Conclusiones

Although Barbara Kelly points out that “[Debussy’s] death quickly acquired symbolic meaning,”7 she devotes only a few paragraphs to the reactions to Debussy’s death in 1918-1920 (quickly moving on to the mid-1920s and 1930s), and so it remains unclear what the nature was of this “symbolic meaning” at the time of the composer’s death, and how it shaped the construction of his legacy in the immediate postwar era, when the consequences of the war and its memorialization were on everyone’s mind. Here I will explore the conjunction between the myth of Debussy that developed from the circumstances of his death and what George Mosse referred to as the “myth of the war experience.”8

In Souvenirs de cinq années (1914-1919), a series of articles on music during the war published between October 1919 and January 1920, musicologist Julien Tiersot recounted how narrowly Debussy’s funeral procession avoided the bombing of Saint-Gervais:

Vingt-quatre heures après exactement, sur le même parcours, un obus tomba et, crevant la voûte de l’église Saint-Gervais, ensevelit sous les ruines ceux que le désir d’entendre les pures harmonies palestriniennes avait attirés dans ce lieu. Si l’enterrement de Debussy avait été retardé d’un jour et que la trajectoire du projectile eût été plus courte de quelques mètres, celui-ci, tombant dans la rue, aurait pu donner en plein milieu du cortège.

Exactly twenty-four hours later, a shell fell on the same path and, bursting the vault of the church Saint-Gervais, buried under the ruins those who had been attracted to this place by the desire to hear the pure Palestrinian harmonies. If Debussy’s funeral had been delayed by a day and the trajectory of the projectile had been a few meters shorter, this shell, falling in the street, could have hit the heart of the procession.9

7 _{Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France, 15.}

8 _{George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University}

Press, 1990), 7–11.

9 _{Julien Tiersot, “Souvenirs de cinq années (1914-1919),” Le Ménestrel 82, no. 3 (January 16, 1920): 24.}

Tiersot told the same story in the updated second edition of Julien Tiersot, Un demi-siècle de musique

française, 1870-1919, 2nd ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1924), 228 (the first edition was published shortly before

Debussy’s death). In that version, Tiersot mentioned the influence of Palestrina’s music on Debussy. I have not been able to identify the repertoire sung by the choristers on Good Friday in 1918.

Tiersot’s brief account of the funeral is charged with symbolism. By referencing Palestrina, it is possible that Tiersot wanted to draw connections beyond the coincidence of the bombing of Saint- Gervais and Debussy’s funerals—spared by a mere day and a “few meters.” Tiersot was well aware that it was in Saint-Gervais, years before (in 1893, to be exact), that Debussy himself had heard the music of Palestrina, a composer he praised throughout his life, sometimes quite nostalgically as when he preached a return to “ancient times” and the “grand passion” of Palestrina.10 Hence, although the repertoire sung on the tragic Good Friday of 1918 is unknown, Tiersot’s mention of Palestrina was meant to draw a connection with Debussy’s personal involvement with Saint- Gervais and thus show a stronger connection between the two events of March 1918.

For others, the line between Debussy’s death and the war was even thinner. Debussy’s publisher, Jacques Durand, wrote in his Quelques souvenirs d’un éditeur de musique in 1924 that the funerals overlapped with the attacks on Paris:

Nous étions quelques amis à rendre les derniers devoirs à la dépouille de cet enchanteur des sons ; le bombardement ennemi faisait entendre sa voix formidable. En signe de glas, ce fut malheureusement le canon allemand qui tonna et non celui de la France. Tragique coïncidence pour les funérailles de celui qui fut un compositeur si profondément national.

