Song Just Beyond the Nation, or Debussy via Verlaine

Hailed as the epitome of French musical style, Debussy also excelled at ‘creat[ing] works based on vernacular idioms from other cultures’ (Brown 2012: 6). Debussy’s mélodies may be the hallmark of ‘Frenchness’, but they also mediate other cultures through the choice of poetic texts, including subtle interweaving of cultures close to home. This chapter offers a close reading of Debussy’s Trois mélodies (composed 1891, published 1901), settings of three Verlaine poem’s from the Sagesse collection of 1881 which depict Belgian and English landscapes and seascapes. Debussy’s text-setting techniques (prosody and repetition) temper the apparent ‘Frenchness’ of the poetic language, by revealing that inhabiting just one national idiom is fundamentally at odds with the creative act of song-making.