On his journey to the Franciscan General Council in 1259, Bonaventure, having recently been elected minister general of the Order, stopped off to make a spiritual retreat on Mt. Alverna, the place where St. Francis had seen a vision of a six-winged Seraph with an image of the crucified Christ at its center from which he received the stigmata. It was here that Bonaventure was inspired to write a six-stage ascent of the mind into God, associating each stage of the ascent with one of the six wings of the Searph. By creatively adapting contemporary preaching techniques of the so-called “modern sermon” or sermo modernus style, Bonaventure was able to craft a work of which Bernard McGinn would say: “Perhaps no other treatise of comparable size in the history of Western mysticism packs so much into one seamless whole.” I also broach an issue that has divided commentators on Bonaventure’s leadership of the Franciscan Order since the moment he took office as minister general. In helping to foster the Franciscans presence at the University of Paris and other leading universities, did Bonaventure lead the Order in a direction contrary to the spirit of St. Francis?

Debussy’s creative world was deeply enmeshed in the cultural field of the French capital. Steeped in a post-Enlightenment worldview centred on exploration, accumulation of knowledge, and scientific discovery, no aspect of human experience and its habitats was deemed out of bounds in this path to creative accretion. Like many of his contemporaries, Debussy became fascinated by a wealth of new ideas about the world and the human condition that exploded onto the scene during his lifetime. Mysticism and occultism expanded the horizon within which to understand the mind and its creative potential; archaeological discoveries from Greece and Rome brought alive a past that belied the bland classicism so revered only decades earlier; and a rich smorgasbord of historical research – one that encompassed music and its practice – provided new materials from the foreign worlds of medieval, if not mythical, pasts. Over the course of Debussy’s life, these currents were woven together into the conceptual framework that sustained his creative world and that he claimed continually to renew rather than reproduce.

This chapter explores the fascination with things Japanese (the term japonisme was first coined in 1872), which manifested itself in many ways, not least through the collecting of objets d’art – an obsession of Debussy’s. It will examine other ‘orientalisms’ and the role of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in promoting them. This chapter intersects with Debussy’s interests in a number of ways. His attendance at the Exposition Universelle was seminal to his future development, not least in alerting him to musical cultures remote from his own. However, whilst we can hear the influence of these experiences in his music, Debussy was also a fanatical collector and browser of shops specialising in exotic products. He would often spend housekeeping money on objects for his collection, much to the despair of his partners. This chapter reflects changing consumption in France.

From what can be inferred from the composer’s correspondence and writings, Debussy was indifferent to political debate. It is noteworthy that the names of politicians are virtually absent from his letters, and that none of the major affairs or terrorist episodes that shook French public opinion are the subject of his public or private writings. This chapter describes France’s volatile politics and the impact of the Prussian invasion, the Commune (1871), the Dreyfus affair, the First World War, and other events that shaped the country. Relations with Germany and the catastrophe of the First World War are discussed. Although Debussy was directly affected by some political events, for example his father’s involvement in the Commune, he comes across as fairly apathetic in his few political pronouncements.

This chapter reflects on the class system and economic background of Debussy’s youth and the implications they had for his education. Given that he received little formal education until he entered the Paris Conservatoire, there is ample opportunity here to assess how typical this background was, or if it was shaped by the parents’ unusual circumstances. Arising out of this, there is a discussion of contemporary conceptions of the family, both at the time of Debussy’s childhood and in the twentieth century, when he became head of a small family and had to cope with the consequences (he apparently coped badly much of the time and resented the demands of family life). Despite his ardent desire to make up for everything he did not have as a child, Debussy struggled to reconcile the demands of his family with his professional aspirations at a time when men were increasingly expected to participate in and enjoy family life. Whether his struggles emanated from his artistic aspirations or his self-centred character, Debussy’s personal and professional choices were undoubtedly shaped by the circumstances of his upbringing and the increasing importance accorded to the family in French society during his lifetime.

Paul Dukas believed that the strongest influence that Debussy came under was that of writers, not composers. Writers were also prominent in his friendship circles, and this chapter outlines the importance of these circles to Debussy’s musical development. So many French composers have been influenced by artists of all types at least as much as by their musical peers, and Debussy was no exception to this. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so personally reserved, his face-to-face encounters with writers were at least as important to him as the time he spent reading their books. But as a collaborator, he was far better at discussing projects than actually completing them: Debussy’s list of projected theatrical works is considerably longer than his list of achievements in this sphere. His personal connections with writers started with the odd coincidence that Debussy’s first piano teacher was Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville; her daughter, Mathilde, and the poet lived under her roof when the nine-year-old Debussy studied with her.

