Locke San Sebastien

Unacknowledged Exoticism in
Debussy: The Incidental Music for Le

martyre de saint Sébastien (1911)
Ralph P. Locke
How are locales and peoples that are exotic—distant and different from
“us”—evoked in and through music?
Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at State Univ NY at Stony Brook on June 5, 2011

In my book, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections, I argue that
the portrayal of exotic peoples and places has been too often reduced, by
scholars and critics, to a search for specific stylistic codes.1 The discus-
sion of musical exoticism generally ends up fragmenting into numerous
separate hunts after markers of musical oddity. For example, the melodic
interval of an augmented second can signal, depending on other factors,
a Gypsy style (as in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies), an Eastern-European
Jewish one (typical of klezmer music), or a Middle Eastern one (as in the
Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila).2 Black-note pentatoni-
cism often represents China or the gamelan traditions of Indonesia.
Scholars who explore musical exoticism primarily or solely in terms of
such quasi-semiotic signals (or topoi) are working within what I call the
“Exotic Style Only” Paradigm. I love the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm.
I use it often. I feel strongly that it needs to be used more.3
But the “Exotic-Style Only” Paradigm is inadequate for dealing
with the thousands of exotic portrayals that do not make continuous
use, or in some cases any use, of stylistic (musico-semiotic) indicators of
the exotic. This is particularly true of works for the musical stage
(including operas). Stage works, by their very nature, frame the music in
a panoply of nonmusical signs: words, sets, costumes, dramatic action,
dance, and so on. When the job of identifying the locale has already
been accomplished by these nonmusical elements, the composer is free
to use many kinds of musical materials to tell other things to the
listener, such as what the locale, its people, and its customs “are like.”
The musical materials that he or she employs may include ones marked
as exotic but also ones that are not marked in that way. After all, music
(as critics and aestheticians have long recognized) is well equipped for
doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdn017 90:371 –415

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372 The Musical Quarterly
“characterizing”: that is, for conveying mood, gesture, personality, and

all kinds of feeling tones and emotional reactions. Music can often do
this, compellingly, on its own. It can do so more explicitly when it is
linked (as in much song, opera, and film) to verbal and dramatic
context.4
I call this new and broader approach to exploring how cultural
Others are represented the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm.
The phrase is, I hope, just ungainly enough to stick in the mind. I do
not intend the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm to take the
place of the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm, nor to serve as an alternative
to it. Rather, I see the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm as a
broader methodological umbrella, under which may be found the
“Exotic Style Only” Paradigm but also many other options whose very

existence the latter cannot recognize (much less explore and explain).
As I was working on the early-twentieth-century chapter of my
book, I noticed that a major work by Debussy, his incidental music to
Le martyre de saint Sébastien (1911), had rarely been discussed in regard
to exoticism, even though its various Eastern locales (e.g., Syria and
Babylonia) seemed to me to offer intriguing possibilities.5 This neglect
of a work written during Debussy’s full maturity—a scarce seven years
before his death—is not entirely surprising: a number of other pieces
from Debussy’s later years (some exotically tinged, others not) have like-
wise never quite become central items in the performing repertoire in
the way that many of his early and middle-period works have (say, the
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, or the Estampes for piano). Among
these fascinating and varied late-ish works are the Etudes for piano, Six
épigraphes antiques, En blanc et noir, the three Images for orchestra (only
the second of which, “Ibéria,” gets played often), and the ballets Jeux
and Khamma. Of these works, the Six épigraphes antiques and Khamma
evoke, in a number of specific ways, ancient Egypt and other Eastern
Mediterranean locations, as does the somewhat better-known “Canope,”
from the Preludes for piano (book 2). Furthermore, each of the three
orchestral Images is steeped in accepted musical gestures pointing to one
particular European locale, namely (in order) France in its rural aspect,
Spain, and England.6 Clearly, the portrayal of other places and cultures
remained a recurrent fascination for Debussy during his later years, as it
had been at earlier points in his career (e.g., “Pagodes” and “Soirée dans
Grenade,” from the aforementioned Estampes for piano, 1903).
For reasons of space, I ended up not writing about Le martyre in
the book. I here share my thoughts about the fascinating and substantial
ways in which this remarkable theater work evokes, per musica, various
exotic worlds.
Unacknowledged Exoticism in Debussy 373
Neo-Medieval but Also Exotic

