Painted portrait of Claude Debussy in his mid-forties, dark hair brushed back from a broad forehead, full dark beard and black bow tie, against a verdigris ground

Portraits · Composers · XI of XVII

Claude Debussy

1862–1918 · Composer

Discipline must be sought in freedom, and not within the formulas of an outworn philosophy only fit for the feeble-minded.

Il faut chercher la discipline dans la liberté et non dans les formules d'une philosophie devenue caduque et bonne pour les faibles.

Claude Debussy · as Monsieur Croche, 1901
Read it in the source →

Claude Debussy wrote this in 1901 for La Revue blanche, in the voice of Monsieur Croche, an invented character who said what Debussy thought. Croche wanted no handed-down formulas: listen to no one's advice, he says, only to the wind.

Two years later Debussy finished Estampes. This is the first page of Pagodes.

'L'Entretien avec M. Croche', La Revue blanche, vol. 25 (1901), signed Claude Debussy; collected in Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Paris: Dorbon-aîné, 1921), pp. 17–18. English: Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater, trans. B. N. Langdon Davies (London: Noel Douglas, 1927), p. 8, read in the unaltered Dover reprint, Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York, 1962).

The originals

Sepia photograph of Claude Debussy about 1908, dark hair, full dark beard and a black bow tie, turned to the right
The likenessPHOTOGRAPHED BY ATELIER NADAR · C. 1908Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (published before 1931; the studio was run by Paul Nadar, d. 1939; Commons credits Félix Nadar). Wikimedia Commons.
A handwritten page of piano music headed Pagodes and marked Modérément animé, with a red library stamp in the margin
Estampes · Pagodes, 1903The opening of Pagodes, first of the three Estampes, in his own hand. He finished the set in 1903 and dedicated this piece to the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche.Autograph manuscript, 1903, f. 3. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Musique, MS-988 (Gallica btv1b55002580k). Public domain.