Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s ‘L’isle Joyeuse’

Abstract

drives are important for artistic creativity, and that access to the artist's intimacy is the proper way to understand how and why. This genetic approach implies from the start a parting of company with Klein, whose hermeneutics of the musical work disregards biographical materials altogether; indeed, he never mentions sketches nor other traces of the creative process, and the mere biographical contextualization of his analysis to the effect that 'Debussy composed L'isle joyeuse in the summer of 1904 while on an extramarital holiday on the island of Jersey with Emma Bardac' 8 is actually misleading. Now, the assumption that sex does matter for art has never gone without resistance. This often goes in the name of idealistic or moralistic conceptions of artistic creativity. François Lesure, the great biographer of the composer, thought it vain 'to try to explain Debussy's oeuvre by his sentimental life (expériences amoureuses).' 9 This article will seek to demonstrate quite the opposite, and to connect these insights with broader biographical issues. Debussy's marriage with Emma Bardac in 1908, a 45-yearold woman he first met as the mother of a pupil, Raoul Bardac, has often been described as resulting from social ambition rather than from love and desire. Of course, social ambition can sometimes also fuel desire, but this is the contrary of discarding desire altogether. Mary Garden, a friend and a favourite performer of Debussy's music (she was the first Mélisande), wrote laconically in her notebooks: 'His first wife was young and poor. His second was old and rich.' 10 A distorted vision of his private life, including hostile allusions to Emma's Jewish origin, emerged in 1904 shortly after the beginning of their initially adulterous relationship at a time when Claude was married to Lilly Texier and Emma to Sigismond Bardac. 11 Public opinion at the beginning of the last century was opposed such a relationship, partly as a matter of age. In this 'golden age of male adultery', four out of five mistresses were younger than deceived wives, who were in turn mostly younger than her adulterous husbands; and fewer than one out of three women involved in adulterous relationships were forty years old or more. Anne-Marie Sohn points out that 'psychologically, though not legally, adultery stopped being a crime between 1880 and 1900.' 12 From a legal point of view, even though divorce was reinstated in France in 1884, it was not until December 1904 that the law allowed

Music and Sexuality

“…48 At EHESS, the collective seminar on the cultural history of dance has examined, since 2008, the way bodies are swept up in the movement of music, as described in Sophie Jacotot's research on American dances in Paris in the interwar period, and Elizabeth Claire's research on the waltz. 49 Finally, since 2016, the Music and Politics seminar led by Esteban Buch has given rise to a study on the relationship between musical climax and orgasm in Debussy's oeuvre, 50 and to a number of study days on the theme of Music and Sexuality.…”