Claude Debussy Quotes

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

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.

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.

Music is the space between the notes.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

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

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.

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

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.

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

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

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

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

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.

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

In opera, there is always too much singing.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

Life is the space between our things.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.

Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?

The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.