French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918) created music that was revolutionary, with a distinctly modern sound that highlighted the intersection of art and life. Here, in this unique biography, David J. Code explores the important moments in the development of Debussy’s literary interests that shaped his music—and in the process brings to life Debussy’s sardonic personality. Claude Debussy presents an in-depth look at how Debussy’s love for poetry influenced his musical compositions. Code explores both Debussy’s earlier years, filled with student cantatas inspired by Verlaine and Baudelaire, as well as his later works, dominated by nationalistic pieces inspired by French Renaissance poets and composed in the lead-up to World War I. Along the way, Code looks at Debussy’s orchestral compositions and operas, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck. This book will give readers a fresh way of listening to Debussy’s classic music by offering the most up-to-date critical analysis of the intersection of Debussy’s literary interests and musical compositions and will appeal to any reader with a love of Debussy, as well as modern music, literature, and the arts.

This book is about reading Proust’s novel via philosophical and musicological approaches to “modern” listening. It articulates how insights into the way we listen to and understand classical music inform the creation of literary meaning. It asks: are we to take at face value the ideas about art that the novel contains, or are those part of the fiction? Is there a difference between what the novel says and what it does, and how can music provide a key to answering that question? According to this study, Proust asks us to temporalize our interpretation by recognizing the distance between initial and final experiences of the novel, and by being open to the ways in which it challenges attempts at interpretive closure. Proust’s novel responds to the kind of attentive and eternally changing perspectives that can be generated from music and our attempts to make sense of it.