Chausson: Piece for cello & piano (1897)
Standing: Mme Chausson, Ernest Chausson, and Raymond Bonheur. Seated on the ground: Claude Debussy In 1893, Claude Debussy wrote to Ernest Chausson, Music really ought to have been an hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief! I'd go further and, instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a 'Society of Musical Esotericism'. His words project a sense of the place and times, ca. 1871-1914, that we call 'Belle Époque Paris', the focus in Europe for the symbolist movement in poetry, and impressionism in painting and music. Putting to one side the artist's disdain for an uncomprehending audience (imagined or real), it's difficult now to understand just why the music of this era, which audiences today rarely consider 'difficult', was labeled 'decadent' and worse. A major justifi