Debussy at the Art Independent Bookshop (1892–1895)

Part of the Music Research Seminar Series 2025-26

Speaker: Denis Herlin – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (IReMus)

Location: School of Music Lecture Theatre 2

• This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
• No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Ellis Jones (e.n.jones@leeds.ac.uk).

Debussy was, throughout his life, a passionate reader, driven by an intellectual curiosity without limits. In the 1890s, when he was not yet a recognized composer, he frequented a small bookshop, the Librairie de l’Art indépendant at 14 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. Founded in 1889 by Edmond Bailly, this publishing house was no ordinary place: one could find there books by Pierre Louÿs, Henri de Régnier, Paul Claudel, or André Gide; prints and etchings by Félicien Rops or Odilon Redon; scores by Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, or Ernest Chausson; as well as publications on the occult sciences. Bailly was not only the most prominent publisher of the young Symbolist artists: he also offered them a privileged meeting place where literature, poetry, and music nourished one another. Such a convergence of the arts in this unique place could not fail to permeate and profoundly enrich the composer’s imagination. In August 1893, one month after the publication of La Damoiselle élue at the Librairie de l’Art indépendant, Debussy began composing Pelléas et Mélisande. The atmosphere of that place was no doubt not unrelated to the birth of his great masterpiece.

Denis Herlin is Directeur de recherche at the IReMUS (Institut de recherche en musicologie), a subdivision of the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), headquartered at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris. He is the author of several major catalogues, including the Catalogue du fonds musical de la bibliothèque de Versailles (1995), and he is co-editor of the ongoing Catalogue thématique des œuvres de Jean-Philippe Rameau (3 vol. published). With François Lesure, he collected and edited the first complete edition of Debussy’s letters—Claude Debussy, Correspondance 1872-1918 (Paris: Gallimard). In 2002 he became editor-in-chief of the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy. While his publications concern French music from the seventeenth, eighteenth and the twentieth century, his current activity centers upon the life and work of Debussy. From 2009 to 2011 Denis Herlin was President of the Société française de musicologie. He was also a six-year (2017-2023) holder of the International Chair in Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.