It turns out that Claude Debussy lived exactly as any self-respecting artist should. He drank too much, showed unwise taste in women, never got the hang of money and assumed that anyone who didn’t see ...

Stephen Walsh’s fascinating study shows the composer progressing from ‘dainty’ sketches to extraordinary works of our time The young Claude Debussy wrote a dainty music redolent of pink lampshades and ...

The music of Claude Debussy is standard orchestral repertory these days, but when he composed his now-famous works, Belle Époque Europe hardly knew what to think. Author Harvey Lee Snyder renders the ...

Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old. Bound only lightly to the past, it floats in time. As it coalesces, bar by bar, it appears to be improvising itself into being—which ...

Musical composition is based on a ruse. Ten seconds of music can hide 10 weeks of anguished pen-work. One lively theme can sit on the grave of 20 erased precursors. The ruse of writing points to a key ...

To many a casual concert goer, the name Claude Debussy suggests a moody, vaporous music of almost monotonous sweetness and grace. Anybody who ever sat down to a piano lesson has tinkled through Clair ...

There is a subtle temptation which leads a man on from mere disinterested craftsmanship, through a positive delight in his own virtuosity, to the exquisite private satisfaction of deceiving the elect.

Everyone knows Debussy’s early piano piece “Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”), one of the most memorably tuneful pieces in the classical-music repertoire. Fewer people know his scintillating late ballet ...

Debussy: A Painter in Sound. By Stephen Walsh. Faber and Faber; 368 pages; £20. To be published in America by Knopf in October; $28.95. CLAUDE DEBUSSY was a rarity: an avant-garde composer who was ...