Debussy, l’étoffe d’un vrai poète ? La synthèse poétique-musicale des Proses lyriques

Paul Dukas admitted that the greatest influence on his friend and colleague Claude Debussy was „ that of the literati. Not that of the musicians ”. Indeed, Debussy always walked the line between these two arts, setting to music both poems and Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande. Although many scholars have already examined these musical adaptations and his preference for prose poetry over classical verse, his attempts at prose poetry remain unknown at best, and ignored at worst. Shortly before setting his lyric opera to music, he conceived the Proses Lyriques, a cycle of four melodies based on his original poems, intended to be accompanied by the piano and sung by a soprano voice. The aim of this article is to shed light on both his poetic prose, which departs from classical verse just as his hexatonic system departs from the classical heptatonic scale, and its original content. While some of the images do not stray far from the symbolist aesthetic, others evoke a suggestive portrait of the lives of his friends and their families at the turn of the century.