In 1910, Debussy agreed to compose incidental music (or, as the genre
is known in French, musique de scène) for Le martyre de saint Sébastien, a
neo-medieval mystery play whose spoken and sung texts had been
written directly in French by the noted Italian poet and novelist
Gabriele D’Annunzio. By the time Debussy was enlisted, the project
already involved four stellar and strong-minded collaborators.
D’Annunzio, the prime mover, was a vain, pretentious womanizer
addicted to living in luxury beyond his means. But he was also imagina-
tive, enterprising, and a virtuosic versifier. (Two decades later, he would
play a controversial role in Italian politics.)7 Le martyre was commis-
sioned by the Russian-Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein, who, in the role of
Sebastian, intriguingly combined dance, mime, and poetic recitation—

and who, through the work as a whole, launched what would become
an important career as a creative impresario. (Rubinstein would later
commission Boléro from Ravel and would dance the central part in its
choreographed premiere.)8 And the choreographer and set and costume
designer, respectively, were the widely renowned Michel Fokine and
Léon Bakst, regular associates of Serge Diaghilev and of his latest com-
positional protégé, Igor Stravinsky.9
The famous story that gave Le martyre de saint Sébastien its name—
Sebastian’s being shot full of arrows by Roman soldiers for having re-
fused to renounce Christianity and to worship Jupiter and the other
gods of Rome—made up acts 3 and 4 (see Figure 1).10 In D’Annunzio’s
retelling, this already vivid story became rich in homoerotic sadomaso-
chism. The Emperor of Rome, Diocletian, yearns for Sebastian’s body
and “hyacinth tresses,” asks him to sing with the Roman lyre, offers him
worldly treasure and a promotion to divinity, and has the crowd cry out:
“May the just gods save your beauty, Sebastian, for the Emperor.”11
Sebastian spurns all temptations, shatters Diocletian’s lyre, and dances
(and also describes in verse) the Passion of Christ. Diocletian orders
that Sebastian’s beautiful face be disfigured by fire:
Scellez sa bouche avec la torche!

Faites de sa face une plaie fumante!
[Seal up his mouth with the torch!

Make of his face a smoking wound!]12
But Diocletian quickly changes his mind and commands instead that the
obstinate one be “smothered” (étouffez-le) under a heavy heap of crowns,
Figure 1. Title and brief summary of each of the five acts (“Les cinq mansions”),
omitting many episodes that do not involve music (e.g., additional miracles, and
commentaries from heavenly voices and from the crowd).
golden necklaces . . . and flowers, “for he is beautiful” (car il est beau).13

This particular death sentence was perhaps intended to echo, and elabo-
rate upon, the one that ends Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and the contro-
versial Richard Strauss opera based on it: at the command of Herod, the
Roman ruler of Judaea, the guards crush Salome “under their shields.”
Le martyre, though, does not end with this attempted smothering.
Sebastian, we learn at the beginning of act 4, was saved by his fellow
archers. Diocletian has responded by ordering that the stubborn Chris-
tian be stripped, bound to a laurel tree in Apollo’s grove, and shot full of
arrows by those same archers. In act 4, the archers try in vain to per-
suade Sebastian to flee, then weep as they—urged on ecstatically by the
victim with cries of “Votre amour! Encore!” [Your love! More!]—com-
plete his martyr’s fate. The people of Syria mourn the beautiful youth,

