Debussy’s Negative Capability:

‘My desire is only to reproduce what I hear’

Last time (DN 3rd Oct.'12) we suggested that the only music that approached the intensity of Beethoven's last String Quartets was Debussy's single String Quartet written nearly seventy years later. Debussy was not a great admirer of Beethoven and their musical styles could not, seemingly, be more different.

What could they therefore have in common? Apart, that is, from the fact that they were both revolutionaries - Beethoven as to musical form and Debussy as to musical language. Could it perhaps be Debussy's radical alteration of the language of music that makes his String Quartet remind us of Beethoven's last Quartets? Since this conjecture is all we have to go on with, let us see whether it holds good on further examination.

Debussy is sometimes referred to as an Impressionist composer. Although he disliked the term being applied to himself, the fact remains that he was much influenced by the Impressionist painters of his time such as Monet and Renoir. They too were revolutionaries. They are spoken of as the discoverers of light. This is because their primary interest was not in their subjects or in objects themselves, but in the way these reflected light. Many of their paintings are set, and were actually painted, out of doors. For instance, Monet's ‘The Banks of the Seine at Vetheuil’ dazzles us with its myriad splashes and streaks of colour just as the actual sun-drenched scene must have dazzled the artist. But through it all we can discern the composition of the scene and the skilful management of perspective.

Claude Debussy

The Impressionists were concerned with communicating the sensory impressions they received from nature and life directly as these affected their visual imagination. Debussy was concerned with doing likewise in connection with his auditory imagination. This is how he put it: “There is more to be gained by watching the sun rise than by hearing the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. To some people rules are of primary importance. But my desire is only to reproduce what I hear. Music was intended to receive the mysterious accord that exists getween nature and the imagination.”

For the Impressionists light dominated over form. For Debussy it was sound that dominated form. The painters achieved this through their their thick strokes and rich splashes of paint, their highly varied and brilliantly matched colours and shades, which all but submerged, but nevertheless indicated, the underlying forms. Debussy achieved this through the density and the strangeness of his harmonies. Debussy's music does not feature logical harmonic progressions and resolutions such as you find in Beethoven for all the latter's propensity for modulating to diferent keys. There is nevertheless an emotional logic to Debussy's harmonic sequences. Each chord usually has an emotional impact of its own and therefore provides its own resolution. Thus, though the modulations are arbitrary to the extent that tonality or the sense of key is dissipated, they still contribute towards the overall pattern of the composition. This is as discenible as the river-banks composition of Monet is behind all the multicoloured flashes of light.

This is how Debussy revolutionised musical language. He changed its grammar and its syntax. But he treasured the intervals, the differences between the pitches of notes. There are no unpitched sounds in his music, such as we find in some ultra-modern music. The interval continues to be the basis of his musical language. But now newer intervals assume an importance.

Not just the customary triads and tertiaries and cadences, but so-called discords or unresolved chords like sevenths and ninths and cluster (closely-knit)-chords, various ultra-octave intervals and whole-tone scale formations, all of which have the effect of dissolving tonality.

With regard to his comment above about the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, what Debussy evidently meant was that Beethoven's personality interfered with the direct experience of nature that a mere passive contemplation of it would afford. This puts one in mind of a beautiful passage in ‘Wuthering Heights’ where the younger Cathy is talking to her sickly cousin, Linton:

“One time we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly.

That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and the woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecatasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee.”

Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to conjecture tnat Linton's and Cathy's markedy different approaches to nature correspond to those of Debussy and Beethoven respectively; the former passively receptive, the latter actively participative. The point is that Beethoven's insistence on participating makes the ‘Pastoral’ as much about himself as it is about nature. ‘A glorious jubilee’ neatly sums up the experience of this symphony.

Debussy, on the other hand, was content to keep his personality out of the picture and give himself wholly up to ‘the mysterious accord that exists between nature and the imagination'.

In fact, he displays the musical equivalent of the Keatsian quality of Negative Capability.’ Keats describes this as the ability that a great poet like Shakespeare has ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

The greatness of Beethoven is that his music reflects not only the mysteries, doubts and uncertainties but the failure as well as the success of his struggle to resolve these. The greatness of Debussy is his ability to give us the full impact of what Wordsworth calls ‘the burthen of the mystery’ without trying to understand and explain it.

Debussy's version of Negative Capability is very much in evidence in his best-known orchestral work, ‘La Mer’ (The Sea). Thls is in three movements but it is far from being a cross between a traditional symphony and a symphonic poem, which is what Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony is.

It is probably his most ‘impressionistic’ work and the least tonal, ie having an intelligible pattern of key relationships. The music is made up of several fragments yet each fragment is powerfully expounded. What he builds up for us is a gigantic seascape depicting the many moods and motions of the ocean. We are, in fact, reminded of one of the most famous works of Impressionist art, namely Monet's series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral as seen at various times of the day and the year. The amazing transformation of the subject from painting to painting represents the changes wrought upon its appearance by the succession of different lights in which it is viewed.

This is achieved through the rich layers and textures of paint whereby the artist captures the way light plays on the barely decipherable forms of the solemn edifice. Likewise, Debussy uses many layers and textures of harmony, along with the other dynamics of music, to give us this unique experience of the sea as it really is, independent of our accustomed ideas about it.

What we have considered above has only served to deepen our impression of the gulf that separates the music of Debussy from that of Beethoven. What affinity could there possibly be between the two? To answer this question we need, next time, to trace the process whereby their entirely different musical techniques achieve a similarity of effect.