickle produced by a dais embellished with
garlands, a copse lined with trellises, and candles moved by a nocturnal
breeze . . . or the wing of a little soul from the past, alarmed and ravished
to recognize this music, which has aged without paling.67 Colettes
Claudine series had recently triumphed among readers, theater audiences, and fashion enthusiasts; she would later inaugurate her stage career in a garden where she participated in an amorous pastoral play and
in Maurice Maeterlincks Pellas (the latter in drag).68 No wonder she
relished a fte galante in the urban landscape of cosmopolitan Paris.
412
Debussys comparison between Les Indes and Watteau was probably

inspired by the same visual stimulus. But antique conceits again seemed
to complement his former predilections. Aside from songs and piano
music on commedia themes in the late 1880s, his Deux arabesques
(188891) for piano borrowed the sinuous and decorative shapes of Watteaus verdant scenes;69 and he dabbled in an orchestral accompaniment
to a poem by Gabriel Mourey (an important theorist of art nouveau)
with the title Lembarquement pour ailleurs, a clear reference to Watteaus
most famous painting, Lembarquement de Cythre.70 Debussy even collected art nouveau.71 But just as we saw that after 1903 he sharpened his
rhetoric in relation to French declamation and a musical tradition of
grace, restraint, and naturalness, so the same year was a turning point in
his understanding of other eighteenth-century arts and aesthetics: after
1903 Watteau and the culture he had come to represent became figures
in Debussys historical imagination.
Debussys comparison between Watteau and Rameau included the
claim that Rameau was almost a young composer, and Les Indes was
so gracefully French.72 He assimilated the Watteauesque notion of
pleasure to a description of the French style: French music is clarity, elegance, [and] simple and natural declamation; French music above all
wants to give pleasure.73 And his interest in ancien rgime culture intensified to such a degree that he planned to compose new music according
to this particular image of the past. In 1909 he lamented the decline of
prerevolutionary listening habits, which were attuned to the perfect
taste, strict elegance, and absolute beauty of Rameaus style.74 He
began to collaborate with Laloy on a ballet for Serge Diaghilev entitled
Masques et bergamasques. He was so impatient to begin that he produced
his own comic scenario, set in eighteenth-century Venice.75 Later they
worked on an opra-ballet, eventually called Ftes galantes. Laloys opening tableau, Les masques, was set in a Watteauesque garden on a late
summer afternoon; two other sections, Les rves and La vrit, developed the commedia dellarte theme. The link between Watteau,
Rameau, and Debussy was to be celebrated in a ballet whose literary
source was a modern evocation of a lost utopia, and whose music was a
modern-day stylization of a French operatic tradition.76
Finally, Debussys view of Rameau developed alongside scholarly
interest in the eighteenth century. The influential literary historian Gustave Lanson (18571934), for example, described the theater during the
Regency and Louis XV as the precedent for modern culture.77 He was
particularly attracted to the secularism and rationalism of this period,
which he compared favorably to the religious and monarchical character
of seventeenth-century art; he celebrated eighteenth-century plays for
Debussys Rameau 413
being classical without association with the king or monarchical

pageantry.78 He repeatedly emphasized rational values, which, he
claimed, made prerevolutionary writers contemporary.79 And he insisted
that eighteenth-century masterpieces are in front of us, not as archival
documents, fossil-like, dead and cold, and without relation to life today;
but . . . still active and living, capable of making an impression on souls
of our time.80
Like Lanson, Debussy used Rameau as a fulcrum around which
narratives about pre- and postrevolutionary French music could be rearranged according to a new agenda. His essay on Castor made similar
claims about the proximity of ancient and modern music. Moreover, in
a preview of the Opras production of Hippolyte, in which he renewed
his attack on Gluck, Marie Antoinette, and Wagner (and this time
added Giacomo Meyerbeer to the firing line), he redoubled his claim
about Rameaus timeless qualities. Debussy proposed Hippolyte as an example for modern composers wanting to imitate nature, avoid gratuitous
spectacle, eliminate frenetic German orchestration, resurrect correct
declamation, and maintain French expressiveness in modern music.81
He also explored the ideological connotations of rococo art by underlining Rameaus separation from the official institutions of his time.
Hippolyte was first performed at the Parisian house of the fermier gnrale
Le Riche de la Pouplinire, one of the wealthiest men in France and
Rameaus employer for many years. So in his preview Debussy stressed
La Pouplinires role in introducing Rameau to his librettist, Abb Pellegrin, and in launching his works into the commercial world of Paris
opera. Having established Rameaus credentials as a modern composer
in the new marketplace, he then focused on those aspects of the drama
that matched the historical imagination of his contemporaries: rather
than emphasize remnants of Racines tragedy, he stressed the luminosity
of the orchestration and the divertissements and pastoral characters: the
shepherds . . . choruses of priestesses . . . hunters, and all sorts of musical
interludes in which Rameau was able to show off his prodigious powers
of invention.82
This publicity complemented the Opras arabesque (Fig. 3) by
presenting Rameau in yet another way as the perfect counterpart to
Watteau. And like Lansons project, it placed ancien rgime culture in
a milieu as close as possible to that of modern times. Perhaps Debussys
own unorthodox attitude toward state institutions and traditional musical training motivated these and later attempts to close the gulf between
past and present.83 In 1912, he stressed Rameaus difficulties with incompetent and uncomprehending musicians and singers; he praised
Rameaus discovery of harmonic moments to caress the ear and his
414
obsessive need to understand and provide a rational basis for his music;
and he celebrated his exploration of sensibility within harmony . . .
[and] certain colors, certain nuances that musicians before him had not
properly understood.84 By extending links between his image of Rameau
and a network of fashionable French artists, historians, and theorists,
Debussy adopted the terms of a popular engagement with ancien rgime
culture, which cut across political differences and located a common origin for the French nation. Debussys historical imagination masked foreign elements in his music and supported a nationalist aesthetic radically
different from Wagners. But his public persona also created competitive
advantages for a composer in a modern marketplace that was increasingly concerned with its roots in the prerevolutionary era.
Playing with Polymnie

In 1908, Debussy publicized his connection with Rameau in a new
way: his name appeared as editor of Les ftes de Polymnie in the Rameau
Oeuvres compltes.85 The series, the first of its kind in France, already
counted among its editors prestigious composers such as Camille SaintSans, Vincent dIndy, and Paul Dukas. And the authority of the project
was enhanced in introductions to each volume by Charles Malherbe,
archivist of the Paris Opra, who described in detail the original performances and critical reception. The Oeuvres compltes offered the renewed possibility of fully staged productions. It was an encyclopedic
monument to Rameau and the most lasting testimony of his modern
revival.86
The guiding claim of the edition, stated in the introduction to
Polymnie, was to restore the initial thinking of the author and to give,
if possible, the version that was used at the first performance of the
work.87 By joining the project Debussy accepted this ideal. But the apparatus of scholarly objectivity did not tell the whole story. Many contributors were friends of the publisher Jacques Durand and had no firsthand knowledge of musicology.88 While each volume bore the name of a
celebrity editor, the most strident claims of authenticity were made
anonymously in introductions signed by the editorial board. Even detailed critical notes and cumbersome appendices did not fully acknowledge the difficulty of restoring Rameaus original.
Debussys editorial role remains particularly mysterious. Lon Vallass picture was of a composer humiliated by the scholarly enterprise and
driven to it only by financial insecurity;89 Lesure suggested that Debussy
gave most of the work on Polymnie to a young pianist, Francisco de La-
Debussys Rameau 415
cerda.90 The image of Debussy engaged in the drudgery of editorial work

