Jacques-Émile Blanche’s 1902 portrait, oil on canvas, of Claude Debussy. (Wiki)
Nothing sorts extraordinary drives from ordinary ones quite like the selection of music to accompany the journey. That is especially true when the drive is long.
A vacation drive has its own curious logistics of pre-planning. Water bottles must be cleaned out, snacks must be chosen for purchase, the endless worry of a flat tire or a soon-to-expire AAA membership in a crisis of possible need must be surmounted. After batting away these concerns, music is a balm, and when you grow road-weary, a tonic.
My first use of the music of Claude Debussy while traveling was four summers ago during the infamous “Midwest derecho” of 2020. Almost any time is a bad time to drive through Chicago—driving into the city usually presents no problem—but on August 10 of that year, the outskirts of Chicago looked as if they had been swallowed whole by a gray clouded apparition more at home in an episode of Stranger Things than in suburban Illinois. The wipers of my rented SUV spanned the windshield, moving back and forth so fast they almost disappeared in the blur, but they were still no match for a downpour that was auditioning for the Apocalypse. The wind was lost in the chaos of ambulances attending to turned-over cars all along I-94, though it could be heard throughout northern Illinois. Through it all, the dulcet tones of Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire performing Claude Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie” (The sunken cathedral) rang through the sound system. I strained to imagine myself anywhere but driving home to St. Louis, knuckles pale and stomach sore from ingesting too many energy bars. When after three hours I—and my daughter, gazing at her phone the whole time—reached the halfway point to Springfield, the fates treated us to the sight of a double rainbow. I had hit repeat on Freire’s track at least a dozen times, and the lilting tones of Debussy’s magical ways with ascending parallel fifths (and fifth chords) matched perfectly with the sight before me. Here, at last, after all the trauma of driving through a gale so thick that almost nothing but rain could be seen, was the cathedral I had heard made manifest in sight. I have looked for it ever since, playing the same track at home, and years later still often behind the wheel.
Among composers, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) has a somewhat iffy reputation as nodding too much toward “program music,” i.e., music assigned in advance to certain images and ideas, as opposed to the purity of J.S. Bach’s “absolute music,” or any other music that exists for its own sake. Music scholars know this dis of Debussy is a bit unfair. When he wrote his Préludes (1910), of which “La cathédrale engloutie” is the tenth in the series, Debussy placed the title of each miniature at the end of each piece. Debussy hinted at what the pianist could have in mind. He never issued commands. Clocking in at five and a half or seven minutes, depending on the pianist’s taste, “La cathédrale engloutie” was inspired (in a loose sense) by the Breton myth of a submerged cathedral off the shore of the Island of Ys, also part of Breton myth. Neither exist, except in the words of their literary accounts and the music with which Debussy brought them both to life in the imagination. Listen to the piece with an open mind, and a pianist who knows pedaling and articulation sufficient for coloring tones, and you might hear the ringing of cathedral bells and priestly chants across gentle, undulating waves, as the cascading harmonies rise above the seawater, only to sink back down again. The culminating sensations of sound and vision dovetail nicely into the aesthetic school of Impressionism, which the French are fond of having invented. While driving that stressful day in August 2020, I imagined myself standing in front of Claude Monet’s Waterlilies: The Clouds, housed in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie, rather than plowing through winds and rain so violent they made, together, climate history.
On another vacation destination drive this summer, I tried again to find the same moments of coincidence that aligned with Debussy’s seismic piano miniature. Alas, there was no weather calamity for the French composer to appease, just the visual blight of monotone highways peppered with Trump placards outside rural homes and the garish marquee signs of franchise businesses. The beauty of Debussy’s music clashed at every turn with the dreary visuals of my all-American road trip. Then a realization clicked: maybe Debussy would have approved of the tension between his music and the mundane, preferring that contrast to my use of his music to buffer the stress of hideous weather. Music cannot always re-make the moment, but it can battle boredom and routine long enough to recalibrate it. At the very least, it recalls past moments it alone made.
Sitting in my idle rental car at various stoplights in rural Michigan, I felt the transcendent parallel fifths of “La cathedral engloutie” wash over my ears all over again. Past the AutoZone signage, between the marquees of competing chicken wing and hamburger drive-thrus, and on toward the distant highway entrance to the right, I could almost persuade myself it was there again for me and my daughter to see: the double rainbow after the infamous “Midwest derecho” of 2020.