whom they call Adonis. The arrows miraculously vanish from his body
and reappear in the tree behind him. (Hence the title of act 4: Le
laurier blessé, The Wounded Laurel Tree.)
D’Annunzio prefaced this lengthy story of Sebastian’s temptation
and martyrdom with two independent stories: Sebastian walking on
burning coals yet feeling no pain (act 1), and Sebastian vanquishing the
pagan sorceresses of Babylonia (act 2). He followed it with an epilogue
(act 5) set in heaven. He studded all three stories and the epilogue with
additional miracles and with commentaries by various pagans, the souls
of saints, and angelic voices. And he encrusted the whole text with
internal rhymes, precious allusions, and quasi-musical repetitions of
words and phrases. (The printed libretto, in exquisite typography, ex-
tends to more than 250 pages.) At the 1911 performances, the show,
despite some cuts in the spoken portions, lasted over four hours.14 In
the near-century since its original run of nine performances, the work
has rarely been revived on stage—always with extensive, even drastic
cuts in the spoken passages; and rarely, if ever, with enough success to
create a demand for many repeat performances.15
One might also note that the sets and costumes devised for Le
martyre in productions of recent decades (e.g., Paris 1988 and Palermo
1999) have largely eschewed all marks of Middle Eastern local color.
Instead, they have tended to be either cleanly abstract (thereby empha-
sizing such putatively universal themes as oppressive power and sexual
transgression) or else, at most, generically “ancient.” In the process,
these productions have reflected, and perhaps also reinforced, the ten-
dency toward downplaying or even leaving unmentioned the exotic
aspects of this remarkable work.16
Assigning the role of a young male saint or biblical character to a
female performer was a relatively standard practice at the time among
producers of religious and other “ancient” spectacles.17 In the case of Le

martyre, D’Annunzio and the other members of the creative team may
also have hoped that the use of a woman as Sebastian would make the
homoerotic aspects of the text and physical movement less objectionable
to the audience, critics, and religious authorities. Nonetheless, many
people at the time found D’Annunzio’s and Debussy’s bold reworking of
central Catholic traditions tasteless, opportunistic, or worse. Shortly
before the opening night, the Vatican placed all of D’Annunzio’s works
on the index of forbidden writings, and the archbishop of Paris formally
forbade his flock to attend the performances of a work so “offensive to
Christian conscience.”18
The next year, Debussy published a four-movement work for orches-
tra alone, entitled Le martyre de saint Sébastien: Fragments symphoniques.

This authorized suite stitches together (with minimal adjustment) some of
the work’s lengthier passages of continuous music (e.g., preludes and
scenes for miming), reassigning to instruments certain lines that were orig-
inally sung by soloists or chorus.19 Debussy’s apparent aim was to include as
many distinctly different passages of musical material as possible. Thus, in
cases where a passage in the complete score returns several times—always
with significant, dramatically apposite adjustment—only one version of the
material (usually the initial one) appears in the Fragments. The Fragments
symphoniques last around twenty-three minutes and, in recent decades,
have been performed and recorded with increasing frequency.20
In 1928, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht—who had been choral conductor
for the 1911 performances and was one of Debussy’s closest associates—
collaborated with his wife Germaine to drastically condense the spoken
text, producing an effective seventy-five-minute quasi-oratorio with reci-
tations by a single actor or actress.21 In 1962, Leonard Bernstein created
and recorded an English-language version with two actors (one male, as
narrator and Emperor; the other female, as Sebastian), which conveys
the drama with particular vividness.22 In recent years, Pierre Boulez has
conducted his own version. Like those of the Inghelbrechts and of
Bernstein, it contains the complete music, but the passages of spoken
recitation between the musical numbers—and even sometimes during a
musical number—are even shorter. (This is the version that forms the
basis for the forthcoming edition of the work in the Debussy Oeuvres
complétes.)23 In the remainder of the present essay, phrases such as “act
1, no. 3, reh. no. 3/4 –8” refer to the complete stage music, whether with
full or shortened spoken text. Phrases such as “Fragments, mvt. 2, reh.
no. 7/4 –8” refer to Debussy’s four-movement orchestral work.24
Debussy’s complete contribution to D’Annunzio’s Le martyre
amounts to close to an hour of music. It consists of preludes to the five
acts, orchestral passages to support extended speech or mime ( primarily

by Sebastian), and vocal numbers for several solo female voices and—
especially in act 5—for female, male, and mixed choruses of varying
sizes. Marcel Proust found the musical contributions to D’Annunzio’s
sacred drama “slight” (mince) and expressed astonishment that
D’Annunzio and Rubinstein had hired “a quite immense orchestra to
play these few farts” by Debussy (orchestre bien immense pour ces quelques
pets).25 Nonetheless, Debussy’s contribution to the evening-length event
was recognized by many commentators at the time as substantial indeed
and as displaying a high level of inspiration and innovation.26
Barely mentioned at the time, or since, is the fact that the score
also contains some remarkably diverse exotic portrayals.27 These exotic
portrayals interact in important ways with two aspects that have domi-