certainly fits ill with cherished views of the avant-garde. But while it is
possible that others intervened, even at the most detailed level, the edition that bore Debussys name remains an undeniable part of his public
persona and in the present context deserves closer consideration: Polymnie was issued under the weight of the symbolic burden that had been
placed on Rameau by Debussy himself, and it bears in complicated ways
on his historical imagination in relation to national identity.91
Polymnie was first performed during court celebrations of the victory of Fontenoy in the conquest of Flanders in 1745; along with Plate,
La princesse de Navarre, and Le temple de la Gloire, it earned Rameau the
title Compositeur de la Musique de la Chambre du Roi. Despite such
auspicious beginnings, it was revived only once, in 1753, and was drastically curtailed for two further performances in 1754 and 1765. Never
famous or respected, Polymnie did not appear in nineteenth-century collections of popular operatic airs, nor was a performance planned in connection with the new edition of 1908. Unlike other opra-ballets such as
Les Indes, which were supported by La Pouplinire and the Parisian public, Polymnie reflects its state function in its preponderance of dance and
allegorical spectacle and its simpler musical style. Rameaus fin-de-sicle
biographers hardly mentioned the work.92 Even Malherbe spelled out its
limitations: Les ftes de Polymnie will certainly not reappear in the theater; but the genius of the author should protect it from unjust distain;
the work has its own value; it is part of the great Rameaus dramatic output; and history must at least evoke its memory in honor of the cause.93
Debussys essays leave no doubt about his general support for the
cause; his involvement with this particular work seems less surprising
when considered as another facet of his historical imagination. Malherbes quotation from the great Encyclopdie explains:
[Polymnie] is one of the muses, thus named because of her many songs.
She is regarded as the inventor of harmony. . . . Her name is derived from
to remember, which means she presides over memory as well as history.
. . . She is depicted with a crown of pearls, her right arm extends like an
orator, and in the left there is a scroll on which is written saudere, to persuade: here she presides over eloquence.94
Polymnie represents a meeting of the sounds that produce harmony and

the acts of memory that contribute to history; in her, history and memory are like musical lines whose counterpoint produces compelling songs
and convincing stories. She seems tailor-made for Debussys view of history, in which music, memory, and history were likewise combined in a
powerful polemic about ancient and modern music.
416
Louis de Cahusacs libretto is also concerned with history. Rameau

had lately revised Hippolyte and had omitted its allegorical prologue for
a public increasingly distanced from the monarchy. But Polymnie was
dedicated to the king and addressed him directly: the authors invoked
the Lullyan connection between stagecraft and statecraft and offered a
tribute to history as witness of Frances military power. The prologue,
Le temple de Mmoire, the only section honored with new scenery at
the premiere, also emphasizes the preoccupation with the past.95 A chorus praises the king and celebrates historys lasting testimony to his glory;
the Arts and Memory produce a gold statue of the monarch, which they
adorn with garlands and flowers; Victory arrives; and Polymnie dedicates
a song to her and proposes the performance of a drama in celebration of
the king. The remaining acts explore different narrative genres, Le fable, Lhistoire, and La ferie, and include mimetic devices such as
birdsong, hunts, and ballets figursmusical equivalents of Watteaus
scenes. But with its long and elaborate prologue, Polymnie evoked the
past even at its first performance. The characters of Polymnie, Art, and
Memory further tie the work to history: genre, allegory, plot, and musical
style make history their theme, and the link with traditional royal entertainments is reinforced. Debussys reconstruction of a work about monarchical history and memory and his approval of it as part of the national
canon indicate one aspect of his engagement with the French past.
His choices as an editor offer further insights. The Oeuvres compltes used three main sources: the original manuscript, partly in the
composers hand and with several layers of revisions and additions; a
copy of the manuscript with significant alterations; and the first engraving from the revival in 1753, which included remarks Rameau added
at the proof stage.96 Because alterations reflect a flexible attitude to the
operatic score typical of the time, the idea of restoring the composers
first version was anachronistic. But Debussys response is an opportunity
to understand his historical ideal: where Rameaus original eluded him,
he was forced to make decisions based on a view of the composer formed
independently of the primary sources.
As we have seen, Rameaus orchestration had special meaning
for Debussy. In 1903 he praised the superb movement and energy of
Rameaus orchestra, and in particular the energetic use of trumpets in
Castor.97 Most editors of the Oeuvres compltes enhanced Rameaus orchestration to make it more familiar to nineteenth-century audiences.98
Debussy was no exception. Some of Rameaus most interesting orchestral
effects in Polymniea trumpet fanfare for the arrival of Victory in the
prologue, and a series of hunting calls for horns in the air de chasseurs
in La feriewere accepted in the modern edition even though they
Debussys Rameau 417
were late additions. And in many other passages Debussy added parts for
flutes, oboes, and bassoons, thus creating a more diverse orchestration
and enhancing what he considered to be one of the nations most desirable characteristics.
Debussys edition also expresses a particular view of Rameaus textsetting. Early in the prologue a choral scene in the Temple of Memory
describes the marble and bronze walls on which the glorious stories of
heroic deeds are inscribed. Rameaus first idea was a long passage of
polyphony, in which two separate lines of the text are declaimed simultaneously (Ex. 1a, mm. 1524). Debussy consigned this passage to an
appendix. He chose a later version, which had been transmitted in the
copy and the engraving for 1753. Here only one line of text is used, and
it is presented homophonically (Ex. 1b). Debussy even enhanced this
texture by inventing woodwind parts to double the voices. The result is
a simple, forceful setting of the text. Debussy might have preferred this
solely on musical grounds; but in light of his views about Rameau, it
seems likely that he had additional reasons. Clarity of declamation was
one of the salient features of ancient and modern French opera as Debussy understood it; and a vocal line that was supported rather than obscured by the orchestra was central to his comparison between French
and Wagnerian styles. By clearing away the polyphony to emphasize the
words Des ravages du temps sauvons la Vrit, Eclairons notre sicle et
la postrit, he linked an ideal text-setting to the notion of history, revival, and national pride: these lines appear to be addressed not only to
Rameaus contemporaries, but also to Debussys imagined audience in
the 1900s.
Some textual ambiguities forced Debussy to take a position on
the mimetic idioms of Rameaus time. For example, an air for Polymnie
exists in two different versions in the manuscript. In the earliest, also
transmitted in the copy, Polymnie celebrates the kings victory by offering praise to Love. There are several melismas on the word volez (Ex.
2a, mm. 1720, 35, 37, 3945); these conventional representations are
sometimes emphasized by a high sustained a (mm. 2830, 38, 4142).
But in the revised version, which Debussy chose by following the late
print, Polymnie exhorts the warriors to come, listen to my voice (Ex.
2b). Instead of a passage of vocal embellishment, here a flute part complements a simpler vocal line and creates a more varied sonority, and
Polymnies importance in recording the good news is underlined by the
placement of the high a, now on the word voix (mm. 2022). Debussys
earlier essays had praised the eighteenth-century style not only as a defense against excessive German orchestration, but also as a means of
counteracting the Italian fashion for commercialism and, as he put it,
418
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Example 1a. Rameau, Les ftes de Polymnie, prologue, scene 1. Original version (appendix 1908).
Debussys Rameau 419
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Debussys Rameau 421
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quantity over quality.99 His choices in the prologue reject Italianate