We were a few friends paying our last respects to the remains of this enchanter of sounds; we could hear the dreadful noise of the bombardment. As for the death knell, it was unfortunately the German cannon that thundered and not France’s. Tragic coincidence for the funeral of a man who was such a deeply national composer.11

Durand’s nationalism is tangible as he laments the lack of proper national funerals for one of France’s greatest composers. He symbolically synchronized the bombing of Paris by the Germans with the composer’s funeral, thus adding an even stronger wartime connotation to his memory of the composer’s death than was present in Tiersot’s earlier account. Moreover, both Durand and Tiersot also mentioned the attendance of representative(s) from the Ministère des Beaux-Arts on

10 _{In Excelsior, February 11, 1911, in Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure}

(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 324. On Debussy and Palestrina, see Eric Frederick Jensen, Debussy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 146–47.

the occasion, but while Tiersot admitted that one could complain about the lack of military homages because of the wartime context, Durand appeared more regretful that France remained silent, asking if the ministry “precisely realized the genius of the artist who was disappearing?”12

Even before Tiersot and Durand published their reminiscences, the composer-critic Florent Schmitt connected Debussy’s death even more directly with the catastrophe of the war. In the very opening lines of a commemorative issue of L’Écho musical on Debussy, published in November 1919, Schmitt ambiguously suggested that the composer’s death was a consequence of the attacks on Paris:

La guerre qui, parmi les artistes, anéantit tant de jeunes espoirs, n’aura peut-être pas détruit de génie à qui il restait plus à exprimer que Claude Debussy. Avec l’amertume du regret inconsolable, on peut dire que, malgré son œuvre déjà immense, Debussy avait encore toute la force de créer. Ses dernières grandes compositions d’orchestre, la Mer, Images, Jeux, — celle-ci incompréhensiblement méconnue jusqu’à présent — semblaient l’orienter vers un monde encore insoupçonné. Aussi, bien qu’elle ne fût pas déterminée par la guerre, du moins directement, sa mort peut compter parmi les pires calamités de ces temps affreux. L’âme la plus française, la plus harmonisée dans le parfait équilibre des dons les plus divers, des plus subtils aux plus profonds, s’est tue comme brisée, révoltée des discordances du dedans comme du dehors, du fracas des artilleries comme de la piraterie mercantile et la lâche complicité de ceux qui devaient nous en défendre.

The war which, among the artists, annihilated so many young talents, perhaps destroyed no genius for whom more remained to be expressed than Claude Debussy. With the bitterness of inconsolable regret, one can say that despite his already immense output, Debussy still had all the strength to create. His last large orchestral compositions, la Mer, Images, Jeux—this one incomprehensibly

unfamiliar to this day—seemed to direct him towards a still unsuspected world. So, although his death was not influenced by the war, at least not directly, it might count among the worst calamities of these terrible times. His soul was the most French, the most harmonious in its perfect balancing of the most diverse gifts, from the subtlest to the deepest; it died broken, revolted by the discordances from within as from outside, by the roar of artillery, and by mercantilism and the complicity of those who should have defended the nation against it.13

Florent Schmitt’s article is symptomatic of what Marianne Wheeldon recognizes as the “collective amnesia” that shaped Debussy’s legacy in the early postwar years, when the composer’s late

12 _{Durand, 126. “Lorsque, quelques années après, je devais le conduire au cimetière, un ministre fut présent}

à la maison mortuaire ; se rendait-il compte exactement du génial artiste qui disparaissait ?”

works—such as his set of wartime sonatas—were “selectively forgotten,” or one could say “erased” from his output.14 Although La Mer (1903-05), Images (1905-1912) and Jeux (1912-13) are admittedly Debussy’s “last large orchestral works,” the composer’s ultimate stylistic developments at the time of his death are better represented by his non-pictorial and classicizing wartime chamber works. Most striking in Schmitt’s article, however, is how he very nearly presented the composer as a victim of the war, on par with (or even greater than) the young artists who fell on the battlefield. Even though he mentioned that his death was not directly caused by the war, Schmitt suggested the opposite three times in this opening paragraph when he said that “the war . . . destroyed” Debussy, that his death was one of the “worst calamities” of the times, and finally that his soul was “broken, revolted . . . by the roar of artillery.” Hence, Schmitt politicized Debussy’s death by elevating him to the rank of war hero, a truly French spirit who died in revolt against “mercantilism and the complicity of those who should have defended the nation against it.” Turning Debussy into a victim of the war was an important step toward the idealization of his whole life and of his nationalism.15

