Debussy Quotes

music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light

When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien. Hunting knife

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

I feel I am in love with you, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

People don't very much like things that are beautiful.. they are so far from their nasty little minds.

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy.

the colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

Music is the space between the notes.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself

Bach, Chopin, Schumann, these composers have mastered the art of listening. Richard hears Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” and every cell in his body has a broken heart and bare feet dancing in the moonlight. Playing Brahms is communing with God.

I feel I am in love with you and it should be Spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

Nothing more then nothing can be said. We make our lives by what we love. Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big. Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: “I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others”. Satie said: “When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing”. Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure. It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep. All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.

There's never one sunrise the same or one sunset the same.

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses

I’ve always been a fan of the melancholy, like Morrissey. I grew up playing classical nocturnes like Chopin and Debussy on piano, so I write really melancholy lyrics and melodies

Which composers?” “Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Maurice Ravel are my favorites.

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.

Un artiste est par définition un homme habitué au rêve et qui vit parmi des fantômes.

Where the piano is, there is one's treasure, as far as I am concerned....nothing, surely, is more delightful than sitting down at the piano on a summer day, and playing Chopin or Debussy while the natural sunlight drifts over one's shoulders through the vines outside, creating a filigree of shadow in the printed page...a shifting pattern of ghostly leaf and blossom that dances to the mood of the music.

I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me." You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?" "And Debussy." Did he ever talk back?" The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air. "No," he says. "He never did.

Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman

Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.

Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune.

Debussy’s quote that “Music is the space between the notes,” because an analogous statement about trading—Trading is the space between trades—is so strikingly apropos.

elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out

I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

Siento que estoy enamorada de ti, y debería ser primavera. Quiero que el sol caiga sobre mi cabeza como coros musicales. Imagino un sol como Beethoven, un viento como Debussy, y cantos de pájaros como Stravinski. Pero el ritmo es totalmente mío

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But this is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more--a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.

When it came to the realm of creativity, I was basically facing a pure nothingness. When Claude Debussy had writer’s block while composing an opera, he wrote, “Day after day I produce rien—nothingness.” That summer was the same for me—day after day I took part in producing nothingness.

Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry’s taste. He didn’t care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?

Αν πρέπει να νικηθώ, άραγε εσύ θα είσαι ο νικητής μου;

I wasn't trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me." "You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?" "And Debussy." "Did he ever talk back?" The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air. "No," he says. "He never did.

At the piano, he felt a stinging of notes in A minor play themselves, doodling down and then upward as a sort of introduction before an odd bluesy tune interrupted the chords he had been vamping around with. The tune started in his right hand before moving to his left, sounding vaguely like an absentminded jazz pianist remembering Bill Evans but as Bill Evans, debilitated and in a cocaine haze, might have remembered Debussy. All of Brettigan’s music was filled with memories of other music.

Here again the seller’s voice recalled the barely musical declamation of Mussorgsky, but that was not all. For after having delivered “Snails, snails, lovely fresh snails” almost parlando, it was with the vague sadness of Maeterlinck, transposed into music by Debussy, that the snail man, in one of those sorrowful final phrases which the author of Pelléas seems to have learned from Rameau12 (“If I am to be conquered, must you be my conqueror?”), added, with melancholy plangency, “Six sous a do-zen . .

Dedico-me à tempestade de Beethoven. A vibração das cores neutras de Bach. A Chopin que me amolece os ossos. A stravinsky que me espantou e com quem voei em fogo. Â morte e transfiguração, em que Richard Strauss me revela um destino? Sobretudo, dedico-me às vesperas de hoje e a hoje, ao trasnparente véu de Debussy, a Marlos Nobre, a Prokofiev,a Carl Orf, a Schönngberg, aos dodecafônicos, aos gritos rascantes dos eletronicos - a tonas esses que em mim atigiram zonas assutadoramente inesperadas, todos esses profetas do presente e que a mim me vaticinaram a mim mesmo a ponte de eu neste instante explodir em : eu. Esse eu que é vós pois não aguento ser apenas mim, preciso dos outros para me manter de pé, tão tonto que sou, eu enviesado, enfim que é que se há de fazer senão meditar para cair naquele vazio pleno que só se atinge com a meditação. Meditar não precisa de ter resultados: a meditação pode ter como fim apenas ela mesma. Eu medito sem palavras e sobre o nada. O que me atrapalha a vida é escrever.

Rodin was on the brink of a grand passion. But unlike Bernhardt’s, his lover would become the greatest inspiration of his career. Her name was Camille Claudel, and if she was not pretty in a conventional way, she was as beautiful and alive as quicksilver. She was also an extraordinarily gifted sculptor in her own right.

Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things. And that is why I have this irrefutable need to escape and become involved in adventures which seem inexplicable because they involve a man no one recognizes. And perhaps that is what is best in me! Besides, an artist by definition is a man accustomed to dreams and who lives among phantoms. . . . How could it be expected that this same person would be able to follow in his daily life the strict observance of traditions— laws and other barriers erected by a hypocritical and cowardly world. (Letter from Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand)

He laughed quietly. 'A family is a strange thing,' he said. 'A family has to exist as its own premise, or else the system won't function. In that sense, my useless legs are kind of a banner that my family rallies around. My legs are the pivot around which things revolve.' He was tapping at the table top again. Not in irritation – merely moving his fingers and quietly contemplating things in his own time zone. One of the main characteristics of this system is that lack gravitates towards greater lack, excess towards greater excess. When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spend my days pursuing nothingness, –

Murakami: Had you been listening to Mahler before Bernstein got you started? Ozawa: No, not at all. […] It was a huge shock for me – until then I never even knew music like that existed. I mean, here at Tanglewood, playing Tchaikovsky and Debussy, and meanwhile there’s this guy putting all his energy into studying Mahler. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I had to order my own copies right then and there. After that, I started reading Mahler like crazy – the First, the Second, the Fifth. Murakami: Did you enjoy just reading the scores? Ozawa: Oh, tremendously. I mean, it was the first time in my life I had ever seen anything like them. To think there were scores like this! Murakami: Was it a completely different world from the music you had been playing until then? Ozawa: First of all, I was amazed that there was someone who knew how to use an orchestra so well. It was extreme – his marvelous ability to put every component of the orchestra to use. And from the orchestra’s point of view, the Mahler symphonies are the most challenging pieces ever.

It was delicious in the garden. The storm had passed over long since, and it was still and warm; the sweetness of the stocks and roses filled the air with the peculiar intensity of fragrance of flowers after rain - in the evening light they had the unnatural shadowy vividness of a coloured photograph. The rain had stirred up the nightingales too - near and far, their bubbling ecstasy welled out from the dark shelter of ilexes and cypresses, and through the open windows of the villa there came presently the cool elusive sequences of Debussy's music - ghosts of melody rather than melodies, evocations rather than statements; gleams on water and pale lights in spring skies, a single star, slow waves beating in mist on a deserted shore. Grace leant back in the corner of her seat, listening, watching the leaves of the buckthorns, like little curved pencils, against the sky above her head; in the relaxation of fatigue her attention was fixed on nothing, but some part of her was profoundly aware of all these things - the scent of the flowers, the song of the nightingales, the cool western music, with its memories of her own Atlantic shores.

Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L’assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet’s painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale. Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it.

The great French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile’. His attitude to painting was a little more responsive: he admired (and knew) Lautrec, and approved of Renoir; but he found Cézanne barbarous and Monet’s waterlilies ‘girly’. This was less philistinism than a robust admission of his own areas of non-response. And he did write one wonderful thing about painting, on 8 January 1908: ‘When I am in front of a picture, it speaks better than I do.’ It is a chastening remark, because most of us, when in front of a picture, do not give the picture time enough to speak. We talk at it, about it, of it, to it; we want to forcibly understand it, get its measure, colonise it, ‘friend’ it. We compare it to other pictures it reminds us of; we read the label on the wall, confirm that it is, say, pastel on monotype, and check which gallery or plutocrat owns it. But unless we are highly trained, we don’t know enough to recognise more than roughly how the picture relates to the history of painting (because it always does, even if negatively). Instead, we hose it with words and move on.

In the meantime, he anxiously awaited visitors, and on occasion even attempted some visits of his own—including one to his nearby Bellevue neighbor, the charming and notorious courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne. Red-haired and beautiful, Valtesse de la Bigne had brought several rich and titled men to financial ruin. She had also captivated some of the most sophisticated men in town, including Manet, who referred to her as “la belle Valtesse” and had painted her the year before. Born Louise Emilie Delabigne, Valtesse de la Bigne was sufficiently intelligent and charming to draw an entourage of admiring writers and artists such as Manet. Zola also paid court to Valtesse—although in his case from a desire to get the characters and setting right for his upcoming novel Nana. Flattered by his journalistic interest, Valtesse even agreed to show him her bedroom—until then off-limits to all but her most highly paying patrons. Zola (who seems to have limited his visit to note taking) used her over-the-top boudoir as the model for Nana’s bedroom. Even if the fictional Nana was nowhere near the sophisticated creature that Valtesse had become, the bed said it all. It was “a bed such as had never existed before,” Zola wrote, “a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.

