Debussy’s Early Years

A Composer in the Making

 In 1982, the autographed copy of a piano trio composed by a teenaged Claude Debussy was discovered in the effects of one of Debussy's piano students. I will get to that after I explore a bit of history.

signature from an early composition

Debussy by Baschet, 1884

An early Debussy composition, Piano Trio in G Major is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a world beating composition. However, it does give me an opportunity to delve a little bit more deeply into the life of the teenaged Debussy and to look for seeds of potentiality which would then manifest themselves later on in his life as a mature composer, teacher, writer, thinker about music, culture, art.

Achille Claude Debussy was born in 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and died in 1918 in Paris. Debussy came from rather humble beginnings. When he was very young, he and his parents lived over a china shop that his parents owned. His father, Manuel-Achille Debussy never really settled in to a long-term career. He was a traveling salesman, a printer's assistant, and a clerk. Debussy's mother Victorine was a seamstress. They had difficult times when Debussy was young, exacerbated by the political realities of the time. This was during the 1871 period when France was embroiled in the Franco Prussian War, and Manuel-Achille was imprisoned for a while for revolutionary activities as a part of the Paris Commune movement.

There was much political turmoil that really shook France at that time to its foundations. This was the environment in which the young Debussy was growing up. Claude had his first piano lessons in Cannes while living with his paternal aunt, Clementine, who had recently married a rather wealthy man and was able to then support Claude's young growth as a musician and initially as a piano student.

Claude later came back to Paris and began studying piano with a self professed disciple, former student of Frédéric Chopin, Madame Antoinette Montaigne de Fleurville, who was the mother in law of French poet Paul Verlaine. Debussy later set a number of Verlaine's poems to music, some of Debussy's most beautiful songwriting.

I found that to be a really interesting and great connection!

Madame Montaigne then prepared Debussy for entrance into the Paris Conservatoire. Around this time, the composer's Camille Saint Saëns, Emmanuel Chabrier and Gabrielle Fauré founded the Société Nationale de Musique, formed as a means of pushing back against the influence of Wagnerism in Germany, which was like a big cultural musical tsunami that was going through Europe and beyond.

The idea was to put forth a means of championing and trying to define and inspire a French musical renaissance. Later on, Debussy would inherit this mantle and take it to a little bit further fruition. Although young Debussy was also very taken, it seems, with Wagner's operatic writing. He spent some time in Bayreuth, and apparently Parsifal, Wagner's opera, was very meaningful and special to Debussy throughout his life and actually had, it seems, some influence in some of Debussy's stage works.

Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire to study piano and theory initially in 1872, and he was studying piano with a very well regarded French pianist, teacher, and writer, and really cultural icon in Paris at that time, Antoine François Marmontel and apparently did very well with Marmontel. By 1874, he was playing Chopin's F Minor Piano Concerto, which is significant work, especially as such a young pianist. It seems that Debussy was really on track to put together the makings of a virtuoso piano career. However, when Debussy was ready to take his piano exams in 1878 or 1879, they did not go as planned, so Debussy had to go in a slightly different direction.

Armentell said, He [Debussy] doesn't care much for the piano, but he does love music.

The following year in 1880, Debussy joined the Conservatoire composition class of Ernest Giraud. He really took off as a composer, as a very young, headstrong and strong willed composer.

In 1883 Debussy won second prize in the Prix de Rome competition. In 1884 Debussy won first prize for his cantata, L'enfant Prodige (The Prodigal Son), which is a lovely work. I've been listening to it recently, and I love the writing so much. It’s very impressive for such a young composer.

At the same time that Debussy was entering to the composition class at the Paris Conservatoire, he was hired by the longtime patron of Tchaikovsky, Madame Nadezhda von Meck, to teach her children piano and traveled with the von Mecks during the summers of the early to mid 1880s and traveled with them throughout Europe and eventually to Russia. This was important for Debussy as a young composer because he then was exposed to and was able to study the music of Russian composers of the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Their music was to have a fairly significant impact on Debussy's thinking about composition, specifically how Russian composers were incorporating modal sounds into what they were doing. And this, I think, really excited Debussy. As a young composer, Debussy focused primarily on more absolute music with very limited programmatic elements and that of course was to change considerably as Debussy matured, but as a young composer, with a lot of his solo piano works, for instance, we have fairly generic titles such as Balad, Mazurka, and Nocturne.

Debussy was really exploring medieval modes, specifically Gregorian chants, and he began to see what he described as “elements of delicate tracery, musically” in Gregorian chant literature. And he saw, so he said, certain elements of arabesque in this music. Which could perhaps provide something of an architect for early twentieth century and late nineteenth century fringe composers in terms of exploring expanded vistas and gaining a sense of freedom, especially as far as phrasing and melodic construction were concerned.

