Claude Debussy quotes
-
“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!”
-- Claude Debussy -
“When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
-
“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.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“There is nothing more musical than a sunset.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music". Book by Don Michael Randel, 1996.
-
“Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "French Music: From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré". Book by Martin Cooper (p. 136), 1951; later quoted in "Debussy and Wagner", book by Robin Holloway (p. 207), 1979.
-
-
“A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg, 2001.
-
“Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“There is nothing is 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.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "Claude Debussy: His Life and Works". Book by Léon Vallas, p. 226, 1933.
-
“Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Twentieth Century". Book by Caroline Farrar Ware, 1972.
-
“Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg, 2001.
-
-
“In opera, there is always too much singing.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg (pp. 239-240), 2001.
-
“Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary...”
-- Claude Debussy -
“It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "The Cambridge Companion to Debussy". Book by Simon Trezise, 2003.
-
-
“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.”
-- Claude DebussySource : Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Roger Nichols (1987). “Debussy Letters: ,”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
-
“The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”
-- Claude DebussySource : "Greatness: Who Makes History and Why". Book by Dean Keith Simonton, May 20, 1994.
-
-
“On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?”
-- Claude Debussy -
“People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?”
-- Claude Debussy -
“The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language...I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“People don't very much like things that are beautiful.. they are so far from their nasty little minds.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism , a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner , the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.”
-- Claude DebussySource : Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Roger Nichols (1987). “Debussy Letters: ,”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
-
“Extreme complication is contrary to art.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity...”
-- Claude Debussy -
“The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.”
-- Claude Debussy -
“He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.”
-- Claude Debussy -
-
“the colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”
-- Claude Debussy
You may also like:
-
Arnold Schoenberg
Composer -
Bela Bartok
Composer -
Camille Saint-Saens
Composer -
Edvard Grieg
Composer -
Erik Satie
Composer -
Felix Mendelssohn
Composer -
Franz Liszt
Composer -
Franz Schubert
Composer -
Frederic Chopin
Composer -
Gabriel Faure
Composer -
Igor Stravinsky
Composer -
Johann Sebastian Bach
Composer -
Johannes Brahms
Composer -
Ludwig van Beethoven
Composer -
Maurice Ravel
Composer -
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Composer -
Richard Strauss
Composer -
Robert Schumann
Composer -
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Composer -
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Composer