DOCTEUR JOUVE AND MÍSTER MAC TITULAR Aquí está el extraño caso que conmocionó al país, los crímenes más terribles de Mister Mac en París. NOTICIA El docteur Jouve nació en el corazón de Europa, cosa que se traslucía en sus modos y en su ropa. De niño fue algo precoz, si bien su primera cita no fue una cuestión de amor sino, más bien, erudita. Por la mañana se tomaba un tostón de Thomas Mann, un vaso de Joyce de frutas y un milhojas de Renan. Llamó a su perro Lacan, llamó a su gato Goethe, el benjamín era Walter y su esposa La Feyette. Tenía un chale en la Pleyáde una casa en la Montaigne y un Nietzsche en el cementerio con un busto de Verlaine. Cuando estaba en la Camus su esposa era Simenon porque le cogía un Sófocles si él quería un Fenelón. Como estaba Debussy, ella se sentía sola, por eso empezó un diario y al final se sentió Zola. Los años van Maupassant, se va quedando Calvino, se siente un poco Stravinski, y muy poco cervantino. Pero el docteur Jouve esconde un secreto terrorífico tras las botellas de Evian que inundan su frigorífico. Tiene oculta entre el burdeos, en gruyère y el gorgonzola, una pócima secreta que se llama coca cola. Cada vez que se la bebe se le altera el mecanismo y se transforma en un monstruo de contumaz consumismo. Se arranca entre convulsiones la americana pana, los pantalones a cuadros y la bufanda de lana. Luego se pone sus levis, sus adidas y su custo y sale con ganas de consumir con sumo gasto. De este modo transformando docteur Jouve en míster Mac se va directo de compras sin pasar por el FNAC. De golpe adora a los USA compras nikis de la NASA le pone Pamela Anderson y su cultura de masas. Después de haberse comprado un doble de Britney Spears, va a depilarse la espalda pues no es un lobo en París. Tiene una serie de Friends que invita siempre a su House para mirar la MTV y en los highlights pone pause. Por la mañana volvía a ser el gran europeo que viste ropa de Sartre y es -gracias a Dios- ateo. Era tan grande su Ovidio que desde una estantería <<¡Qué vedo!>>, exclamaba Góngora y <<¡Te Virgilio!>>, Marías. Pero una noche quemó su nutrida biblioteca, y no se salvó del fuego ni el penúltimo planeta. Otra noche mató a un hombre que parecía Balzac y luego entró en un McDonalds y se pidió un big mac. Por estar leyendo un libro de un tal Jünger Habermás dicen que a un colega suyo nadie lo volvió a-ver-más. Con su Northface y sus RayBan y su jerga angloparlante Míster Mac se llevó a muchos al infierno por peDantes. CIERRE No hace falta que escojáis entre Pamela y Balzac que todos somos a ratos docteur Jouve y míster Mac.

In the first place it is to be borne in mind that Debussy's music overrides a good many established theories, or

the preparation and resolution of a dis-c(5rd ; the transition from a point of rest to one of unrest, and thence to a new point of rest, which is one of the great underlying prmciples of musical art. Concords, and discords, and the sys-tematisation of tones into scales, are all inextricably mixed up together, and Debussy's departure from what has hitherto been the ordered procedure in relation to chords has involved a proportionate departure, or nearly so, as regards scales. This, again, it is possible to consider as an addition to, rather than a destruction of the proved resources of music. The universal employment of the major and minor modes exclusively, was born of expedience. They made for elasticity and security ; but at the same time the door was thereby closed upon the old Church modes, and with them, upon a range of effects which belonged to these old-world modes alone. Many of these effects Debussy has revived, but in this only treading more continuously in a path which has been adventured upon by various composers, from Beethoven to Weingartner. Not the construction of music, however, but its effect, is the main subject of consideration so far as the non-professional public is concerned. In this connection there are a few points which it will be worth while to consider with some little attention, for upon this consideration will it depend very much whether one takes a reasonable view, or the reverse, of Debussy's music. and the reverse, it should be mentioned, may equally well be laudatory or hostile ; adulation or detraction alike insufficiently informed. In the first place it is to be borne in mind that Debussy's music overrides a good many established theories, or rather the limitations within which the operation of these theories has hitherto been confined.

The choir box is empty this morning, and I long for some kind of melody, the crash of the organ, the flight of angelic voices. My fingers twitch against the fabric of my dress and I close my eyes, remembering the Debussy, the Brahms lullaby I played each night before bed, my face pressed to the pad beneath my chin, arms cutting the air around me. The fact that Luke doesn't deserve music, the blissful lilt and salvation of it, make me, for some reason, saddest of all.

