Debussy and Stravinsky in Paris By the end of the nineteenth century the traditional musical genres had been stretched to their limits. Moreover, the forms that had nurtured the symphony and the string quartet - namely, the solo sonata and the piano concerto (especially the varieties of sonata form) - had reached a degree of formal complexity that demanded repeated hearings before a listener could perceive their structure. Wagner, drawing on the symphonic techniques of Beethoven and his successors, had created his own web of thematic and harmonic interrelationships. After Wagner, it seemed unlikely that any further integration of music, libretto, staging, and scenery could he achieved. AVANT-GARDE PARIS For composers seeking new channels for their creative energies, Paris provided an ideal environment. Despite the Prussian humiliation of the French in 1871, Paris was still the cultural capital of the Western world. The city had a long tradition of welcoming artists from all over Europe, and, as Berlioz had learned, the French were often more hospitable to foreigners than they were to their own artists. In 1873 a group of four Parisian painters that included Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) learned that their works had been rejected for an exhibition organized by the reigning academicians. Unwilling to accept this rebuff, the next year they sponsored their own exhibit, sparking the first of several dramatic ruptures in the visual arts. A critic pejoratively labeled them impressionists". Over the next 13 years almost every French painter of note exhibited at least briefly with the Impressionists, including Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), and Edgar Degas (1834-1917). The Impressionists rejected realism and Romantic displays of emotion, seeking instead to depict fleeting, informal scenes from everyday life in broken, luminous textures of pure color. They viewed themselves more as scientific observers of reality than as vessels of artistic inspiration. Met at first by hostile criticism, by the 1920s the Impressionists had achieved a widespread popularity that continues to this day. Despite their early reception, they altered the artistic landscape of Paris almost overnight and opened the way for other innovators. Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), for example, led Impressionism in a more analytical and abstract direction. An even bolder innovator was Paul Gaugin (1848-1903), who, after careers as sailor and stockbroker, turned to painting full-time and exhibited briefly with the Impressionists. To protest against the "disease" of civilization, he sailed from France and settled in 1891 on the island of Tahiti. Turning away from the representation of nature as the primary purpose of art he embraced abstract symbols and figures that took nature only as their starting point. His bold paintings and their uncivilized settings brought together daring colors and shapes that were labeled "exotic" and "primitive". French literature kept abreast of painting. Taking their cue from the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), symbolist writers such as Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) reacted against the realism and naturalism of the period and focused on suggestion and allusion rather than on direct statement. Bold new art movements continued to spring up in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century. Fauvists (after fauve, meaning "wild beast") such as Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Raoul Dufy (1878-1953) made up the French wing of Expressionism, a Franco-German movement in which the representation of objective reality was replaced by an inner, often tormented psychological vision. Asked Dufy: "Can I render not what I see, but what is, what exists for me, my reality?". An even more radical exponent, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), explained: "I wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts ['School of Fine Arts,' the center of French academic painting] with my cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me." Around 1907 a group of painters known as Cubists, including Braque, Juan Gris (1887-1927), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)-all living in Paris- rejected subjects charged with emotion in favor of abstract geometrical shapes that redefined traditional three-dimensional objects from several different points of view. Though founded in Italy, the movement called Futurism, with its worship of the kinetic machine, received a major exhibition in Paris in 1912. Meanwhile, the Trocadero Museum was sponsoring pathbreaking exhibits of "primitive" African art and artifacts (especially masks). It was this remarkably avant-garde yet cosmopolitan Parisian mix that was to find its musical expression in the music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. But first French music had to liberate itself from the suffocating grip of Wagnerism. WAGNERISM By the end of the nineteenth century the dominant force in European music was what had become known as "Wagnerism." So pervasive was Wagner's influence on harmony, for example, that virtually all composers active at the end of the century sounded as if their music had passed through a Wagnerian filter. Under the spell of Tristan und Isolde, French composers like César Franck (1822-1890) and Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) wrote music that resonated with Wagnerian chromaticism, instrumentation (especially the prominent use of brass), and leitmotifs. For a time Chabrier belonged to a small group of musicians known as Le petit Bayreuth ("The Little Bayreuth") who came together to study Wagner's scores. Even composers who rejected Wagner's style fell under its influence. Georges Bizet (1838-1875), France's most original opera composer at the time, modeled his operas on those of Mozart, Verdi, and his teacher Charles Gounod (1818-1893). Yet French critics accused him of being either too Wagnerian or not Wagnerian enough. Bizet died a few months before his operatic masterpiece Carmen (1875) attained success, but the first reviews of this utterly un-Wagnerian work accused him of having sacrificed the vocal line to the harsh clamor of the orchestra. Bizet himself once accused Verdi, in Don Carlos (written for performance in Paris in 1867), of "trying to write Wagner." Actually, the term Wagnerism was applied to a variety of social movements as well as to music. Wagner believed himself to be a cultural messiah, and his followers endorsed everything from vegetarianism and antivivisectionism, to Darwinism, to politics of both the extreme left amid the extreme right. Between the opening of Bayreuth in 1876 and Wagner's death in 1883, scores of Richard Wagner Societies sprang up across Europe. Wagner and the Wagnerians declared themselves the musical avant-garde - the defenders of the new amid the adventurous - and they decried the preference of middle-class audiences for a small group of "classical" masterpieces by composers long dead (a dispute that still rages today). Probably no composer in history - not even Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven - exercised such a powerful influence on the music of his own time as Wagner did. Only against that background can we appreciate the achievement of Claude Debussy. Source: Winter, Robert. Music for Our Time. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992 (p. 507-09).