virtuosity and conventional mimetic devices and match French restraint
with the shift in the libretto to an emphasis on Polymnie, history, memory, and music.
My final examples are from La ferie, the story of Zims, who is
liberated from a dark forest and transported to a decorative garden by his
sweetheart, Arglie. A celebratory air for Arglie, Des plaisirs, existed
in two versions. This time Debussys edition reproduced the first version
(Ex. 3a), rejecting a revision in the manuscript and in the print of 1753,
which featured a solo flute imitating a bird and a highly melismatic vocal
part (Ex. 3b). Another birdsong that included a demanding vocal line
with wide leaps and coloratura was omitted entirely. Debussys omission
was not as simple as it might seem: although he rejected these virtuoso
pieces, he included some of the recitatives and ballets that were added
at the same time, on the same paper, in the same gathering, and in the
same handwriting. The dances enhanced the rococo element, and the
recitatives satisfied Debussys search for a precedent for modern declamation; Arglies airs were perhaps unacceptable because they bore the
marks of music composed to satisfy the demands of a singer and were
baroque in the original sense of the wordexcessively elaborate, Italianate, misshapen, and incomprehensible.100 With a simpler musical
422
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Example 1b. Rameau, Les ftes de Polymnie, prologue, scene 1. Revised version (main text 1908).
Debussys Rameau 423
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424
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Debussys Rameau 425
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Debussys Rameau 429
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Debussys Rameau 431
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style, clearer declamation, and an emphasis on dance and visual spectacle, Rameaus role as a purveyor of French identity was yet more rigidly
maintained.
Debussys imprimatur on the edition of Polymnie gave substance to
his cherished convictions about Rameau and provided the history that
his own compositional styleparticularly that of Pellaslacked. In this
sense Polymnie was yet another creation of his historical imagination.
Just as the Temple of Memory provided symbolic support to the project
to make Rameau contemporary, so Debussy seized on ambiguities in
the sources to derive a reading of the composers style as a model for
modern music. Shearing off mimetic idioms and vocal excess, Debussy
saved Rameaus oeuvre from Italianate extravagance; avoiding complex
declamation, he represented Rameau as typically French; and allowing
late revisions when they included passages of colorful orchestration, he
represented Rameau as an antiromantic and a modern composer. He effected his rescue of Polymnie by expressing the notion of a living work
not in fidelity to an original or continuing creative process (he later
heaped derision on Rameaus audience for forcing on him changes that
constrained his creative powers101), but by isolating it from any single
432
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Example 3a. Rameau, Les ftes de Polymnie, La ferie, Air for Arglie. Original version (main text
1908).
Debussys Rameau 433
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moment in history and pressing it into the service of a pure French