The mythification of Debussy’s death hinged on the incidents it transformed (such as the exact circumstances of his funeral) and the facts it ignored. None of these tributes mentioned, or even alluded to, the real cause of Debussy’s death: a cancer of the rectum that had been diagnosed in November 1915.16 _{Throughout 1916 and 1917, Debussy’s illness affected his morale, his}

activities, and his public appearance. He was becoming nostalgic for his healthy past: “I feel only horrible fatigue and this distaste for activity, a result of my last illness. . . . Where are the beautiful

14 _{Marianne Wheeldon discusses this in Wheeldon, Debussy’s Legacy and the Construction of Reputation,}

12.

15 _{Sometimes, this juxtaposition of Debussy with the conflict could also be subtler, with no less impact, as}

when Raymond Bouver listed Debussy alongside two other composers whose death actually resulted from war actions, writing: “today, the dead are named Debussy, Magnard, Granados…” (les morts, aujourd’hui, s’appellent Debussy, Magnard, Granados…) (Raymond Bouyer, “Petites Notes sans portée, CXC, La Physionomie de la musique au Salon d’Automne,” Le Ménestrel 81, no. 8 (December 5, 1919): 66.) This characterization of Debussy’s death as a result of the war persists to this day in academic literature. For instance, in the chronology included in the Cambridge Companion to Debussy, we can read: “Dies on 25

March in Paris to the sound of Germany’s bombardment of Paris.” (Simon Trezise, ed., The Cambridge

Companion to Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xviii.)

months of 1915?”17

Debussy’s illness was no secret to his friends and collaborators; so, their choice to conceal the steady deterioration of his health in his last years and instead persistently focus on a national event that had far-reaching social implications—the bombing of Saint-Gervais—is telling: denied a national funeral on account of the war, Debussy’s death acquired its symbolic meaning as a result of the war. As Kelly recognized: “Debussy’s death at a difficult moment during the war facilitated the transition from avant-garde figurehead to national symbol.”18 This raises more questions about the effect of mediatization in the memorialization of Debussy than it answers. It questions how the media celebrated memories of the war in the years that followed the Armistice, how “private memories were absorbed into a common culture.”19

The need to attribute a higher meaning to death in times of war is at the heart of the “Myth of the War Experience,” a concept that George Mosse developed to explain the dialectic nature of memory in the war experience. In this myth, mourning is mixed with pride as people feel the urge to justify or legitimize the horrors they have suffered by asserting the sacredness and national interest of war, to an extent that some veterans “remembered the security, purpose, and companionship of war.”20 _{This myth is especially prevalent in collective commemorations of war.}

As Mosse put it, “Those concerned with the image and the continuing appeal of the nation worked at constructing a myth which would draw the sting from death in war and emphasize the meaningfulness of the fighting and sacrifice.”21 _{Thus, the myth rearticulated memories that were}

directed toward the presentation of a positive national heritage. This is what we can observe in the several accounts of Debussy’s death by his peers as they attempted to render the composer a victim and to mythicize the circumstances of his funeral within the confines of French nationalism.

17 _{Quoted in Jensen, 117.}

18 _{Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France, 15.}

19 _{Patrick H. Hutton, “Reconsiderations of the Idea of Nostalgia in Contemporary Historical Writing,”}

Historical Reflections 39, no. 3 (2013): 2.

