The Composition of Debussy's Piano Etudes

In 1914 the First World War broke out, changing the national climate in France as well as Debussy’s compositional path. At the beginning of the war Paris was very close to the front lines, and many residents of the city could hear the bombs and felt the great fear and tension in the air. Within this environment, the musical scene within the city shifted, moving toward the national French, the patriotic, and the historical. There was a clear expectation that composers should exclude any foreign influence from their music and abandon the experimentation that had characterized music compositions in the prewar years, As Marianne Wheeldon explains:

The musical climate in Paris veered toward the patriotic and historic. With the outbreak of war, there was a new imperative for composers to expunge foreign influences from their music, to abandon the experimentation that had characterized the prewar years, and instead to capture the gravitas appropriate to the wartime effort in Paris.[1]

Composers were expected to join forces with the rest of the country, contributing to efforts to strengthen France and win the war. Composers such as Debussy were thus faced with the questions of what, precisely, constituted a French national style, and in what ways they could strengthen and contribute to patriotism. Debussy had to find a new path for composing that would suit the necessities of this new era.

In the summer of 1915 Debussy decided to leave Paris for the seaside resort in Normandy known as Pourville sur la mer, where he experienced one of his most creative periods. Due to national financial needs, the budget for theatrical arts was greatly diminished, leading to new attention to French instrumental music; as Wheeldon notes,

All Parisian theatres closed on 3 August 1914, and when they reopened they operated with reduced budgets, schedules and personnel… But it is not only in the world of opera and ballet that these changes occurred. In general, a new atmosphere pervaded all artistic enterprise, one that was “far more austere, moralistic, and circumspect.[2]

Therefore, in this period, most of Debussy’s music was instrumental and included works which possessed generic titles such as “Berceuse,” “Pièce,” “Sonate,” and “Etude.” Debussy was revivified by nature and by the vitality that he derived from “the infinite sea.”[3] In these short few months he composed two instrumental sonatas, a piece for a children’s choir, a multipart piece for two pianos, and the twelve piano Etudes.

[1] Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 8. [2] Ibid., 7, 9. [3] Marguerite Long, At the Piano with Claude Debussy (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1972), 41.