Louis Laloy (1874-1944) on Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky

Deborah Priest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429787881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

First published in 1999, this is the first study of the noted French music critic and scholar Louis Laloy, and the first collection of his writings. His writings were unique in their time and have never previously been translated. Laloy's ideas on Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky are presented here with an introduction by Deborah Priest to each extract, placing it in the context of the period and the composer's work. Detailed annotations explain technical and cultural references.

As a friend of all three composers, but especially of Debussy, Laloy wrote with great authority and influence: his work provides recollections, analytical insights, and insights into reception and performance practice. His erudition and wide range of reference make for fascinating and enlightening reading about the period. Deborah Priest provides a detailed introduction which sets Laloy's work against the background of the Paris music scene from 1900- 1940.

On Debussy

Laloy’s friendship with Debussy

Laloy first met Debussy in late 1902, after his article on the prelude to Pelleas et MeSsande was published in La Revue musicale. Writing twenty-five years later, he describes the meeting and also recounts some anecdotes from Debussy’s earlier life.

Notes begin on p. 50.

La Musique retrouvée, pp. 119-124¹

This article attracted Claude Debussy’s attention and, not content with thanking me, he expressed a desire to meet me and asked me to go and see him. This was the beginning of a friendship which every year grew more intimate and secure, as he later put it better than I:

10 September 1909

My dear friend,

A long time ago already, you were pretty much the only person to understand Pelléas; you know how much joy that gave me, you also know that from that day a friendship began which neither things nor men have been able to disturb .. .²

Not without some apprehension, I climbed for the first time a rather dark staircase, at number 58 rue Cardinet, where he lived in a small flat on the fifth floor. I am shy, in the sense that I feel embarrassed before a new face like an explorer in an unknown land; 1 carefully test out the lie of the land with a fear of committing faux pas which often produces precisely that result, until the contact points are brought together and the current of sympathy can flow. What is more, when one likes a work, it is always an adventure to meet its author. In every case, there is a resemblance between the two. On this point I agree entirely with Romain Rolland. But it can happen that the resemblance is well hidden, and the thoughts an author puts into what he creates are those he does not use at all in his everyday life, which may be filled with dross. Or else, knowing what is expected of him, he wears a mask and puts on a face to suit the circumstances, reeking of lies. Then one can only make out a little of his true nature through chinks and by benefiting from a slip. Such were my fears, but I was soon reassured.³

His study was to the right of the dining room; the table in front of the window, a rosewood upright piano at the back. A little later the house of Pleyel, which was always generous to artists, offered him a fine mahagony instrument which he joyfully showed and played to me. The visitor’s armchair was to his left and almost directly opposite his own. That is where he invited me to sit and, bowing his head slightly to evade my protests, began by congratulating me. I felt at ease straight away, firstly because of his sinuous face which reminded me of the Far East, calm out of courtesy, and above all because I sensed that he was being careful, just as I was, not to offend the stranger, and not to assert anything unless he was sure the other would understand.

He spoke in a low, clear voice, using short sentences, and in a burst, without ever searching for words, he would suddenly lay down a marvellous image.⁴ He had a poet’s mind. 1 do not know whether, as certain old friends of his have thought necessary to assert, he was completely ignorant about literature when he was at the Conservatoire. But it is certain that, better than anyone else, he had since made up for lost time. It was no accident that, from the time he returned from Rome, he was the only one among his friends to seek out the elite of writers, and consult for example Henri de Régnier, who has since told me the story, about the text of his Proses lyriques, when Catulle Mendès was there, quite ready to undertake the task; he also frequented Stéphane Mallarmé’s coterie which was closed to the uninitiated, and to which I do not believe any other musician ever gained entry. That is where he had seen Whistler take hold of a drawing by Odilon Redon, and ask which way up it should go, and seen Verlaine take a seat by the fire, fill his pipe and demand a large absinthe. Another day he had met Pierre Louÿs, that exquisite conversationalist, and stayed talking to him until first light when the two friends waited for a café in the Bois de Boulogne to open, to sit over their cups of chocolate for another few hours.

All he had brought back from a trip to Russia were some very pleasant memories of the gypsies and their improvisations.⁵ But an old musician named de Brayer had given him a score of Boris Godunov, before the revision by Rimsky-Korsakov, in the original edition, which was then almost unprocurable. He had been unwise enough some years earlier to lend this copy to an artist who never returned it, and could only speak to me about it from memory, with deep feeling.⁶

At the Conservatoire, he had retained good memories of Guiraud, his composition teacher, but had only stayed briefly in César Franck’s organ class. When he was improvizing, the old master kept saying to him, over and over, ‘Modulate! Modulate!’ So much so that one day, to the horror of the class, he replied, ‘Why do you want me to modulate when I’m fine in this key?’ This was his sincerity of emotion protesting against a figure of musical rhetoric which is but an artifice if it is not necessitated by some inflection of the mind.