tradition that linked the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Debussys querelles
In a recent study of Wagners impact in France, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe
suggested that the shock of Wagnerism owed something of its force to
a reversal of cherished beliefs about French identity and the relationship
of words to music. Wagners Schopenhauerian elevation of music made
it the primary tool in representing subjectivity, says Lacou-Labarthe; and
his relegation of poetry overturned the assumption, which had underpinned French aesthetics since the eighteenth century, that literature,
not music, was the most expressive art.102 Wagnerians high regard for
music could be supported by reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus position, which emerged in debate with Rameau during the querelle des bouffons in the 1750s: that literature is linked to (or even imprisoned and
limited by) language, whereas music inhabits the realm of feeling and instinct and is therefore universal. According to French Wagnerian theory,
which offered a final word in the querelle, music works in the dialectic
sense of the word: it has the power to conciliate, to unify different forms,
and that is why it dominates, why it is sovereign; but it also has the
power to resolve . . . and that is why it provides the universal organ. 103
Lacou-Labarthes description can be helpful in understanding
Debussys agenda as essayist and editor. The composers emphasis on
434
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Rameaus natural declamation and transparent sonorities suggested reverence for words; and his celebration of pleasure, grace, sensuality, and
other rococo characteristics counteracted the ideal of transcendence in
Wagnerian theories but maintained the notion of expression in them.
Although I am not sure Lacou-Labarthe would go so far, his discussion
436
also suggests that as old quarrels were reignited by reference to distinctions between music (a universal) and language (marked or located
within a particular culture), so there was a more vigorous return to questions of national identity. The eighteenth-century querelle had added
contentions about music and words to tussles between proponents of
Italian comedy and French tragedy, and between the ideological and
aesthetic positions of the philosophes and the old order. By contrast, Debussys singular emphasis on naturethe universal underlying condition
of a timeless French declamation, orchestration, melody, harmony, and
emotional and aesthetic sensibilityaimed to wrest the sovereign
power of music from German and Italian composers, and ally it with linguistic specificity and expression in the name of a strengthened French
identity. Debussy wanted to have it both ways: he tried to mark a musical style and a reverence for language as particularly French traits.104
Debussy and other editors of the Oeuvres compltes were of course
aware that Rameau had been criticized in his own time for an excessive
attention to music, not words, and had therefore been vulnerable to the
charge of violating expectations with respect to comprehensibility in the
operatic genre.105 Moreover, as Charles Dill has suggested, Rameaus debate with Rousseau may have been the impetus behind his reduction of
musical complexity in revised versions of Hippolyte, Castor, and other
works.106 On the other hand, as is well known, Gluck and his librettist,
Ranieri de Calzabigi, reacted against another kind of musical excessin
Italian opera seriawhen they claimed in the dedication to Alceste to
have restored the primacy of words over music. But Debussy was uninterested. According to his view of history, the German style was burdened
with dense and impenetrable orchestration and a system of musical formulae that obscured the words; in contrast, Rameaus luminosity exemplified a balance between words and music that conveyed universal passions by means of national traits. Debussys Rameau was universal and
French, timeless and ever more closely identified with his own culture.
His description of musical style flies in the face of one kind of history;
but it does so, crucially, in the name of another: nationalism.
Debussys strenuous efforts to place the nationalist debate within
a renewed querelle des bouffons were also observed by his contemporaries.
Indeed, Malherbe was one of the first to note that interest in old music
was informed by modern concerns. Writing on the occasion of the revival of Hippolyte, Malherbe observed that this return to the past created a new orientation for the path ahead.107 He adduced reasons for
this confluence: How and why do all these young composers act as advocates of the old master? It is because they regain through him some
of their daring and aspirations, some of their pride and intoxication, in
Debussys Rameau 437
short, a little of their ideal. 108 For Malherbe, Rameau took on a new
appearance now that the Oeuvres compltes had corrected the errors of
previous editions; this newness made him available to contemporary culture.109 Through their involvement with Rameau, the new generation
was being drawn into the thrall of a new querelle des bouffons: It will be
necessary to declare oneself Gluckiste or Ramiste, and streams of ink will
flow again in favor of or against the god of ones choice. Thus, living or
dead, Rameau takes part in these battles.110 Malherbes unparalleled
commitment to scholarly accuracy and faithful revival did not prevent
him from recognizing the disputes of the ancien rgime as a vital engine
of contemporary debate.
Debussy was the most outspoken Ramiste of his generation, and
his edition had given Rameau a new appearance. But his querelle was
more than an attempt to gain a belated victory against foreign styles. It
was a corollary to an urgently awaited present conquest, one of which
he would be a direct beneficiary. This conquest gives new meaning to
his subversion of editorial policy at the moments in Polymnie when
memories of Frances imperial strength were at issue. It also points to
the importance of stylistic continuities between Pellas and Polymnie,
and to the further significance of Debussys description of Rameaus style
in essays that forged connections with the modern arts of the ancien
rgime. Neither the monarchy, nor the Revolution, but a united French
tradition was the victor at the very moment of its transformation into
an enduring modernist culture.
But Debussys idealizing did not prevent a repetition of events in
the querelle. Gluck was accepted at the Opra in fulfillment of government quotas for French works,111 and despite critical interest, the performances of Hippolyte in 1908 were short-lived by comparison with regular
and successful Wagner revivals on the same stage.112 The production,
based on an edition by dIndy for the Oeuvres compltes, undermined
Debussys tactics. DIndy enriched Rameaus harmonies and thickened
his textures to match a Wagnerian style; and during rehearsals extra instrumental lines were scribbled into the conductors score. The greatly
expanded orchestra supported famous Wagnerian singers in all the main
roles.113 In 1915 Debussy complained that Wagners influence on performance practice was pervasive, adding, no one cares to admit that
[Rameaus] performing style has been forgotten. It certainly will not be
Monsieur dIndy, the Schola entrepreneur, who will revive it.114 Had he
seen Castor in 1918 he would have been no happier. Some critics praised
the lavish eighteenth-century sets and costumes; but all but the most
scholarly compared the work unfavorably to Gluck and found Rameau
wanting in drama and expression.115
438
That the object of Debussys desires failed fully to materialize highlights a paradox in the modernist project, the radical opposition between
an accurate restoration of forgotten artworks and a strengthened modern
identity. I have tried to expose this paradox by exploring Debussys historical imagination; a more detailed description of the disparities between Rameaus scores, the Oeuvres compltes, and revival performances
of Rameau would further underline the paradox, as would a discussion
of Debussys Hommage Rameau. But it is clear, even within the limited
terms of the present discussion, that the impossibility of accurate restoration in the service of nationalism does not merely account for the failure
of Debussys and Laloys projects to create new ftes galantes immediately
after the publication of Polymnie, or for an edition of Polymnie that remade Frances glorious history as a precedent for a modern musical utopia.
It also points to the conflicting demands placed on a culture whose history seemed ever more distant and whose future was ever less secure.
Debussys public alliance with Rameau thus exposes troubling connections between nationalist historicism and the idea of a homogenous
modern identity. The problematic role of imagined communities and
invented traditions is well known in this context.116 But, as Homi K.
Bhabha has shown, by exposing as an illusion the idea of a community
in constant progress, we may learn still more about the ideologies that
underpin claims of continuity in modern nationalist narratives.117 For
example, Bhabha notes that Debussys contemporary Ernest Renan emphasized the importance of a collective act of remembering. Rather than
merging seamlessly with the present, the past was first forgotten; it was
then recalled in a purged form, as a unified image of the modern people,
thus re-entering the present by what Renan called the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided
form.118 Bhabha develops from this a double time in nationalist writing: on the one hand, the pedagogic or historical notion of a collective
people involved in a cumulative tradition; on the other, a performative
construction of the people as reproductive and contemporary. Covering up the disjunctions and tensions between these two serves the ideological interests of those individuals who map their own ideals on to the
image of the people, thus excluding others and asserting, artificially, a
coherent national culture, past and present.119
This discussion has explored Debussys somewhat frantic attempts
to create an illusion of historical continuity. The fragility of that illusion
is most obvious when the demands of accurate restoration conflict with
his ideal of contemporary national identity: in Bhabhas terms, Debussy
merged pedagogic and performative narratives when he claimed
Rameau as his contemporary. Debussy filtered a totalized French musical
Debussys Rameau 439
tradition through the image of an individual, Rameau, and presented his

