Claude Debussy: Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which...

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

Claude Debussy

expression dream feelings

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Claude Debussy

music air art

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.

Claude Debussy

return shadow want

The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language...I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.

Claude Debussy

simple memories children

Music is the space between the notes.

Claude Debussy

weekend music art

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Claude Debussy

classical-music musician art

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

Claude Debussy

curves swag expression

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

Claude Debussy

form color essence

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.

Claude Debussy

tree advice wind

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

Claude Debussy

assessment butterfly teaching

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

Claude Debussy

beautiful lying art

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

Claude Debussy

music-love tradition trying

It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.

Claude Debussy

abandon oblivion people

When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.

Claude Debussy

paris age two

When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity.

Claude Debussy

symphony listening past

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

Claude Debussy

impressionists imbeciles

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

Claude Debussy

sunrise sunset beautiful

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

Claude Debussy

sunset beautiful book

To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.

Claude Debussy

one-you-love someone-you-love

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Claude Debussy

music beauty art

Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.