Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Claude Debussy
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French composer Claude Debussy.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
There is nothing is 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.
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 will happen.
Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
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.
The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
Music is the silence between the notes.
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
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.
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
In opera, there is always too much singing.
A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Extreme complication is contrary to art.
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
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.
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.
On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly
Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.
To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
Music is the space between the notes.
[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.
The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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! 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.
Life is the space between our things.
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.
Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
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.
Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.
The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.
Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.
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.
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.
There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.
People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.
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.
Art is the most beautiful deception of all!
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.
There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
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.
Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?
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.
The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
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 in the space between the notes.
I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.
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.
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