Once again, French
music was.
Debussy
Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul,
and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a one
appear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy is
proper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before all
time our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birth
returned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of
"Pelleas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had always
needed such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we
perhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. The
music seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but the
exquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasing
moments that we had already encountered. It seemed fashioned out of
certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffably
sad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set us
apart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, at
the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cluster of tones out of
the warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of their
stature and become ours entirely.
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