own story of anti-Wagnerian differentiation and historical revisionism as
the story of the nations music as a whole. And he took advantage of the
figure of Polymnie (in whom connotations of time and timelessness also
mix) to create an edition of Rameaus work that straddled the boundary
between a progressive ideal of historical continuity and an isolated moment in contemporary music. Furthermore, his will to perpetuate a reconfigured past by remembering an ancient quarrel was motivated by a
palpable desire to purge the modern French style of its German and Italian others. Through this process Debussys public persona and his characterization of Rameau could become twin exemplars of a homogenous
national tradition.
Laloys image of Debussy as a worthy successor to Rameau becomes more pungent in this context, the critics complicity with Debussys nationalism amply testifying to the attraction of such narratives:
Debussys imagined proximity to Rameau received contemporary endorsement because it satisfied desires for a continuous French musical
tradition, and it has persisted because musicologists like to explain the
development and emergence of musical styles along chronological lines.
As we have seen, Debussys claim of kinship with Rameau fits such a history only by means of a trick of perspective. Rather than a direct ancestry, Debussys relationship with his predecessor operates on different
temporal levels at once. It was a response to Wagners influence in the
present and recent past; it was a strategic position that attempted to circumscribe the future reception of his national identity; and, most imaginatively, it placed Rameau in a distant past that had been forgotten and
could be remembered fully only as an image of the present. We can
think of Debussys historical imagination as an arabesque that merged
ancient and modern, fantasy and reality: the vignette at the center
showed Debussy and Rameau together; it was linked by means of essays,
editions, art, design, and music, to a frame of intertwined ideas about
French history. Each detail contributed to a picture of a national identity
purged of foreign styles. Debussys historical imagination thus supported
the public persona he created as a polemicist for, and a savior of, an ideal
French tradition. Laloys account is a straightforward reproduction of
this image. Beneath its surface are hints of a more troubled relationship
between the individual, the nation, and its others.
Notes
Many thanks to Katherine Bergeron, Carla Hesse, and Richard Taruskin for help with
early work on this material; and to Thomas Laqueur, Roger Parker, Stuart Proffitt, and
Michael P. Steinberg for invaluable comments on later versions.
440
1. See announcement in Le Figaro, 17 Feb. 1918, Bibliothque dArsnal, Paris [hereafter B.A.]: Ro 4121 (1).
2. Lubin sang Kundry at the Bayreuth Festival in 1939; in 1946 she was condemned for
collaborating after her gardener and his wife died in concentration camps. See Le Monde,
89 Dec. 1946, B.A.: Ro 5394.
3. On other performances during the war, see Charles Dupchez, Histoire de lOpra de
Paris: un sicle au palais Garnier, 18751980 (Paris: Perrin, 1984), 15160; and Jane F.
Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism, Journal of Musicology 17, no. 2 (1999): 197230.
4. Laloy studied at the Schola Cantorum and at the Sorbonne, where he received one
of the first doctorates in musicology in France; he was a renowned music critic, having
written for Revue musicale, Mercure musicale, La grande revue, and Lanne musicale. See
Deborah Priest, Louis Laloy (18741944) on Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky (Brookfield,
Vt.: Ashgate, 1999), 12.
5. Nous vmes ses traits se creuser, son regard se ternir. Il fut oblig de garder la chambre, puis le lit. Oh! Ce lit! ce lit! nous disait-il avec dsespoir. LOpra, cependant, prparait la reprise de Castor et Pollux dont la rptition gnrale fut donne le jeudi 21 mars
1918, dans laprs-midi, car on craignait le soir les alertes davions. Ce fut un de ses
derniers regrets que de ny pouvoir assister. Essayant de sourire, il me disait de sa voix
teinte, en me voyant partir: Bien le bonjour M. Castor! Deux jours plus tard, le
samedi matin, le bombardement de Paris par canons longue porte commenait. Il entendit, ses derniers jours, le bruit lugubre des explosions, et cessa de souffrir le lundi
25 mars; Louis Laloy, La musique retrouve, 19021927 (Paris: Plon, 1928), 22829.
6. Jann Pasler, Pellas and Power: The Reception of Debussys Opera, in Music at the
Turn of Century: A Nineteenth-Century Music Reader, ed. Joseph Kerman (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 12950.
7. Franois Lesure, Claude Debussy: biographie critique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 251.
Laloys support for Debussy is clear from numerous articles; relevant here are Exercices
danalyse, Revue musicale (15 Nov. 1902): 47173; Claude Debussy: simplicit en
musique, Revue musicale (15 Feb. 1904): 10611; Le drame musical moderne, Mercure
musical (1 Aug. 1905): 23350; and Claude Debussy (Paris: Dorbon Ain, 1909).
8. Le 21 mars 1918 restera lanniversaire dune rsurrection. Le plus grand musicien de
lancienne France, Jean-Philippe Rameau, a retrouv sa gloire. . . . Ce succs unanime est
une mmorable victoire de got franais. Par un cruel retour, le destin qui en ce moment
nous prodigue les preuves a frapp dune mort prmature le plus digne hritier de
Rameau, le musicien qui seul avait su recouer cette tradition de force mesure, de
limpide profondeur et dincorruptible harmonie, en lenrichissant de toutes les impressions acquises par la sensibilit moderne; Louis Laloy, Castor et Pollux lOpra: mort
de Claude Debussy, 30 Mar. 1918, B.A.: Ro 4121 (1).
9. Debussy wrote for Gil Blas for six months in 1903 and then published only sporadically until 1912, when a new contract with the Socit International de Musique produced several more essays. His essays are collected in Monsieur Croche et autres crits, ed.
Franois Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); they are translated in Debussy on Music: The
Critical Writings of the Great French Composer, ed. Franois Lesure, trans. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977).
Debussys Rameau 441
10. Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1962
65), 2:5961; and Lesure, Debussy, 238.
11. Dieter Winzer, Claude Debussy und die franzsische musikalische Tradition (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Hrtel, 1981). Earlier discussions of archaic styles in Debussys music include Ursula Eckart-Bcker, Claude Debussys Verhltnis zu Musikern der Vergangenheit, Die Musikforschung 30 (1977): 5663.
12. Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music from the Genesis of the Concept through the
Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 3849.
13. Michael Downes, Wagner and the Musicien franais: An Interpretation of Debussys Criticism, Cahiers Debussy 1718 (199394): 313; Jrg Stenzl, Versptete
Musikwissenschaft in Frankreich und Italien? Musikforschung im Spannungsfeld von
Nationalismus, Reaktion und Moderne, in Musikwissenschaft: Eine versptete Disziplin?
Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen Fortschrittsglauben und Modernittsverweigerung,
ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 281305.
14. Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First
World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17678.
15. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 17986.
16. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 176; and The Composer as Intellectual, 206.
17. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 170, 186.
18. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 180. Compare Lesure, Debussy, 2045, who claims
the best evidence of Debussys political position was his association with the Dreyfusard
Revue blanche.
19. I discuss this piece and Debussys relationship to the French keyboard tradition in
another essay, Memory and Imitation in Debussys Hommage Rameau (forthcoming).
20. In thinking about this problem I have found the following particularly helpful:
Roger Parker, Falstaff and Verdis Final Narratives, in Leonoras Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 100125; Richard Taruskin,
Stravinsky and the Subhuman, in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 36088; and Bernard Williams,
Wagner and Politics, New York Review of Books (2 Nov. 2000): 3643.
21. The Schola Cantorum (established in 1894) was devoted to the revival of Gregorian chant and other ancient music; it was directed by the composer Vincent dIndy, who
developed a conservative program of training intended to rival that of the Conservatoire; see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 2426, 2835, 4859. On earlier concert performances of Rameau, see Christine Wassermann, Die Wiederentdeckung Rameaus in
Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 50, no. 2 (1993): 16486.
22. Nous avions pourtant une pure tradition franaise dans loeuvre de Rameau, faite
de tendresse dlicate et charmante, daccents justes, de dclamation rigoureuse dans le
rcit, sans cette affectation la profondeur allemande, ni au besoin de souligner . . . dexpliquer perdre haleine; Claude Debussy, la Schola Cantorum [Gil Blas, 2 Feb.
1903], in Croche, 91.
23. Cette clart dans lexpression, ce prcis et ce ramass dans la forme; Debussy,
la Schola Cantorum, 91.
442
24. Lair-monologue de Pollux . . . si personnel daccent, si nouveau de construction,

