The career and work of Claude Debussy offer a unique opportunity to reexamine the paths taken by French composers from the mid 19th century to the early 20th, an era coincident with the evolution of modern French nationalism, the transformation of that country’s painting, photography, and sculpture, and the emergence of modern poetics and the modern novel. Debussy was the most influential French composer of the 20th century, and well beyond the borders of France.

The Bard Music Festival will explore the part played by Debussy in the search for a distinctly French voice in music in the last quarter of the 19th century. Since 1861, Wagner had exerted a decisive influence in French art and culture. In the age of Berlioz, Beethoven’s oeuvre had done the same. Yet beginning with the generation of César Franck, the evolution of a French aesthetic was under way. Debussy’s role and place in the very factional and divisive French musical scene that included Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Dukas, Charpentier, Widor, Chabrier, Chausson, Magnard, Schmitt, d’Indy, and Massenet will be presented.

The character of Parisian society and culture between 1862 and 1918, a glorious era in that city’s history, provides the immediate and constant backdrop to the festival’s rediscovery of Debussy’s world. Topics of exploration will include the relationship of French music to politics after the Franco-Prussian War in the Third Republic, particularly during the Dreyfus affair, and music’s place in the context of radical nationalism. Music of this period became its own intense battleground, not only on the operatic stage, but in the concert hall, the home, and the church.

Issues of music and national politics, the distinct trajectory of French music, the role of music in 19th-century French culture, and cultural politics within French musical circles will be traced alongside the evolution of Debussy’s career as a composer. His compositions, including less well known works, provide an ideal opportunity to illuminate French musical traditions and the creation of an aesthetic sensibility now identified as "modernist." The festival will take a critical view of the notion that Debussy was an "impressionist," a musical equivalent of Monet or Degas. It will explore the role of orientalism and aestheticism in music at the turn of the 20th century, as well as the connection between Debussy and the Russian musical tradition. The Frenchman’s rivalry with the younger Ravel, his ambivalence toward Brahms and Mahler, and his German reception will round out the festival’s agenda.