Gabriel Faure, 1864

Debussy also was highly influenced by the music of Gabriel Fauré. Fauré's language harmonically, while being relatively diatonic, he really was in no way limited just to traditional harmonic relationships. His regular functional harmonies were not an impediment to him at all.

Modest Mussorgsky

It seems that Debussy was also very influenced by the music of Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky for very much the same reason.

To the Piano Trio in G Major. Debussy composed this when he was about eighteen years old as a part of the von Meck musical artistic establishment, and he actually had a couple of partners, violin and cello, for whom he composed this for them all to play. This trio was written in Fiasole, Italy, during a sojourn there, and I believe appeared alongside a Nocturne and Scherzo for Cello and Piano that Debussy also composed at the time.

It's a great example of how the young Debussy was processing and trying to make sense out of all of the influences he was experiencing. We can hear, or at least I do, a lot of Fauré's music in this Trio. It's a four movement work and is melodically rich. The second movement is wonderful, specifically the pizzicato effects that Debussy achieved.

I want to point out a little harmonic progression that lets me know that Debussy is very aware of what Fauré is doing in his music at that time. If you listen to Fauré's music, this kind of like beautiful transitioning from harmony to harmony, creating just a sense of ease and flow and beauty and expression. I love this so much and I can hear that Debussy is very aware of this and taking that on.

There are a couple of reviews that I found to be fun and interesting. One coming from New York critic Harold Schoenberg in 1984:

The Debussy piece is juvenilia.

Well, of course! I just love this,

You can have a lot of fun putting it on the turntable and asking your learned friends to guess who the composer is. Nothing in the music suggests Debussy. It is sweet, sentimental, and sugared. It verges on the Salon.

If you think about it, that is, in fact, the circumstance in which Debussy was composing this piece, so I think that's spot on. I very much enjoyed also the commentary of a BBC reviewer Charlotte Gardner in 2012:

Debussy's teenage Piano Trio doesn't often get to see the light of day, mostly because it reveals him very much still in feat finding mode. Still, it's an enjoyable listen, and it's interesting to compare its pizzicato second movement with that of the Debussy Quartet, and a good performance can make much of the work's smoochy, romantic leanings, the high beauty of many of its passages, and it's light, clear textures.

And there we get back to effortlessness that we find in so much of Fauré's music and how that had a wonderful impact on the young Debussy.

Maurice Dumesnil

Finally, let's talk about the circumstances in which this piece was discovered. A Debussy autograph was believed to have been lost, and was found in 1982 in the effects of pianist, teacher, and writer, Maurice Dumesnil, a student of Debussy. Dumesnil who studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Isidore Philippe, but then also studied for years with Debussy and extensively in Europe and the US, and eventually settled in the US. He is best known for two books that he wrote, How to Play and Teach Debussy and Claude Debussy Master of Dreams.

In terms of continuing the legacy of Debussy's piano teaching and discussion about Debussy's keyboard style, these books are very valuable, historically and practically. The first edition of the Piano Trio was published, I believe, by Hindley.

Performance time for all four movements is fairly substantial. It's a twenty to twenty-five minute work, depending on the performance. It really is a fun, very pleasant listen. And, if you listen to it from the context of the eighteen year old Debussy, I think then that provides some helpful context.

I hope I’ve provided some helpful context and piqued your interest a little bit in the music of the early Debussy. I wanted to also mention two other videos, one being Frederick Chopin and the Swiss Connection, a very similar story about one of Chopin's autographed manuscripts having been lost, it thought, for years, but finally saw the light of day in the twentieth century.

I also made a video of one of my mentors, Mr. Ericort and the Theory of the Half Circle, and I talk in that video about Debussy's compositional style, but also specifically his phrasing mechanisms and how Mr. Ericort, who was a protégé of Debussy, went about explaining to me and how that phrasing mechanism works. Thank you for joining me! I hope you've learned a little something, I've certainly enjoyed doing this.

​ —Rick Ferguson

In the following video I perform Dubussy’s first movement of Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major [12:24]. I am joined by two of my chamber music students, Rob and Diego, and we explored this movement together for several months. We're doing a version of this First Movement for flute, cello and piano. We had the best time exploring this piece and so I'm very proud of the work that Rob and Diego put into this. I thought that since this is the work of a teenage Debussy, it would be fun to perform this piece with a few of my students who are about the same age. Please enjoy this beautiful music and wonderful work.

Please like the video and subscribe to my channel if you don't already. Let me hear your comments! Feel free to share ideas and things that you're curious about. I always love to get in and do a little historical and musical digging. Or contact me here.