6 - Design

Summary

Formal structure

Complimentary and uncomplimentary charges of radical informality and amorphousness have always greeted Debussy's works. Climaxes that dissolve almost before they have begun and whose function does not seem designed to signpost a clear point of formal departure, such as a recapitulation, have been viewed as essential qualities of both Debussy's style and the Impressionist movement in music. Commentators still speak of Debussy's music as nebulous, ill-defined, and so on – a music carried on the wake of dreams. Schoenberg, evidently swayed by the Impressionist label, described Debussy's harmonies (he might as well have been referring to form) as ‘without constructive meaning, [which] often served the colouristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures. Moods and pictures, though extra-musical, thus became constructive elements, incorporated in the musical functions; they produced a sort of emotional comprehensibility.’

It is salutary to consider that ill-defined formal boundaries are not a ubiquitous part of Debussy's compositional style so much as a resource available to him. They are most remarkable in L'après-midi where a latent ABA division is skilfully masked; the ‘parts seem to overlap each other, so that the continuity of the whole work is extraordinarily smooth, and our recollection of it at the end is imprecise, though intense’. This work has done more to shape the popular perception of Debussy's style than any other, yet it is no more reasonable to use it to define the whole of his output than it would be to define Beethoven's symphonic style on the basis of the Fifth Symphony.