Cradle of Composers

When Manuel-Achille Debussy got out of the army, he had a hard time finding a job. Through family connections he worked first at a small shop in a town just west of Paris selling china. There he and his wife had a son, Claude-Achille in August of 1862. The china shop had to close, so Manuel-Achille took his family to Clichy to live with his maternal grandmother. For the next few years employment for Manuel-Achille was catch-as-catch can, and they moved to an apartment in Paris within walking distance of our hotel. We passed it today. The ground floor of the building is now occupied by a barber shop, hairdresser and beauty school. Because Debussy’s wife Victorine could not afford to send her children to school, she sought to educate them herself. Hard times forced Victorine to move the children away again, and while staying with Manuel-Achille’s sister in Cannes, they discovered young Claude’s musical aptitude. Manuel’s Marxist tendencies led him to participate in the Commune Insurrection of 1870 and earned him a four-year prison sentence. The sentence was commuted to one year in prison with three years of public service. Returning to Paris the Debussy family moved again and on October 22, 1872 young Claude, age ten years, was admitted to the National Conservatory of Music. There, for a decade, he studied under the likes of César Franck, Antoine Marmontel, and Albert Lavignac to hone his musical skills in keyboard studies, music theory, composition, harmony and counterpoint. Though his teachers recognized that he was an extraordinary musician, he was a troublesome student, often arriving late, missing classes or showing disrespect to teachers. Like his father, Claude had an independent streak. The rebellious spirit angered some of his professors, and ultimately forced him away from the Conservatory, but eventually it led him into areas of harmonic richness that forever changed the character of Western music.

Today we visited the building in which Debussy studied, the old National Conservatory of Music. It is still a national conservatory, but now it houses the students studying for the dramatic arts. The music academy has moved to a lovely modern campus in the northeast part of Paris. Yet I regard this building as sacred ground. Not only did Debussy study here, but so did every other French composer you can name. Parisians first heard the works of Beethoven here. Hector Berlioz first performed his Symphony Fantastique here. César Franck, a member of the faculty, composed his remarkable Symphony in D minor here, and gave its first public presentation in the conservatory’s concert hall. The school’s students include Adolph Adam, George Bizet, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Boulez, Alfred Cortot, Paul Dukas, Marcel Dupré, Maurice Duruflé, Maurice Ravel and Camille Saint-Saens,

I regret we were not able to get inside the building today. One must know the combination on a keypad to get through the doors, and, judging from the neighborhood around the building, I can certainly understand why such security measures are needed. What was formerly the main entrance, a door through which Chopin regularly passed, is now a place for a homeless man to pitch his sleeping mat. Nevertheless, we stood at a door through which the greatest composers and musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries passed—the people who made the harmonies and melodies we were taught as children to call “music.” And for me, just being here is wonderful.Leia mais