Claude Debussy
1905
Debussy was a terrible person. This is not conjecture — the biographical record is extensive and unflattering. He borrowed money constantly and rarely repaid it. He left his first wife, Lilly Texier, for a married woman named Emma Bardac; Lilly shot herself in the chest on the steps of a church and survived, and Debussy's response was essentially to be annoyed at the inconvenience. Several of his closest friends never spoke to him again. He wrote Clair de Lune anyway, and it's so beautiful that you briefly consider forgiving him.
The piece was composed around 1890 but not published until 1905, because Debussy was a perfectionist who revised obsessively and published reluctantly. The title comes from a Paul Verlaine poem about masqueraders singing in a minor key under the moonlight, their songs mingling with the beauty of the fountains. Debussy captures exactly that — the shimmer, the sadness underneath the elegance, the feeling of watching something lovely that you know is a performance.
Technically, Clair de Lune is built on the tension between the major and minor modes. It begins in D-flat major but keeps slipping into darker territory, as if the moonlight keeps passing behind clouds. The arpeggiated middle section, where the left hand cascades downward while the right hand sings above it, is one of those passages that makes pianists choose their career. It sounds like water and light and time passing, which should be impossible for eighty-eight hammers hitting strings inside a wooden box.
Debussy rejected the label 'Impressionist,' which critics had borrowed from painting to describe his music. He preferred 'Symbolist,' and he had a point — his music doesn't depict scenes so much as evoke states of being. Clair de Lune doesn't paint the moon. It paints what the moon does to you at 2 AM when you're alone and not entirely at peace and the world feels simultaneously enormous and intimate. That's a more difficult thing to capture, and a worse person than Debussy captured it perfectly.