nated discussion of the work from its own day onward: the “perverse”
sexuality (incarnated in Ida Rubinstein’s vivid manner of dancing and
posing) and the extreme religious mysticism. In pointing them out,
I hope to complement (not supplant) the insightful observations by
Peter Lamothe about similarities between Debussy’s music in Le martyre
and “ancient” and “early Christian” styles in stage works of the gener-
ation or two before Debussy.28 I should add that I am particularly eager
to stress the exotic aspects because Le martyre has sometimes been por-
trayed as representing a decided retreat on Ida Rubinstein’s part from
Diaghilevan exoticism (Cléopatre, Shéhérazade), as in Toni Bentley’s
otherwise perceptive account.29 Writers who have focused on the cos-
tumes and sets for the original Le martyre know better: several, echoing
the views of observers at the time, consider this production the apogee
of Bakst’s many efforts at creating “a magic Orient.”30
Because Le martyre as a whole is such an elaborate and disparate
work, and because some of its music is unknown to most music lovers,
I will, for greater clarity, be discussing the musical examples in the order
in which they occur in the work and will often mention their dramatic
context. This will also make it easier to coordinate my comments with
the Fragments symphoniques, since the passages in it proceed in the same
order as in the complete work. (As indicated in the captions, Examples
1, 2, and 3 are all included in the first movement of the Fragments and
Example 9 in the third.)
“That Young Man from Asia”

The exotic tilt to the work was largely instigated by D’Annunzio, and
Debussy’s previous exotic explorations may have been one reason why
D’Annunzio sought him out.31 Exoticism was not an obvious component
for D’Annunzio to include in a work about this particular saint. After

all, according to Catholic tradition, Sebastian was an archer, not from
the Middle East, but from Narbonne in southern France or from Milan
(or, combining the two, born in Narbonne but educated in Milan). The
story goes that he was one of Emperor Diocletian’s Praetorian guards
and that he was put to death in 287 AD by the emperor’s archers for
refusing to worship the gods of Rome. In Renaissance and Baroque
paintings, Sebastian is usually shown tied to a tree, his face gazing heav-
enward, his half-naked body pierced by numerous arrows.32
D’Annunzio’s play fluctuates unsteadily between a variety of loca-
tions, all of them lying to the east of Europe. Acts 3 and 4 occur in or
around one of the palaces of Diocletian, perhaps his main one in
Nicomedia (today İzmit, in Turkey). Diocletian was emperor of the eastern

portion of the Roman Empire. (His son-in-law Galerius ruled the western
portion from Rome itself, and two other “tetrarchs” ruled yet other por-
tions.) The majority of the onstage characters, though, come from greater
Syria, a broad territory that included the Mediterranean coastal region
known then (and now) by some version of the name Lebanon, e.g.,
“Libanus” (Latin) or “Liban” (French). Most crucially, the Roman warrior
Sebastian is, from the beginning of the work, called “archer of Lebanon”
and head of a cohort of archers who, though loyal to Rome, come from
Emesa, the Syrian city that is today known in Arabic as “Homs.”33 In
addition, Sebastian visits, in act 2, a major world power located yet further
to the east: Babylon. (The text sometimes calls it “Chaldea.”)
Sebastian’s smothering (in act 3) and death-by-shooting (act 4)—
wherever they are understood as occurring, whether in Turkey or
Syria—are mourned by the women of Byblos, the famous coastal city of
the Phoenicians that is today Djubayl, in Lebanon. Sebastian identifies
himself at one point with one particular pagan god, namely Baal
Marcod, who was worshiped in greater Syria during the time of the
Phoenicians. (The name, which means “Lord of the Dance,” is given in
Latin inscriptions as Balmarcodes.)
César, César, aux yeux de lynx, je danserai, je danserai, si je suis le