His piano teacher, Marmontel, had disgusted him slightly with Beethoven by putting words to a melody in the finale of the Pathétique sonata, which was the examination piece that year, in order to increase its expressiveness: ‘O pauvre mère, douleur amère’ [‘Oh, poor mother, bitter sorrow’]. It was only in the following year that he won second prize, with a Fantasy by Chopin.⁷ He liked Chopin very much and it was he who made me understand the poetry in a repertoire which too many virtuosi only treat as an exercise in technical difficulties. But, in order for the beauty of the sounds to be revealed, it needs a lightness in the delineation which is not within the scope of ordinary pianists. Although he had not practised for a long time, Debussy still had a delicate touch and supple fingers which seemed to mould the sound that was overtaken by the rapidity of his soft, agile hands, and to spread it out smoothly in fluid, transparent layers.⁸.

He responded deeply to the passion of Schumann and all its restless tenderness, exalted nobility and unfulfilled wishes, with the regret however that Schumann had put the ideas best suited to the orchestra into his works for piano, and that the instrumentation of his symphonies was dull and heavy. ‘You’d think,’ he said, ‘that he orchestrated in his cellar.’

Soon, at his request, I acquired the habit of going to see him almost every week, on Saturday afternoons. It would be just the two of us. On only one occasion Jean Marnold, whom I did not yet know, took part in the conversation, but did not disturb its unanimity: we were discussing François Couperin, whom all three of us loved for the wealth of his imagination.

But it was not taste alone that linked me to Debussy. Although our existences were far removed from each other both by events, and by the feelings which arose from them, it was still easy for us to communicate not those feelings themselves, but their subsequent resonances, which were in harmony. Thus we exchanged not confidences but reflections, prolonged into silence, while each of us applied what had been said to his own case, whence came to mind another remark which brought us together once again.⁹

We also felt quite free, however, when we were in a different mood, to push serious thoughts to the back of our mind and reach a unanimous opinion on the events of the day, the silly ways of a person we knew, or our favourite tobacco. From time to time, he would come out with me to buy a cake for the evening’s dessert. He was made for the opulent life and up to that point had floundered in poverty with no hope of escaping from it It was obvious to me that he was suffering as a result, but he put on a brave face, and he even managed to say that he was perfectly happy. I strongly supported his views at that time and I think he was grateful to me.

Notes

1 This is Chapter XVII of La Musique retrouvée, ‘L’Amitié de Claude Debussy’ (‘Claude Debussy’s friendship’).

2 The original French is quoted on p. 40 n. 50.

3 Laloy later recalled:

Few friends crossed the threshold, and even fewer pupils. The message of his music, however, had won him the good feeling of some fervent spirits far and wide, but they kept their distance, instructed by the example of the music itself to respect the soul of others. He was not in the mood to gather a school around him and could give no other lessons than in taste, which were accessible to rare adepts.

Claude Debussy (rev. ed. 1944), p. 86

This recollection was noted down many years after the event, but it is consistent with Debussy’s own assertion that ‘There is no Debussy school. 1 have no disciples. 1 am myself.’

4 Elsewhere Laloy writes of ‘... his bulging, sulky child’s forehead, the lively expression in his eyes, which he would suddenly turn away, his broken voice [...]’ La Musique retrouvée, p. 101. Some other contemporaries also described Debussy’s way of speaking, including Alfredo Casella who wrote: ‘Debussy’s voice was unprepossessing, being hoarse (and this was aggravated by the abuse of tobacco), and he spoke in an abnormal, nervous, jumpy way.’ Casella (1933), p. 1. Pasteur Vallery-Radot’s analysis is more detailed:

He spoke in a soft voice, without affectation, slowly, searching for the right word to make an image. From time to time he would stop in the middle of a sentence as a horse hesitates before an obstacle: he could not find the term which would be the raiment of his thought. He expressed himself as a visual person who knew how to look and he could always bring out the dominant feature. His sentences were often steeped in imprecision, in order to render the uncertainty of an idea or an impression, with a word bursting forth suddenly, vibrantly. One was under the spell of his sensitivity, and at the same time one feared it, for he would become irritated at an unexpected noise, a light that was too garish, an ill-placed word.

Vallery-Radot (1938), pp. 398-399

5 In his biography of Debussy, Laloy writes about this episode, and the passage reads as if he were reporting a conversation between them. He says that while in Russia in the employ of Madame von Meek, Debussy ‘became well acquainted [...] with the gypsies, who in the taverns in and around Moscow first gave him the example of music without rules. But he did not even think of writing down one of their melodies.’ Claude Debussy (1909), p. 15

6 Compare Claude Debussy (1909), p. 22 According to Lesure (1994), passim, the story is that Jules de Brayer, the administrator of the Concerts Lamoureux, had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of plates
• Preface
• Introduction
• On Debussy
• On Ravel
• On Stravinsky
• Appendix I     Personalia
• Appendix II    Chronological list of principal compositions by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky
• Bibliography
• Index