Listen to a genuine recording of Debussy playing Debussy from 1913
For all we know, Mozart could’ve been shite live.
We only have the word of a few thousand European elites to say otherwise, and they’re not the best judges. One of them has just bought a pile of ropes from David Shrigley for a million quid. That’s not culture. That’s mental illness at best, and at worst, a big capitalist, American Psycho-like middle finger to the struggling masses of the world.
All that being said, given that Mozart began touring when he was five and wrote some of the world’s greatest compositions, we can at least assume he put on a cracking little show. Thankfully, though, when it comes to the charming Claude Debussy, we know full well that he didn’t crack under he pressure of live performance, unlike Eminem’s character in Eight Mile before his profound transitional arc.
We know this because Debussy lived to see the age of recording equipment. Granted, not its Pet Sounds golden age, but he did glimpse a gramophone, and gratefully, a gramophone glimpsed him. Back on November 1st 1913, in a room that stank of sweat, Debussy recorded 14 pieces onto six rolls of a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano in Paris. And it’s proper good stuff, actually.
So good, in fact, that Debussy was moved to effectively DM the inventor, Michael Welte, with the following message, “It is impossible to attain a greater perfection of reproduction than that of the Welte apparatus. I am happy to assure you in these lines of my astonishment and admiration of what I heard. I am, Dear Sir, Yours Faithfully, Claude Debussy.”
It is presumed that Welte appreciated the compliment, but thought ”I am, Dear Sir, Yours Faithfully” was taking things a little too far. Yet, if you put yourself in Debussy’s cobbled shoes, it is easy to see why he was more gushy than Dame Edna after seven sherries. This technology was practically witchcraft back then. The first recording in history had only been cut in 1857, and it sounds like the rumblings of hell.
Debussy’s outing on the Welte-Mignon fares far better. He played as though it could be his last time. For all he knew, it might have been. The then-52-year-old was suffering from cancer at the time, and though he would live for another five years, it was far from guaranteed that even an esteemed key-tickler such as Debussy, with his Toby Jones-esque head and beard, would encounter another Welte-Mignon.
The device, which looked to record pianists as faithfully as the times would allow, was the price of a large house or two small ones, depending on how you look at it. In brief, a pianist would perform on a Welte-Mignon piano, and their keystrokes, timing, dynamics, and pedal-work, were all encoded onto a piano roll using a perforated paper system. The piano roll was then fed back into the device, and it could reproduce the performance. (And remember, this was well before the days of PayPal pioneer Elon Musk).
And Debussy absolutely nailed his rendering of ‘La soirée dans Grenade’, meaning ‘Granada in the Evening’, which I’m reliably informed is a cracking city to swill down a rioja in late spring, and also the brithplace of José Bueno, the diminutive Spanish forward who went by the name Callejón and briefly tore things up at Napoli for a few seasons. Debussy seems to somehow capture all of this during his expressionist fixation. This recording practically places you in Granada, with a cicada sounding off in each ear.
To escape my natural plebian tone for a moment (usually more of a Whitesnake fan), the cackle and hiss that accompanies his playing now overlays like the quilted static of memory. Renowned for his graceful spacing, the breathy pauses are now punctuated by the pop and fizz of passing time, as a maestro doing something purposeful is recorded for posterity, somehow offering up the quiet knowingness that this would all gladly eventuate in something better, something more complete, like the 1997 stereo album mix of ‘Big River’ by Jimmy Nail.
And ‘ol Jimmy is good live, chuffing brilliant in fact. And bloody handsome to boot.