Seigneur des danses venu de Béryte marine avec tes cargaisons d’épices
. . . . Pour tes mages et tes devins je danserai la Passion de ce Jeune
Homme asiatique[,] de ce Prince supplicié: car la feuille de ton laurier
est comme le fer de la lance qui lui perça le flanc anxieux.34
[Caesar, Caesar, with [narrow] eyes like a lynx, I shall dance, I shall
dance, if I am the Lord of the dance, come from Berytus-by-the-sea [i.e.,
Beirut] with your cargoes of spices. . . . For your wise men and seers I
shall dance the Passion of this Young Man from Asia[,] of this tortured
Prince: for the leaf of your laurel [wreath that you offer me] is like the
iron [tip] of the lance that pierced his tense thigh.]
Jesus and Sebastian are thus presented, by Sebastian himself, as “young

men from Asia,” hence as ethnic outsiders to Imperial Rome (and, in
act 2, as outsiders to an older, even more benighted empire, Babylon).
They were also that much more exotic to a Paris audience of 1911. And
their association, in D’Annunzio’s text, with an Eastern region of simple
ways seems consistent with their unselfconscious beauty and their will-
ingness to sacrifice themselves toward a higher religious goal.35
I might add that the (Middle-)Easternness of Sebastian, from a
Parisian point of view, was apparent in the very casting of a

Russian-Jewish dancer, Ida Rubinstein, in the role—particularly given
that her most famous previous roles were as Cleopatra and the Sultan’s
wife Zobédiade. To be sure, Bakst’s costume for Sebastian early in the
work was primarily European in allure (see Figure 2). But the overtones
of the ancient Middle East—and of famous paintings of Bible scenes—
became ever stronger as evening went on, with Sebastian being stripped
down at one point in act 3 to a plain white robe and finally to a loin-
cloth and some chest wrappings in act 4.
The exoticness of the work’s various pagan worlds (Lebanon/Syria,
Babylonia, and even, as we shall see, the Roman Empire itself, either as
a whole or just its eastern half ) and of its two chief Christian figures
(Sebastian and Jesus; the latter, though he never appears, is often
described, praised, or excoriated) permitted D’Annunzio and Debussy to
enrich the work with a staggering variety of religious, cultural, and
musical images. There were extensive exotic elements in the costumes
and sets. This is suggested in the numerous costume and set designs—
and onstage photos from the original production—that were published
at the time, either in the program book for the 1911 performances or in
two important theater magazines: Le théâtre and L’illustration théâtrale.36
It is said that Baron Robert de Montesquiou, a noted writer and one of
the age’s great dandies and aesthetes, “went with Bakst to the Louvre to
examine” (with an eye toward imitating them in Le martyre) “Sassanid
fabrics, Byzantine enamels, and bas-reliefs from the eastern part of the
Roman Empire that had extended into Egypt and Syria.”37 If so, Bakst
helpfully ignored a lot of what he saw there, choosing instead to invent
his own versions of Roman togas and Arabian-style caftans and turbans,
painting them with bold, contrasting, and freshly imagined geometric
designs that could be easily seen at a distance. (See Figures 2–8, most
of which have rarely, if ever, been reprinted in discussions of Debussy’s
Figure 2. Ida Rubinstein in the vaguely European-Renaissance costume for act 3, in

which she confronts the Roman Emperor Diocletian in his palace ( presumably in what
is now Turkey). Diocletian was costumed in a brightly decorated version of a
recognizably Roman toga. Several of Diocletian’s seers wore togas that were somewhat
Greek in cut and design. From the issue of Le théâtre: Revue bimensuelle illustrée that is
devoted entirely to Le martyre (no. 299, for the first half of June 1911).
Figure 3. By contrast, the Babylonian sorceresses were given strikingly weird and
non-European garb. These sketches by Léon Bakst (see also Figures 5–8) were
scrupulously carried out in the actual costumes, as numerous photos attest. From Le
théâtre: Revue bimensuelle illustrée 299 (1911).
score. The description cited earlier of the Sebastian in act 4 being near-
naked except for some strategic wrappings accords with one
oft-reproduced drawing by Bakst. A less well-known Bakst drawing of
Figure 4. Stage photo of two Women of Byblos (in Lebanon), from the scene in Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at State Univ NY at Stony Brook on June 5, 2011
act 3 in which Sebastian (costumed as shown in Figure 2) confronts Diocletian. From
Le théâtre: Revue bimensuelle illustrée 299 (1911).
the same scene, shown as Figure 8, is more modest but perhaps even
more redolent of Biblical characters, such as John the Baptist. No photo
of the actual costume survives.) The costume sketches and photos also
give hints, in conjunction with some surviving verbal descriptions, of
the dancing, miming, and other stage movement.
We are on significantly more solid ground when discussing
D’Annunzio’s text and Debussy’s music, since both of these were pub-
lished in full at the time. (The music was published in a complete