The dazzling white Sacré-Coeur, which went up in the Commune’s aftermath, was erected in expiation for the sins of France, but its conservative Catholic promoters had little sympathy with the Communards. Not coincidentally, the basilica completely hides the ground where the cannons were parked and the uprising first broke out.

Pummeled in turn by the Prussians, by French government forces, and by the Commune, Paris in late spring of 1871 was a shambles.

All suffered, but not equally, for the greatest damage was borne by the poor, whose despair and anger had fueled the Commune

Degas, who did not seem to have taken much personal interest in any of these girls except as models for his paintings, was endlessly interested in their lives, including the older men who hovered so possessively over them. These men, termed “lions,” appear again and again in his paintings, sometimes adjusting a costume or sometimes simply watching. Degas

Le Figaro’s Albert Wolff,

Théodore Vacquer,

Raising a child, managing a household, and being a good wife, all the while focusing on expressing herself in ways that had never been done before, took an enormous toll on Morisot

incensed Clemenceau angrily denounced Ferry for dragging France into this mess, which he charged that Parliament had not properly authorized. China, Clemenceau warned, had an “inexhaustible reservoir” of men, and fighting such a power would sap France of its manpower for years to come.

When the struggling young painter Rodolphe Salis opened Le Chat Noir in 1881, he had no idea that he was about to make history.

Le Chat Noir’s clientele were looking for good times, to be sure, but their idea of a good time was a convivial (and well-lubricated) evening based on shared intellectual and cultural interests.

La dame aux camélias.

1883, Printemps achieved the distinction of being the first department store in Paris to be lit electrically. Zola,

La Samaritaine and the Cognacqs were also thriving.

leaving a searing impression of a brilliant, emotional, and deeply caring woman—one who, with a startling degree of selflessness, poured her considerable passion into helping the downtrodden.

Escoffier reduced the number of courses, developed the à la carte menu, introduced lighter sauces, and eliminated the most ostentatious of the food displays. He also simplified the menu and completely reorganized the professional kitchen, integrating it into a single unit. Women approved, and he approved of them, creating dishes for some of his most famous diners, including Sarah Bernhardt (Fraises Sarah Bernhardt) and the Australian singer Nellie Melba, who garnered two creations in her honor—Peach Melba and Melba Toast.

ever since Eugène Poubelle had become prefect of the Seine and issued strict laws governing street cleaning and garbage collection (thus giving his name to the French trash can).

Life often functions in dull repetition, but humanity does not operate in patterns. Experiences are random to the point of them never happening again. People are different and they shift throughout space over time. Nothing may repeat. There is no one in a million. There is one in one. It was why no summer was the same. It was why some lips in history never got to test if they were good kissers. It was why Ali lost to Frazier but Frazier lost to Foreman. It is why film does not get another Marlon Brando and no music, however similar, can be compared to Debussy. To resurrect these greats is like trying to re-enter a lost dream. The shore motions toward the feet and never meets them exactly again.

In Mexico, while I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude—between 1965 and 1966—I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night.

La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art

A música é o silêncio entre as notas. — CLAUDE DEBUSSY

La cathédrale engloutie Debussy Echo's ontwaken donker en gedempt als klokgelui uit lang verzonken steden. Uit diepten, raadselig en onbestemd, doemen de schimmen op van het verleden. De dromen die ik nooit ten einde droomde, en de contouren van een oud verhaal voegden zich samen tot een cathedraal die langzaam oprijst uit het overstroomde gebied Vergetelheid, omschenen door het bleke licht van de herinnering, een liefelijke, bovenaardse gloor: de glimlach van wat eens verloren ging... O Tijd, meedogenloze metronoom! Terwijl de laatste tonen traag weerklinken, zie ik het beeld dat oprees als een droom, opnieuw en onherroepelijk verzinken.

Sous une reproduction d’un Botero, une petite étagère garde précieusement une collection de livres des cuisines du monde et quelques guides sur les vins de France. Rien d’autre n’apparaît comme décoration. Pas d’autres livres, pas de disques, rien. Il y règne une ambiance minimaliste, sereine et aseptisée. Pas de musique, non plus. Le genre d’ambiance où Claude Debussy aurait sa place, mais il n’en est rien.

