At the piano with Debussy [antikvár]

I First acquaintance with DebussyWhen an artist who speaks a new language and dares to break with old formulas appears, he is rarely admired, understood or even listened to. People dislike anyone whose ideas are different or better ; they greet his first creative attempts with discreet but treacherous laughter and begrudge his most slender new work. Emptiness is abhorred in nature, but adored by mankind.How many of us, on hearing for the first time the String Quartet, Proses lyriques. Sarabande or La Damoiselle élue, felt that a new star was illuminating the heavens? And how many, having reached the master's threshold, offered to him the gold, frankincense and myrrh of our marvelling admiration?Debussy existed before Debussy. It is an architecture which moves upside down in water, clouds which form and disperse, branches which slumber, rain on the leaves, plums which in falling kill themselves and bleed goldeverything that only murmured or stammered before a human voice came to give it expression. A thousand vague marvels in nature have at last found their interpreter.'^Then came Pelléas, and allied to the marvels of nature were those of the heartof the old human heart of Arkel which, in sympathy with Maeterlinck's child-woman, began to beat as an adolescent's once more. The youth of today does not know what Pelléas meant to those who were present at its birth. One had to be twenty to love the freshness of its unfamiliar thoughts and to^ Jean Cocteau.I