Figure 5. A Jew of the Eastern Roman Empire. From Le théâtre: Revue bimensuelle
illustrée 299 (1911).
piano-vocal score, plus the various orchestral excerpts mentioned earlier.

The complete orchestral score was long available only on rental, but a
critical edition, edited by Eiko Kasaba, is scheduled to be published in
the near future.)38 Naturally enough, many of the textual and musical
images of exotic locales chosen by the various members of the creative
team were ones considered, at the time, peculiarly appropriate to the
Middle Eastern regions in question. Others were borrowed from un-
named locales that lay even further to the east, notably India and, in
one startling case (as has apparently not been pointed out), Indonesia.
Figure 6. A dark-complexioned augure (seer) serving Emperor Diocletian. From Le

In some spots, this proliferation of exoticisms strengthened the primary

Roman Catholic message of the work; in others, as we shall see, it deftly
undermined it.

Figure 7. Three turbaned non-Europeans in Diocletian’s extensive retinue: from left,
a devin (soothsayer), a Nubian slave, and a mage (wise man or fortune-teller). From Le
The poet’s seemingly idiosyncratic emphasis on regions beyond

Europe was not without some basis in history and legend. A longstand-
ing version of the Saint Sebastian myth specified that Diocletian’s mur-
derous archers were Mauretanians (natives of the “Moorish” lands that
are now Morocco and Algeria). Furthermore, it is a historical fact that,
in 303– 04 AD, Diocletian promulgated four successive edicts against
Christian worship, leading to the slaughter of thousands in Alexandria
and Asia Minor.39
D’Annunzio labored to make theatrically plausible the saint’s con-
nection to what early-twentieth-century French people called l’Orient.
He posited that the Syrians (including the Lebanese/Phoenicians) did
not grasp the principles of the nascent Christian religion and that they
therefore conflated Sebastian with the Greek god Adonis (and with
Adonis’s Middle Eastern predecessors, since his name derives from the
Semitic root adon, “lord”).40 Indeed, as the well-read D’Annunzio surely
knew, the second-century writer Lucian recorded that a river flowing
down from Mount Lebanon was named Adon. Once a year, the river
turned red from silt, yet people in the region believed that they were
Figure 8. Saint Sebastian in act 4, stripped of his courtly garments and wearing a quasi-
Biblical short tunic and animal skins. From Le théâtre: Revue bimensuelle illustrée 299
(1911).
seeing—in quasi-ritualistic annual repetition—the blood that Adon shed

when he was gored by a boar.41
Another aspect of exotic characterization is evident in the way that,
toward the end of act 3, the Syrian people (including the Women of
Byblos) are portrayed as blindly obedient to the Emperor. To be sure, obe-
dience is a central function of all the various choral groups in act 3. The
(presumably Roman, or at least loyal-to-Rome) cithara players respond
instantly to Diocletian’s demand that they sing in praise of Apollo (and of
Diocletian himself). Similarly, when the Emperor—having dressed
Sebastian in a white robe, regal necklaces, and other attributes of power—
cries out to his augures (seers), “Annoncez l’étoile future au ciel romain!”
[Announce [Sebastian as] the future star in the Roman skies!], they
instantly do so in a joyous chorus (act 3, no. 6).42 By contrast, the

