Episode Details

The music of Claude Debussy suggests serenity, but the man behind it was a rebel whose personal choices led to a shooting in the Place de la Concorde. Born in 1862 above a failed china shop, displaced by the Franco-Prussian War while his father served prison time for joining the Paris Commune, Debussy entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age ten and immediately clashed with its Germanic harmonic rules. This episode traces how he won the Prix de Rome in 1884 by deliberately imitating conventional style, then rejected it all.

We examine the influences that shaped his new sound: hearing Wagner at Bayreuth and concluding it was a dead end, encountering a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and absorbing Russian orchestral color. We cover the 1894 premiere of his faun prelude, the decade-long creation of his opera and the casting feud that ended in a duel challenge, and the 1904 scandal when he abandoned his wife Lily Texier for Emma Bardac. We close with his cancer diagnosis, his death in 1918 during the German bombardment of Paris, and his influence on Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Bill Evans, and Herbie Hancock.

• How a fellow prisoner's mother became the piano teacher who got him into the Conservatoire at ten
• Why Debussy called Wagner a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn
• How whole-tone and pentatonic scales remove the leading tone and make music hover in place
• Why he despised the Impressionist label and aligned himself with the Symbolist poets instead
• The friends, including Ravel, who raised money for Lily after she shot herself