Chapter 25 - Orchestral Music and Symphonic Traditions

Summary

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