Music: Impressionist

He was catlike and solitary, as he was artistic and amorous. . . . Feline . . . is the adjective most used to suggest his walk, his manner, his particular kind of acrid wit, his playfulness, his sulks, and, most of all, the voluptuousness that colored his whole relation to life and art.

This engaging character was Achille-Claude Debussy, who died in 1918. He had to wait until last week and the appearance of his first American biography*—his third in English—for a book that would do justice to his lush Bohemian personality and his stature as a composer. Author Thompson, music critic of the New York Sun, paints an intimate picture. Debussy not only resembled a cat; he lived with live cats and collected porcelain cats. His living cats were always grey angoras, always named Line. His women were less uniform. To him the four most important were Mme Vasnier, wife of an aging friend, who brought him from adolescence to manhood; green-eyed Gabrielle Dupont, who lived with him while he worked on his opera, Pelleas et Melisande;Rosalie Texier (Wife No. 1), who had an unpleasant voice which finally got on his nerves; Emma Bardac (Wife No. 2), a singer with a pleasant voice who lived with him until his death.

In other personal respects M. Debussy was equally Bohemian. A short-legged, thick-set man, seldom in funds, he was forever wandering indolently into Left Bank and Montmartre cafes. There he would sit in a cape and large felt hat, ordering rarebits and English ale, rolling his own cigarets. He preferred the circus to the opera, and disliked listening to music, though he accepted several jobs writing music criticism for Paris publications. He finally succumbed to cancer of the rectum one spring when Big Bertha was dropping shells into Paris.

But this same M. Debussy was a hardworking, painstaking composer and in music a revolutionist, if not of a very red dye. Hating the emotionalism of Wagner and other romantic composers, he created a musical language of his own, painted tone-pictures of impressions from nature, conceived a whole new palette of instrumental and harmonic colors. Critics, fond of loose similes, called him a symbolist like Poets Mallarme and Verlaine; others called him an impressionist like Painters Renoir and Monet. The latter title stuck. His work—fastidious, poetic, voluptuous and all but perfection in technique—had an immense influence on the composers of the early nineteen hundreds. Besides a picture of an incurable Bohemian, BiographerThompson offers a systematic critical study of all of his compositions, from the slightest piano piece to L’Après-midi d’un Faune and Pelleas et Melisande.

*DEBUSSY: MAN AND ARTIST, by Oscar Thompson, Dodd, Mead ($3.50).