The soul of another is a dark forest in which one must tread carefully. Letter, 1891 Claude Debussy

Kathleen.” He could not hear the latter tune often enough and recorded it numerous times. Its sweetness and simplicity were worth more to him than the unresolved harmonies of Debussy, which he likened to “interrupted conversations.”173 That particular comment was

Claude Debussy’s father had plans for his son to become a sailor but Claude, at the age of eight, was described by his sister as spending “whole days sitting on a chair thinking, no one knew of what”.

Brahms is the first great musician in whom historical significance and artistic significance no longer converge as one and the same. He was not to blame for this. Rather it was the fault of his times. Even Beethoven’s most abnormal conceptions were born of the demands of his time and derived from the linguistic and expressive possibilities of that time. Although Beethoven’s will, a creative will so timeless and touched with insight into the future, was somehow in complete accordance with the will of his time; Beethoven was “sustained” by his time. Wagner’s boldest and most coherent works not only articulated the powerful personality of their creator, they revealed the will and possibilities of his time. There is a consonance between personal will and the general will of the time in Beethoven and Wagner, and later in Strauss, Reger, Debussy and Stravinsky. In Brahms, for the first time, these wills become separated; not because Brahms was most profoundly a man of his time, but because the musical possibilities of his time had taken a different direction from his own inclinations, and did not satisfy him. He is the first artist and creator who transcends his historical and musical function.

Toulouse-Lautrec often worked while under the influence of a concoction he called the Earthquake Cocktail, a potent mixture of absinthe and cognac. Gabriel made do with Cortese di Gavi and Debussy

History, when told as epic, often has the thrilling grandeur of Dvorak or Smetana, Borodin or Mussorgsky, but historical fiction must also find the intimacies and dissonances of the delicate little piano pieces of Satie and Debussy. For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events. Tchaikowsky can carry me away, but I tire quickly of the large effect, which feels so hollow and false on the second hearing. Of Satie I never tire, for his music is endlessly surprising and yet perfectly satisfying. If I can bring off this novel in Tchaikowsky’s terms, that is well and good; but if I can also give you moments of Satie, I am far happier, for that is the harder and, ultimately, more rewarding task.

I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative—in Marianne Moore’s line, “Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,” or more like Michelangeli playing Debussy—powerful chords hammered out amidst the most feathery ornaments.

Claude Debussy mixed with the California wind, which made for the most incredible soundtrack for our drive.

The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

Debussy to this?” He raised an eyebrow.

It is the space between the notes that makes the music

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910. "Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new...

Instead of a coup d’état, MacMahon’s associates risked a general election—a daunting prospect given the amount of opposition that they now faced. With little appreciation for the nature of that opposition, they put off the elections for many months, during which they embarked on a series of actions that amounted to mass arm-twisting—prosecuting newspapers, threatening owners of republican meeting places, dismissing “unreliable” local officials, and forbidding circulation of opposition circulars and propaganda while conducting their own massive propaganda campaign. Their actions, which betrayed more than a whiff of desperation, merely united the previously fragmented opposition, of which Gambetta now took command.

they did not yet have control of the Senate. But elections for one-third of the Senate’s members were coming up in early 1879. And despite the Senate’s reputation as a bastion of conservative power, the republicans intended to win.

As for alcoholism among the poor, there had been no one who had dramatized the problem more graphically than he, but he saw alcoholism as a result, not simply a cause, of the social evils that the poor suffered.

That one doesn’t paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure; one paints the effect of a time of day on a landscape, a seascape, or a figure.

Goncourt observed in a rare compliment, although he felt compelled to add that the dinner included “some grouse whose scented flesh Daudet compared to an old courtesan’s flesh marinaded in a bidet.”14

It was not until 1869 that Claude Monet became a friend of Edouard Manet, joining Manet’s circle, which by now included Zola, Cézanne, and Degas.

Monet in turn introduced Sisley, Bazille, and Renoir to the group, which met evenings at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, at the edge of Montmartre.

Certainly one of Haussmann’s finest achievements, this is the water system that, with modifications and updates, still supplies Paris today.

The youngest son of an officer in Bonaparte’s army, Hugo was born in 1802 near the Swiss border, in Besançon. Two years later, his mother, a confirmed royalist, gave up on her marriage, leaving Major Hugo to his mistress and his wars.

Rome—the final event in the long

march toward Italian unification. The two stories were intertwined, for Napoleon III had for several years used French troops to defend the pope, who was determined to retain temporal power in Rome, the last remaining vestige of the once-mighty Papal States.

Significantly, it was while the final act of Italian unification was drawing closer that the First Vatican Council (on July 18, 1870) declared the doctrine of papal infallibility—increasing the pope’s power in the spiritual realm at the very moment when his temporal powers were appreciably waning.