que lespace et le temps sont supprims, et Rameau semble un contemporain; Debussy,
la Schola Cantorum, 92.
25. Que lon veuille bien me pardonner davoir tant crit . . . mon excuse sera dabord
Rameau, qui en valait la peine, puis les minutes de vraie joie dans la vie sont rares, et jai
voulu quelles ne me soient pas personnelles; Debussy, la Schola Cantorum, 93.
26. Entre nous, vous prosodiez fort mal; du moins, vous faites de la langue franaise
une langue daccentuation quand elle est au contraire une langue nuance. (Je sais . . .
vous tes allemand); Claude Debussy, Lettre ouverte Monsieur le Chevalier C. W.
Gluck [Gil Blas, 23 Feb. 1903], in Croche, 101.
27.
Rameau tait infiniment plus grec que vous; Debussy, Lettre ouverte, 102.
28. Marc Fumaroli, Le gnie de la langue franaise, in Les lieux de mmoire, 3 vols, ed.
Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 3:462385.
29. Zeev Sternhell, The Political Culture of Nationalism, in Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 18891918, ed. Robert Tombs (New
York: Harper Collins, 1991), 2238.
30. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 2056. In a later essay she elevates this
inconsistency by enlisting Bakhtins idea of the dialogic; see Speaking the Truth to
Power: The Dialogic Element in Debussys Wartime Compositions, in Debussy and His
World, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 20332.
31. De vous avoir connu, la musique franaise a tir le bnfice assez inattendu de
tomber dans les bras de Wagner; je me plais imaginer que, sans vous, a ne serait non
seulement pas arriv, mais lart musical franais naurait pas demand aussi souvent son
chemin des gens trop intresss le lui faire perdre; Debussy, Lettre ouverte, 102.
32. Claude Debussy, propos dHippolyte et Aricie [Le Figaro, 8 May 1908], in
Croche, 2025.
33. Carolyn Abbate, Tristan in the Composition of Pellas, Nineteenth-Century
Music 5, no. 2 (1981): 11741; Katherine Bergeron, The Echo, the Cry, the Death of
Lovers, Nineteenth-Century Music 18, no. 2 (1994): 13651; Robin Holloway, Debussy
and Wagner (London: Faber and Faber, 1979); and Pasler, Pellas and Power.
34. Stephen Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Sicle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and
Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2021.
35.
Lesure, Debussy, 21429.
36. Christophe Charle, Debussy in fin-de-sicle Paris, in Debussy and His World, ed.
Jane F. Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27195.
37. Claude Debussy, Impressions sur la Ttralogie Londres [Gil Blas, 1 June 1903], in
Croche, 18084. On Wagners influence in France, see Huebner, French Opera; and Anya
Suschitzky, Fervaal, Parsifal, and French National Identity, Nineteenth-Century Music
25, nos. 23 (20012): 23765.
38. Il y a l une langue vocatrice dont la sensibilit pouvait trouver son prolongement dans la musique et dans le dcor orchestral. Jai essay aussi dobir une loi de
beaut quon semble oublier singulirement lorsquil sagit dune musique dramatique; les
personnages de ce drame tchent de chanter comme des personnes naturelles; Claude
Debussy, Pourquoi jai crit Pellas et Mlisande [Apr. 1902], in Croche, 63.
Debussys Rameau 443
39. Il fallait donc chercher aprs Wagner et non pas daprs Wagner; Debussy,
Pourquoi ji crit Pellas, 63.
40. On historical research, see Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 18181914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 10713; Charles-Oliver Carbonell, Histoire et historiens: une mutation
idologique des historiens franais, 18651885 (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1976);
Christophe Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe sicle: essai dhistoire compare
(Paris: Seuil, 1996); and Paul Farmer, France Reviews Its Revolutionary Origins: Social Politics and Historical Opinion in the Third Republic (New York: Columbia University Press,
1944).
41. Philip Nord, Social Defence and Conservative Regeneration: The National Revival, 190014, in Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great
War, 18891918, ed. Robert Tombs (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 224; Nord, The
Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 114.
42. According to a member of the orchestra, the idea of staging it in a thtre de verdure
came from Charles Bordes, dIndys colleague at the Schola; see Flix Raugel, Rameau,
Charles Bordes et Vincent dIndy, Recherches sur la musique franaise classique 5 (1965):
1213. For further details of the staging, see Constant Zakone, J.-Ph Rameau au thtre
(Schola Cantorum), Revue musicale 3, no. 7 (1 July 1903): 3079.
43. See Laloy, Castor et Pollux lOpra; Laloy, La musique retrouve, 83; Raugel,
Rameau, Charles Bordes et Vincent dIndy; and Lon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life
and Works, trans. Maire OBrien and Grace OBrien (New York: Dover, 1973), 161.
44. Like Les Indes, Montesquieus Lettres persanes (1721) compares love and sexual
manners in Persia and France; and the Lettres dun Pruvienne (1747) by Franoise de
Graffigny reveals differences between French and Incan ideas about sex, marriage, religion, and familial relationships. See James Creech, Others, in A New History of French
Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994),
40915.
45. Il est arriv ce dernier peu prs la mme aventure qu Watteau. Celui-ci
meurt, les annes passent; le silence se fait . . . , organise par des confrres qui savaient
bien ce quils faisaient. Maintenant, le soleil de gloire illumine le nom de Watteau, et aucune orgueilleuse poque de la peinture ne peut faire oublier le plus grand, le plus troublant gnie du XVIIIe sicle. Nous avons dans Rameau le double parfait de Watteau.
Nest-il donc pas grandement temps de lui rendre une place laquelle il a seul le droit de
prtendre, au lieu dobliger la musique franaise se recommander des traditions lourdement cosmopolites qui empchent son naturel gnie de se dvelopper librement?;
Claude Debussy, Le bilan musical en 1903 [Gil Blas, 28 June 1903], in Croche, 19495.
46. As Rameau was superseded by Gluck and eventually rejected by Rousseau and
other philosophes, so Watteau was unimportant to Diderot and Jacques-Louis David. On
eighteenth-century musical debates, see Batrice Didier, La musique des lumires (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); and Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 175064 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). On painting
before and after the Revolution, see Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 3, Rococo, Classicism, and Romanticism, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 12732; and Hugh
Honour, Neo-Classicism (London: Penguin, 1991), 1742.
47.
Hauser, Social History, 3:112.
444
48. Watteau was born in the Flemish town of Valenciennes, which had been taken by
France in 1677; in 1702 he moved to Paris, where he worked for most of his life. See
Donald Posner, Antoine Watteau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 1213.
49. Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 11.
50. Thomas Crow, Ftes Galantes, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis
Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4029.
51. Michael Levey, Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 5582.
52. Levey, Rococo, 6467; and Posner, Antoine Watteau, 57.
53. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime
Europe, 16601780 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1036; and
Hauser, Social History, 3:12728.
54. Some of Rameaus contemporaries had also placed him in this modern context,
linking him to changing aristocratic tastes and the increasing popularity of lighter
genres; see Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 3132.
55. He used Paul Verlaines Ftes galantes and Thodore de Banvilles Les cariatides for
several songs. The Suite bergamasque (1890, rev. 1905) also glances back at Watteaus
world; and three of the four movements (Prlude, Menuet, and Passepied) take their
names from the French baroque suite. Similarly, Pour le piano (18941901) recalls
baroque dances and uses ancient forms and gestures as vehicles for modern music.
56.
Lesure, Debussy, 7981; Lockspeiser, Debussy, 1:81.
57. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters,

trans. Robin Ironside (Oxford: Phaidon, 1981), 154.
58. Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters, 3840; and Posner, Antoine Watteau,
18284.
59. Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sicle France: Politics, Psychology, and
Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 172314.
60.
Silverman, Art Nouveau, 4351, 14258.
61. Silverman, Art Nouveau, 21428. On interiority in Watteaus paintings, see Levey,
Rococo, 5768, and Posner, Antoine Watteau, 151.
62. Posner, Antoine Watteau, 5862, 14850.
63.
Crow, Painters, 6162.
64.
Crow, Painters, 63.
65. Silverman, Art Nouveau, 12124.

