By François Lesure, Translated and revised by Marie Rolf
University of Rochester Press, HB, 544pp,
ISBN 9781580469036
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Claude Debussy ranks among  the most colourful of musical lives. Born in 1864 to working class parents and with a father who was imprisoned for playing a part in the Paris Commune  of 1870, the boy was farmed out and managed somehow to acquire sufficient skill at the piano to enter the Paris Conservatoire aged 10. An unsteady scholar, he visited Russia as a student when he was assigned a role in the itinerant family of Tchaikovsky’s patron Nadia von Meck. A born rebel, his musical philosophy took decades to formulate, during which time he became a habitué of the clubs and drinking dens of the arty elite.

A succession of passionate relationships kindled a considerable sexual appetite. He kept a long-term mistress even during an aborted engagement, his first wife attempted suicide after he ran off with the married woman who would become his second. The success of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande secured him a musical reputation as a young(ish) Turk and attracted a passionate following of...