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There is no record of Debussy attending school, and his father had him down for a life as a sailor. His musical talent was discovered by chance. In 1871, his father was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional musicality. She gave him piano lessons and a year later, aged ten, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, the youngest candidate then to be offered a place.
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He sought to compose music that was expressive and beautiful, and he grounded it in the quality of his ear and in his musical intuition. It wasn’t only that he was restlessly bored with formulaic solutions to composition, but that he felt music had become too noisy and too rhetorical, and that in its high claims to various kinds of content – religious, cod-religious (Wagner), philosophical, psychological, sociopolitical, whatever – music had forgotten its origin in sound. The racket and bombast of much late 19th-century orchestral and operatic music distressed him. It was as if he couldn’t hear himself think, or rather, as if he couldn’t hear himself hear. Debussy’s music is capable of wonderful gaiety, exuberance, jubilation, ecstasy; yet, given his preoccupation with sound, it was inevitable that an unusual proportion of his work – compared to that of other composers of his time – would sit at the quieter end of the dynamic spectrum, as Stephen Walsh points out, and it’s one of the reasons it is difficult to perform well: the modern concert piano is incapable of the differentiations of pianissimo that Debussy asks for, and the subtle discriminations of his orchestral works, such as La Mer and Jeux, pose big challenges for even the best players (and for conductors: Boulez, the finest interpreter of Debussy’s orchestral works, described titrating the tone of Jeux as a matter of hair’s breadth musical judgment).