66. Je sortirai ma robe pompadour et mon me ftes galantes ; Colette, Au concert,
ed. Alain Galliari (Bordeaux: Le Castor Astral, 1992), 104 [Gil Blas, 22 June 1903].
67. Brise nocturne? Ou bien laile dune petite me dautrefois, effare et ravie de reconnatre cette musique, qui a vieilli sans plir; Colette, Au concert, 107 [Gil Blas,
29 June 1903].
Debussys Rameau 445
68. Claude Pinchois, preface to Colette oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); and Judith
Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 155.
69. Debussy later applied the term arabesque to music that focused on ornamental
fluidity, emotional expression, and tamed nature; see Claude Debussy, Vendredi Saint
[Revue blanche, 1 May 1901], in Croche, 34; and Lorientation musicale [Musica,
Oct. 1902], in Croche, 6566.
70. Debussys collaboration with Mourey, which took place in 1891, is discussed in
Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 4344, 23156. Mourey later identified art nouveau as a truly French defense
against foreign styles; see Silverman, Art Nouveau, 287.
71. On Debussy and art nouveau, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Musique, symbolisme et
art nouveau: notes pour une esthtique de la musique franaise fin de sicle, in Art Nouveau, Jugendstil und Musik, ed. Jrg Stenzl (Zurich: Atlantis, 1980), 1330; and Lockspeiser, Debussy, 1:11819.
72. Presque un jeune ; Debussy, Le bilan musical, 194. La grce si franaise des
Indes galantes; Claude Debussy, De lOpra et de ses rapports avec la musique [Gil Blas,
9 Mar. 1903], in Croche, 117.
73. La musique franaise cest la clart, llgance, la dclamation simple et naturelle;
la musique franaise veut, avant tout, faire plaisir; Claude Debussy, Ltat actuel de la
musique franaise: enqute de Paul Landormy [Revue bleue, 2 Apr. 1904], in Croche,
278.
74. Le got parfait, llgance stricte, qui forment labsolute beaut de la musique chez
Rameau; Debussy to Laloy, 10 Sept. 1906, in Claude Debussy: correspondance, 1884
1918, ed. Franois Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1993), 218.
75.
Orledge, Debussy, 15255.
76. Orledge suggests that Debussys opening borrowed dotted rhythms from the French
baroque overture; Orledge, Debussy, 20616.
77. Lanson presided over a change in French education when he combined the new
scientific spirit of German scholarship with examination of social, cultural, and political contexts. His approach is summarized in the introduction to his Hommes et livres
[1895] in Mthodes de lhistoire littraire; Hommes et livres; tudes morales et littraires
(Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), vxviii. On eighteenth-century theater, see La
comdie au XVIIIe sicle, 21560.
78. Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littrature franaise, ed. Paul Tuffrau (1895; Paris: Hachette, 1951), 62229.
79. Antoine Compagnon explores this further in La Troisime Rpublique des lettres de
Flaubert Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 10713.
80. Les chefs-doeuvre sont devant nous, non point comme les documents darchives,
ltat fossile, morts et froids, sans rapport la vie daujourdhui; mais . . . toujours actifs
et vivants, capables encore dimpressionner les mes de notre temps; Gustave Lanson,
Lesprit scientifique et la mthode de lhistoire littraire [1909], in Mthodes, 28.
81. Debussy, propos dHippolyte, 204.
446
82. Entres de bergers, choeurs de prtresses, choeurs de chasseurs, et toutes espces

de symphonies o pourra sexercer la prodigieuse invention de Rameau; propos
dHippolyte, 202.
83. He attacked ignorant concert audiences and critics, bad music and Conservatoire
training; see Lorientation musicale, 66, and Lentretien avec M. Croche [Revue
blanche 1 July 1901], in Croche, 4853. His disregard for conventional harmonic training
is recorded by Maurice Emmanuel in conversation with Debussy; see William W. Austin,
ed., Debussy, Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun (New York: Norton, 1970), 12831.
84. La trouvaille harmonique qui caresse loreille; Le besoin de comprendre; Il
sut dcouvrir de la sensibilit dans lharmonie . . . il russit noter certaines couleurs,
certaines nuances dont, avant lui, les musiciens navaient quun sentiment confus; see
Claude Debussy, Jean-Philippe Rameau, in Croche, 211. This article was written in
1912 for an American magazine; it suggests Debussys particular effort to disseminate an
image of Rameau as his own contemporary. See also Claude Debussy to Andr Caplet,
19 Nov. 1912, in Lettres indites Andr Caplet (19081914), ed. Edward Lockspeiser
(Monaco: Rocher, 1957), 6164.
85. Claude Debussy, ed., Les ftes de Polymnie, vol. 13 of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Durand, 1908) [hereafter, Polymnie (1908)].
86. Until recently, it was the only edition of Rameau. Work on a new opera omnia was
begun in the 1980s.
87. Nous nous efforons de retrouver la pense initiale de lauteur et de donner, sil se
peut, la version qui correspond la premire mise des ouvrages; Charles Malherbe,
Notes critiques, Polymnie (1908), xxxvii. On textual criticism and historical scholarship, see Jules Combarieu, Cours du Collge de France: Bibliographie 1. Organisation
des tudes dhistoire musicale, en France, dans la seconde moiti du XIXe sicle, Revue
musicale 6, nos. 1920 (15 Oct. 1906): 47182; Combarieu, Cours dhistoire gnrale de
la musique (lecture delivered at the Collge de France, 19 Dec. 1904), Revue musicale 5,
no. 1 (1 Jan. 1905): 323; and Maurice Emmanuel, La musique dans les universits allemandes, Revue de Paris (1 June 1898): 64972.
88. Jacques Durand, Quelques souvenirs dun diteur de musique, 2 vols. (Paris: Durand,
1925), 1:4445, 100101; and Albric Magnard, Au jour le jour pour Rameau, Le Figaro, 29 Mar. 1894. On the lack of musicological expertise in France, see Combarieu,
Cours dhistoire gnrale de la musique.
89. Vallas did not discuss Polymnie; however, writing on an edition of Chopin, he
claimed that Debussy was ill suited to the considerable amount of work both of a purely
musical and historical nature, which he took merely to compensate his publisher for
the advance fees which were mounting up during a fallow period following the outbreak
of the war; see Debussy, 253.
90.
Lesure does not cite evidence; see Debussy, 282.
91. Since I am interested in Debussys public persona, in what follows I will refer to the
edition as Debussys work, despite doubts about the extent of his actual input.
92. Polymnie gets only a passing mention in Pierre Lalo, De Rameau Ravel: portraits et
souvenirs (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947); Louis Laloy, Rameau (Paris: Alcan, 1919); and Lionel de la Laurencie, Rameau (Paris: Laurens, 1926).
Debussys Rameau 447
93. Sans doute, Les ftes de Polymnie ne reparatront jamais au thtre; mais le gnie de
leur auteur les dfend contre un injust ddain; elles ont une valeur propre; elles comptent
dans la production dramatique du grand Rameau; lhistoire doit, au moins pour lhonneur
de la cause, en voquer le souvenir; Malherbe, Commentaire bibliographique, Polymnie (1908), vii.
94. Cest une des muses, ainsi nomme de la multiplicit des chansons; on la regarde
comme linventrice de lharmonie . . . on drive son nom de se ressouvenir, pour la faire
prsider la mmoire et lhistoire. . . . On la peint avec une couronne de perles, la
main droite tendue, comme un orateur, et la gauche un rouleau, sur lequel on lit
suadere, persuader: en ce cas elle prsidoit lloquence; Encyclopdie ou dictionnaire
raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers, (Neufschastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), 12:944.
See also Malherbe, Commentaire bibliographique, Polymnie (1908), xii.
95.
Malherbe, Commentaire bibliographique, Polymnie (1908), xxxi.
96. These are Documents A, B, and D in Debussys edition. The manuscript is at the
Bibliothque de lOpra, Paris [hereafter, B.O.]: MS autograph, A 156 a (iiv). The copy
is at the Bibliothque Nationale, Dpartement de la musique, Paris [hereafter, B.N.M.]:
Vm2 355. The engraving, by Boivin le Clerc, is B.O.: A 156 b. Malherbe assumes the
copy was made early on, so he uses it as a guide to the manuscript. However, R. Peter
Wolf suggests it was prepared in the 1750s; see An Eighteenth-Century Oeuvres compltes of Rameau, in Jean-Philippe Rameau: colloque international organis par la Socit
Rameau, Dijon, 2124 septembre 1983, ed. Jrme de la Gorce (Paris and Geneva:
Champion-Slatkine, 1987), 15969. Document C, which is not consulted extensively in
the edition, was handwritten, with an engraved title page by Ballard: B.N.M.: Vm2 354.
97. Debussy praised un divertissement guerrier dans un mouvement superbe de force,
travers et l par dclatantes trompettes; see la Schola Cantorum, 92.
98. An early investigation of this problem, but with a very different emphasis than
the one offered here, was by Graham Sadler, Vincent dIndy and the Rameau Oeuvres
compltes: A Case of Forgery? Early Music 21 (1993): 41521.
99. He attacked Italian excess and la loi . . . qui veut que la quantit remplace la qualit; he also blamed Italians for le march musical; see Lettre ouverte, 100.
100. Claude V. Palisca, Baroque as a Music-Critical Term, in French Musical Thought,
16001800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 721.
101. Musiciens et chanteurs le craignent et le dtestent, lOpra. Il leur gardera ternellement rancune pour les passages quils lont contraint de supprimer, faute de pouvoir
ou de vouloir les excuter convenablement; Debussy, Jean-Philippe Rameau, 210.
102. Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 611.
103.
Lacou-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 10.
104. For a different reading of this renewed battle, see Charles B. Paul, Music and Ideology: Rameau, Rousseau, and 1789, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 395410;
and Paul, Rameau, dIndy, and French Nationalism, Musical Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1972):
4656.
105. The commentaries in the Oeuvres compltes volumes for Les Indes galantes (edited
by Dukas) and Hippolyte et Aricie (edited by dIndy) discuss this issue; and Debussy was
aware of it, owing to his acquaintance with both editors. His comments on Rameaus
448
attitude to critics (see n. 101) also touch on the idea. On Rameau and genre, see Dill,
Monstrous Opera, 3156.
106. Charles Dill, Rameau Reading Lully: Meaning and System in Rameaus Recitative Tradition, Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 117; and Monstrous Opera, 57105.
107. Ce retour en arrire do peut rsulter une orientation nouvelle pour la marche
en avant; Charles Malherbe, Le Ramisme, Courrier musical (15 May 1908): 31012.
108. Comment et pourquoi tous ces jeunes simprovisent-ils avocats du vieux matre?
Cest quils retrouvent en lui quelques-unes de leurs audaces et de leurs aspirations,
quelques-unes de leurs fivres et de leurs ivresses, en somme un peu de leur idal;
Malherbe, Le Ramisme, 312.
109. Enfin, voici venir le tour des opras qui, rendus leur form dorigine, transcrits en
leur intgrit, prennent un aspect nouveau; Malherbe, Le Ramisme, 311.
110. Il faudra se dclarer Gluckiste ou Ramiste, et les flots dencre recommenceront
couler pour ou contre le dieu de son choix. Ainsi, vivant ou mort, Rameau prendra part
aux batailles; Malherbe, Le Ramisme, 312.
111.
See Archives Nationales [hereafter, A.N.]: AJ13 1194.
112. In comparison to Gtterdmmerung in the same season, Hippolyte was expensive to