20 _{Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 6.} 21 _{Mosse, 6–7.}

Myths provide a stabilizing structure of meaning for how events are experienced, especially in times of war, when mythical meaning can provide much-needed justification for the sacrifice and mourning that is experienced personally, collectively, and nationally. At the same time, as Roland Barthes maintained, myth is a deformation or distortion of meaning, a departure from the truth of reality. Although it stems from an historical concept, myth “deprives the object of which it speaks of all History,”22 by which Barthes meant that myth eliminates its own sources, erases the traces of its own history and the choices that went into its formation; in short, it loses the memory that it was once made. For that reason, Barthes saw myth as a sort of rhetorical (or ideological) instrument that absorbs “historical reality” and gives in return a “natural image” of this reality, that is, the appearance of reality, but not reality itself. As a result, myths become part of the social fabric and substitute themselves for history (or rather, become integrated into it). In short, Barthes wrote that the “myth has the task of giving historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.”23

One aspect of myth that neither Mosse nor Barthes articulated, but that we can observe in the funeral narratives quoted above, is that the process of mythification is public, largely constructed by the media, and always amplified by its circulation, which tends to normalize it. As Starobinski remarked, “During the First World War, André Gide noticed that the language of the journalists (who had not been at the front) furnished the clichés which the soldiers returning from the front used to describe their feelings.”24 _{Starobinski used this anecdote to stress the importance}

of language and public discourse in the formation of emotions such as nostalgia. This reciprocity between the soldiers’ stories and the media’s narratives, which feed into each other, indicates that nostalgia, beyond being an emotion or a practice, is a discourse that is exchanged between private

22 _{See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 120–23 and}

152.

23 _{Barthes, 142.}

24 _{Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” trans. William S. Kemp, Diogenes 14, no. 54 (1966): 82. I, nor}

the specialists from the Centre d’études gidiennes, have not yet been able to trace the source of Starobinski’s reference in Gide’s vast corpus.

and public interlocutors. This can also be read in parallel with Fred Davis’ discussion of the relation between media and nostalgia, about which he argues that “not only is [nostalgia] propagated on a vast scale by the mass media but the very objects of collective nostalgia are in themselves media creations from the recent past.”25

The media can, and often do, turn recent history into nostalgia by contributing to its diffusion and to the normalization of its narratives. What might start as, or take the appearance of, private reminiscences, reaches the collective level with the help of the media’s “seamless symbolic web linking collective and private nostalgia.”26

But the media do not merely create a channel in which memories can move from the uniqueness of the personal to the normalized structure of the collective; they generate and shape symbols that constitute myths. “As a cynic might put it,” writes Davis, “nostalgia exists of the media, by the media, and for the media.” This is what we observed with Debussy’s funeral, when personal memories of the wartime funeral emerged publicly and spread in various newspapers and books, repeating themselves like a set of symbolic variations, none entirely true, but also none entirely distorted enough to be unrecognizable.

These reactions to Debussy’s funerals can therefore be read as symptomatic of the mythical rewriting of history—which also applies to recent or ongoing events—that reflects the nationalist attitude that prevailed during periods of mourning and remembrance. By emphasizing in public media certain aspects of historical events, such as the proximity of Debussy’s funeral to the bombing of Saint-Gervais, writers turned their souvenirs into mythical stories, promoting a symbiotic meaning to both Debussy’s death and the trauma lived by the Parisians during that fateful week. Saint-Gervais thus became a myth—a slightly distorted reality—that attracted a seemingly unrelated character—Debussy—into its symbolic web.

As discussed by Mosse, this notion of myth is especially pertinent to a discussion of postwar memorials, which, unlike spontaneous memories, are inherently public and deliberately

25 _{Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 122.} 26 _{Davis, 124.}

constituted.27 Memorials honor fallen soldiers and other heroic figures by presenting them as ideals and incorporating them into the national myth. In the second half of this chapter, I will discuss the

Tombeau de Claude Debussy not so much as a collective homage, but rather as a memorial, a tangible and lasting monument shaped by national myths that emerged around the idealized image of a composer whose life was unjustly cut short. But before returning to Debussy, it is important to understand the complexities and tensions that undermine the homogenized vision that myths and memorials tend to display since they are central to the composition and reception of the Tombeau de Debussy. Indeed, as I localize the “Myth of the War Experience” in the music and media of the time, I will show its conflicted nature and the inescapable challenges that artists faced in their efforts to contribute to the surge of memorials in the early postwar years. Comparable to the mythification of the sacrifice of soldiers—celebrated for instance with the polemical inauguration of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in November 1920—certain sounds (among them the sounds