Top 42 Debussy Quotes & Sayings

No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.

I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Claude Debussy's 'Children's Corner' is a suite with six movements just for piano. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Alfred Cartot's versions are amazing, but my favorite is Menininha Lobo's. Her version was done when she was an old lady - and you can hear it.

I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision - a Ravel/Debussy approach.

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He gets a bad rap; hes very misunderstood. Hes a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

What is a seemingly conservative Englishman doing, leading the world in the mastery of a classically Spanish instrument? Debussy wrote some of the best Spanish music, and the only time he was ever in the country, he saw a bullfight which made him ill.

I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this.

For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.

I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'

When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.

Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me - it's all a huge circle.

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.

And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.

I think you can move to everything, but with some music you just want to sit still. Like Claude Debussy - I couldn't dance to that.

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!

I have no doubt that there are great people about though... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).

I am a classical fan. I like Debussy a lot, so I was trying to learn it on the piano. I've learned like a third of it, but I think I'm getting to a section that may be beyond my skill level.

When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.

Claude Debussy defined the guitar as an expressive harpsicord. I believe that is the best definition ever given of the Spanish guitar. This phrase is the starting point for my Concierto de Aranjuez Our guitar is the only survivor of the rich and anarchic instrumental wildlife of the Middle Ages.

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That's so soothing in a nervous world.

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.

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.

The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.

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

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.

My own personal melting pot has no room for Hendrix or heavy metal, filled as it is with European ancestors such as Debussy, Sibelius, Bartok, Lutoslawski, and Ligeti.

Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano - or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.

For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

When I was growing up, until I was 18 or 19, I was totally invested in the classical music world. I had no concept of anything else. The closest thing to a cool band I listened to was Radiohead. Radiohead were the only band I liked in high school. I was just obsessed with classical music, opera, Claude Debussy, and that kind of stuff.

For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.

The score of Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, heralds that which will lift man from the earthly to the celestial, from the mortal to the immortal. Once again the ways of the artist and healer are merging.

Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.