produce and not well attended; see accounts and minutes of meetings at the Opra in
A.N.: AJ13 1187; AJ13 1192; and AJ13 1194. The overwhelming financial success of
Wagner stagings continued after 1911 (see A.N.: AJ13 1286) and after the war (see
Jacques Rouch, Procs verbaux des assembles gnrale 1920, in A.N.: AJ13 1187).
113. Compare Vincent dIndy, ed., Hippolyte et Aricie, vol. 6 of Jean-Philippe Rameau,
Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Durand, 1900) with the conductors score used in 1908: B.O.:
A. 128 e2.
114. On nose pas avouer quon ne sait plus lexcuter. Ce nest certainement pas
M. dIndy, entrepreneur de Scholas, qui le leur apprendra; Claude Debussy to Robert
Godet, 14 Oct. 1915, Correspondance, 358.
115. Negative responses include Camille Bellaigue, Revue des deux mondes (15 May
1918): 45869; and Jean dUdine and Charles Tenroc in Courrier musicale (20 Apr.
1918): 15153.
116. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); and Eric
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
117. Homi K. Bhabha, Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Modern Nation, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),
13970.
118. La volont de continuer faire valoir lhritage quon a reu indivis; Ernest
Renan, Quest-ce quune nation? in Quest-ce quune nation? et autres essais politiques
(Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992), 54; translated by Martin Thom in Nation and Narration, ed.
Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. For Bhabhas discussion
of Renan, see Dissemination, 16061.
119. Bhabha, Dissemination, 14546. More optimistically, he suggests that this double time can be acknowledged in a process that counteracts the image of the homogenous nation and explores the question of otherness of the people-as-one or an ethnography of the contemporary within modern culture; see 147, 150, and 16470.

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Music and Culture

Debussys Rameau: French Music

The Musical Quarterly 86(3), Fall 2002, pp. 398448; doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdg016

Downloaded from http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Brunel University on October 29, 2013

Debussys Rameau 399

Laloys account has the force of melodrama. Debussys death and

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Debussys Rameau 401

Pursuing the Past

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Debussys Rameau 403

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Debussys Rameau 405

offered an open-air performance of Rameaus La guirlande (1753).42 This

Debussys comparison is not simply a statement about the similar fates of

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Debussys Rameau 407

Goncourt brothers had published their essays on eighteenth-century art

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Debussys Rameau 409

The Musical Quarterly

Figure 3. Hippolyte et Aricie, Opra 1908, Courtesy of the Bibliothque Nationale de

Much before this, the Scholas performance of La guirlande in 1903

Debussys Rameau 411

Figure 4. La guirlande, Schola Cantorum 1903, Courtesy of the Bibliothque Nationale

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Debussys comparison between Les Indes and Watteau was probably

Debussys Rameau 413

being classical without association with the king or monarchical

The Musical Quarterly

Playing with Polymnie

Debussys Rameau 415

cerda.90 The image of Debussy engaged in the drudgery of editorial work

Polymnie represents a meeting of the sounds that produce harmony and

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Louis de Cahusacs libretto is also concerned with history. Rameau

Debussys Rameau 417

The Musical Quarterly

A nos tra - vaux

nos con - certs

nos con - certs

Debussys Rameau 419

Example 1a. continued

Temps sau - vons

E - clai - rons no - tre

Temps sau - vons

The Musical Quarterly

gloi - re des he - ros que nos

Example 1a. continued

Temps sau - vons

Et la pos-te- ri - te!

Temps sau - vons

chants ap - plau - dis - sent,

Debussys Rameau 421

Example 1a. continued

quantity over quality.99 His choices in the prologue reject Italianate

The Musical Quarterly

Des ra - va - ges du Temps sau-vons

Des ra - va - ges du Temps sau-vons

Debussys Rameau 423

La gloi - re des he - ros que nos chants ap - plau - dis-sent

La gloi - re des he - ros que nos chants ap - plau - dis-sent

gloi-re des he - ros que nos

Example 1b. continued