Although losing more and more ground to German firms in the 1880s, the large French music publishing houses, such as Hartmann, Heugel, Choudens, and Durand, played a predominant role in French musical life by distributing all kinds of music, from the most popular to the most learned, as well as numerous adaptations and transcriptions, for example when an opera or a work was a huge success. Apart from those publishing houses that dominated the French market, the Parisian market was teeming with small publishers. Before being supported by Georges Hartmann in 1894, the young Debussy tried to have his works published by all sorts of publishers, from the most prestigious, such as Durand or Choudens, to the least known, such as Paul Dupont. Jacques Durand was a both a friend and business associate during the latter part of Debussy’s life, for he took over the publishing of Debussy’s music and helped him out in many ways. Their extensive correspondence is consequently revealing.

During this period consumerism developed apace, so that the society of Debussy’s world closely resembles our own in its fondness for shopping as a form of recreation. This was due in part to growing prosperity, at least amongst the middle classes, and increased leisure time. Fine dining, though hardly new, was also an aspect of growing consumerism. Debussy was a product of his time in his fondness for good food and collecting it. from local dealers. Especially pertinent to Debussy is the manner in which music was consumed as a leisure activity, for he catered for the demand for ‘leisure’ music in his early songs and piano works. Developing rapidly in this period of prosperity and stability was tourism, which Debussy participated in, if not from choice, certainly from the preferences of his wives and mistresses. Understanding this part of Debussy’s environment and appreciating Paris’s centrality on the European map (with many borrowings from Great Britain, including afternoon tea and whisky, both much to Debussy’s taste) throws light on Debussy the man as he negotiated the free time that many periods of inactivity as a musician created.

In the years around 1900, Paris was home to three major, well-established orchestras, each of which had its loyal patrons. While there were some differences in programming philosophy, concerts of all three ensembles generally featured an eclectic mix of music of different genres and from different eras. The abundance of concert music would have astonished listeners from the years before the Franco-Prussian War, when there was relatively little interest in non-theatrical music, and even less in such music by French composers. This situation changed after L’année terrible, which resulted in much national soul-searching in France and led to a new mood of sobriety. Musically, this was manifested in increased interest in orchestral and chamber music. The Société nationale de musique was founded in 1871 to encourage the production of such ‘pure’ music by French composers. Over the next several decades, it offered a venue where composers could present their latest creations before a select and appreciative audience. Debussy was an active member of the SN after 1888 and some of his most significant works were introduced at its concerts. But because its concerts were generally open only to members and invited guests, the SN had very little impact on public taste. Most new French orchestral music was premiered not at SN concerts, but at those of the orchestral concerts led by Jules Pasedeloup, Édouard Colonne, and Charles Lamoureux, all of whom performed a great deal of music by French composers in the years after the Franco-Prussian War. By the 1890s, however, growing public interest in Wagner’s music and the popularity of music by an earlier generation of French composers let to decreased opportunities for younger French composers. Debussy proved to be a rare exception and, especially after the success of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, his music appeared frequently on the concerts of all the Parisian orchestral societies.

Aside from the ever-dominant Opéra, Parisian musical life came to be liberally enriched with orchestral performances during Debussy’s lifetime. Whilst one or two of the orchestras catered to the ‘pops’ end of public taste, others were important in premiering and promoting works by French composers. They also exhibit the tension and torn loyalties between French and German music, especially the music of Wagner. This chapter describes some of the music composed for orchestra during Debussy’s lifetime and shows how his orchestral works fit into this context. Debussy’s epoch-making orchestral music drew an extensive and sophisticated network of roots from the symphonic repertoire that dominated contemporary concert culture. As exemplified by the Faune, Nocturnes, and La Mer, the composer appealed to a wide range of eminently familiar generic, formal, topical, and rhetorical devices, synthesising, recombining, recontextualising, and reimagining them to suit his own aesthetic priorities

Debussy lived in Paris for most of his life and left it only for short periods, with the exception of his time in Italy after he won the Prix de Rome, which he regarded as a wasted period in his life. In many ways Debussy epitomises the new confidence of the city as a centre of culture and modernity. His life embraced both its old bohemian neighbourhoods and the new, smart boulevards that had replaced much of the medieval city in the years before the Commune. This chapter explores the urban modernisation of the city during the second half of the 19th century and the Belle Époque, the development of cultural infrastructures (from museums to music halls) that transformed Paris into a ‘City of Light’, as well as technological advances that blurred the distinction between art and commodities and exerted influence on the composer’s inspiration.

