He established a style irrefragably, made musical impressionism
as legitimate a thing as any of the great styles. That he had more to
make than that one contribution is doubtful. His art underwent no
radical changes. His style was mature already in the Quartet and in
"Proses lyriques," and had its climax in "Pelleas," its orchestral
deployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Iberia," its pianistic
expression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever the
refinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien,"
Debussy never really transgressed the limits set for him by his first
great works. And so, even if his long illness caused the deterioration,
the hardening, the formularization, so evident in his most recent work,
the sonatas, the "Epigrammes," "En blanc et noir," and the "Berceuse
heroique," and deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor his
death actually robbed us of some radical development which we might
reasonably have expected. The chief that he had to give he had given.
What his age had demanded of him, an art that it might hold far from the
glare and tumult, an art into which it could retreat, an art which could
compensate it for a life become too cruel and demanding, he had
produced. He had essentially fulfilled himself.
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