Claude Debussy Quotes

1862–1918 France

Achille-Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer, prominent in the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term.

France
Composers
Pianists

Also known as: Debussy

Random Claude Debussy quote

34 quotes

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

Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979)

To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! … that is what I call prayer.

Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933)

The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ.

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

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.

Music in History : The Evolution of an Art (1957)

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.

Music in the Modern World (1948)

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

Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought (1992)

Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found.

French Music : From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré (1951)

As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

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

Debussy : Musician of France (1957)

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

An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981)

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

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

Do you really think that my music is devoid of religious antecedents? Do you wish to put an artist's soul under restraint?

On his music for Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911)

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

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.

The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (2003)

Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express.

Debussy (1989)

I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

Debussy (1989)

Before the passing sky, in long hours of contemplation of its magnificent and ever-changing beauty, I am seized by an incomparable emotion...

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Claude Debussy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.