This chapter demarcates two eras of piano composition – pre-Debussy and post-Debussy – by taking as its focal point a comment made by the pianist Marguerite Long that since Debussy no one has heard or played the piano in the same way as it was played before. As crude as these delineations are, the goal is to emphasise the truly transformative nature of his approach to thinking about the piano in its entirety – as a technological machine, a source of unlimited and variegated sonority, and a catalyst for freeing the human imagination. While taking into consideration the pianistic tradition that Debussy was born into and the one that he was propelled towards – spurred on by the innovations of his contemporaries at the piano, including Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Maurice Ravel – this chapter highlights Debussy’s uniquely refined sense of how the piano might be made to sound anew. By the turn of the twentieth century he was beginning to establish his status as a trailblazer at the keyboard. It would be up to his immediate successors, particularly the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to extend the expressive potential of his engagement with the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound into a dimension that exploited aspects of acoustics and resonance.

Debussy was associated with various French composers whose work stylistically spanned nineteenth-century tradition to the twentieth-century avant-garde. This chapter explores his connections with Ernest Guiraud, Ernest Chausson, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, and Erik Satie. It assesses key issues in each setting. Various relationships are represented here: the student-teacher archetype, less formalised mentorship, peer friendships, the more distant collegial relationship, and sometimes adversarial exchanges. Debussy and these composers engaged with each other in multiple ways; dynamics shifted such that the student became the teacher, a distant figure became a colleague, a peer became a critic. The study of these relationships casts new light on Debussy and the other parties.

This chapter explores the few opportunities for the education of a budding musician in Debussy’s France. These were primarily private teachers, especially piano teachers, and admission to the Paris Conservatoire (or regional conservatoires). The ultimate prize for the aspiring composer was the Prix de Rome, which could be crucial to the advancement of compositional careers. Debussy’s early education with a private piano teacher, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, was critical for his later development; indeed, he praised her playing and supported the claim that she was a pupil of Chopin. He went on to spend a decade at the Paris Conservatoire, where in many ways he trod water, at least until his success in the Prix de Rome. Even then, however, the winning of the coveted prize failed to launch his career in the way it helped others.

Now referred to nostalgically as the Belle Époque, late-nineteenth-century Paris was a paradise for all those who loved a night out on the town. As contemporary tourist guidebooks promised, one could enjoy the city’s bustling street life and lively cafés, revel in its raucous balls and unruly dance halls, be dazzled by the latest music-hall acts and dreamy romantic comedies, and delight in any number of spectacular theatrical extravaganzas. Debussy was a night owl, well acquainted with Parisian nightlife. His favourite haunts included café-concerts and cabarets, operetta theatres and music halls, band concerts and the circus. Like many of his contemporaries, he not only sought amusing diversions in these eclectic and adrenaline-charged establishments but was also inspired by the whimsical fantasies and sensual delights they offered. This chapter offers a glimpse into the popular venues and novelties that Debussy discovered on his nighttime perambulations through Paris, providing a window into the world of popular entertainment that coloured many of his works.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the life and work of the French professional printmaker Catherine Elisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur. Over the course of three decades, Elisabeth Cousinet created a range of impressive, single-sheet engravings after landscape and genre paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, Europe’s cosmopolitan cultural center. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Despite the dearth of historical evidence, her biography provides a broad outline of, and a few tantalizing glimpses into, what the career of a successful women professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France might have looked like.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

Wagner’s relationship with Paris was a career-long struggle with a highly developed music industry that aligned badly with his aesthetic priorities. On repeat visits for what we would now call career networking, he rented in marginal areas of Paris, tried to get on the publishing and performance ladder, courted imperial favour, conducted concerts of his own works, and finally succeeded, briefly, in getting an opera staged at the Paris Opéra (the ill-fated Tannhäuser in 1861). Thereafter, Wagner cults – always contested – began in the concert hall, where anything from riots to hushed listening greeted programmed excerpts of his works. Cultishness intensified after his death – in the press, in artistic and high-bourgeois salons, and finally at the Opéra. This chapter explores the spaces, networks, and contexts within which Wagner attempted to carve out a Paris career which allowed the full concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk to blossom only posthumously.

Wagner’s attitude towards the Paris-centred tradition of grand opéra and its German-language cousin, große Oper, was equivocal. On the one hand, he mercilessly dissects the shortcomings of the genres in his Zurich writings; on the other hand, borrowings are rife and a notable exemplar exists in Rienzi. After disentangling and contextualising that contradiction in relation to Wagner’s early works and writings, this chapter considers the tensions between municipal and international resources in staging ‘grand’ works, the shifting associations of German genre such as Singspiel, große romantische Oper, and große Oper, and the witness born to this by Wagner’s prose drafts for incomplete works such as Die Sarazenin and Friedrich I.