The Birth of Modern Music: Claude Debussy

Where would classical music go after Richard Wagner? How would composers who followed in his footsteps deal with his gargantuan presence?

For his part, French composer Claude Debussy decided to challenge Wagner head on. First, he absorbed Wagner’s lessons on dissonance from the prelude to Tristan and Isolde. Then he set out to surpass his teacher.

In his first major orchestral work, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Debussy paid tribute (or perhaps slyly parodied) Wagner’s prelude, with plenty of unresolved dissonances and even a version of the famous Tristan chord.

But Debussy created a unique sonic world that sounds nothing like Wagner’s. In doing so, he led music into the modern era.

Ultimately, Debussy came to view Wagner as a monument doomed to suffer the ravages of time, “a beautiful sunset which one mistook for a dawn.”

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Claude Debussy, britannica.com

Precursors to Modernism: Richard Wagner, Part 2

Opera was the original multimedia entertainment, combining text, singing, orchestral music, dance, costumes, sets, and lighting. German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), a consummate showman, had a hand in all aspects of the creation and production of his operas.

When the audience at the premiere of Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan and Isolde heard the opening measures of the prelude, they were hearing sounds that would change the future of music–not just classical but jazz, Broadway, and rock.

The pulsating, swelling, unresolved dissonances mirrored the longing and lust experienced by the story’s namesake characters. Wagner had broken the sound barrier of traditional classical music, and in doing so paved the way for modernist composers such as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg.

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Met Opera staging of Tristan from 2016, with Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton, metopera.org

Precursors to Modernism: Richard Wagner, Part 1

It is hard to overstate the importance of German opera composer Richard Wagner, one of music’s first rock stars, to the cultural life of the mid- to late-nineteenth century (and even beyond). So writes Alex Ross in his 2020 book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.

Ross presents a long list of familiar artists, poets, and novelists who engaged with Wagner’s dramas—whether by appropriating his themes, adopting his compositional methods, or using specific operas as inspiration, plot driver, or metaphor.

Ross says Wagner was particularly influential to the development of modernism. He quotes the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was friends with the composer (until they fell out over Nietzsche’s repudiation of Wagner): “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.”

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German opera composer Richard Wagner, wagnermuseum.de