Lebanese and Syrians are not in the employ of Rome, and therefore have
no presumed need to bend to Diocletian’s will and whim. Yet he soon
commands them as well:
Mais il est pâle, Adoniastes, plus que vos images de cire après l’équinoxe
d’automne, sur vos lits d’ébène, à Byblos. Il renaissait, et il se meurt. O
pleureuses, pleurez encore! Il se meurt, l’Archer du Liban!
[He is pale, oh worshipers of Adonis, paler than your images of wax after
the autumnal equinox, upon your beds of ebony, at Byblos. He was
finding new life, and [now] he is dying. Oh, weepers, lament again! He,
the Archer of Lebanon, is dying!]
And the Syrian people (Chorus Syriacus) respond without hesitation by

repeating the exotically colored chorus that—as will be discussed later—
the Women of Byblos had sung earlier in act 3, at the end of Sebastian’s
retelling (and miming) of the Passion of Christ. One can read this supine
reaction narrowly—as typical of the specific ethnic group we are seeing
(fourth-century inhabitants of what would in later centuries become Arab
lands, and already clothed in semi-Arab garb)—or broadly—as a universal
tendency of crowds to be manipulated by selfish people in positions of
power. Or, perhaps (as is so often called for when dealing with a highly
allegorical work), at once narrowly and broadly.43
I have said that Le martyre presents a predominantly Christian
frame for its various exotic moments. This basic Christian context is
reflected in choral and other vocal movements that make free use of
styles borrowed from Western sacred-music traditions, such as Gregorian
chant and Renaissance polyphony. Listeners familiar with various
extended works of the 1880s by Debussy—notably L’enfant prodigue and
Example 1a – b. Le martyre, act 1 (La cour des Lys), no. 1 (Prelude), mm. 1–4 and
m. 12 (equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, same measure numbers). Root-position chords
and, in m. 12, triads a tritone apart. Musical examples from Le martyre are drawn from
the piano-vocal score prepared by André Caplet (see n. 23).
La damoiselle élue—will find themselves on familiar ground. The orches-

tral prelude, offers music of utter purity (Ex. 1a). Here, simple triads in
root position imply various church modes, much like two well-known
moments that were surely familiar to Debussy and many of his listeners:
the ecclesiastical procession in the middle of Musorgsky’s “Great Gate of
Kiev” (from Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874); and the solemn opening
chords of Tchaikovky’s Romeo and Juliet (1870, rev. 1880), which plainly
represent Friar Laurence. But, as if predicting the pain that the agents
of paganism will inflict on God’s “elected ones,” we soon hear chords
juxtaposed a tritone apart (Ex. 1b).44
Easternness surprises the listener in m. 31 (Ex. 2) when, over a
wavering countermelody in the English horn (left-hand part of the piano
reduction) and repeated arpeggios in the two harps (on a chord contain-
ing a dissonant minor second), the oboe begins a tune that is (according
to Debussy’s marking) expressif et douloureux.45 (Oboe and English horn
had long been markers of the Middle East and Central Asia, in part
because of their similarity to the zurna and other double-reed instru-
ments much practiced in those regions.) The tune continues with
arabesque-like flourishes, some of which descend chromatically, rather
like those in Middle Eastern portrayals by numerous composers during
the previous decades, such as the recurring solo violin tune in
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade or Dalila’s “Ah, reviens” from
Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila.
I propose that Debussy meant this Eastern-tinted tune to refer to
Sebastian and Jesus because, in the oratorio, it returns ( played touch-
ingly by the solo violin) during Sebastian’s powerful spoken words about
hearing, presumably on the Day of Resurrection, “the footsteps of the
new god, [walking] side by side with the new man” (la marche du
nouveau dieu à côté de l’homme nouveau).46 The Easternness and sad-eyed

Example 2. Debussy, Le martyre, act 1, no. 1, mm. 31 –38, reh. no. 2/3–10
(equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, same measure numbers). Middle-Eastern sorrow.
gracefulness of Jesus—and, by reflection, of Sebastian, the onstage char-

acter who is invoking Jesus’s arrival at the end of days—could not be
more plainly marked.
Exotic Fire
Later in act 1, Sebastian treads upon burning coals to give witness to
the power of the one God. (The orchestra’s music, without Sebastian’s
spoken lines, forms movement 2 of the Fragments symphoniques.)
D’Annunzio surely based this episode on Indian fakirs and their
world-renowned feats of endurance.47 The (unacknowledged) Hindu

Example 3. Debussy, Le martyre, act 1, no. 3, reh. no. 3/4–8 (equivalent to
Fragments, mvt. 2, reh. no. 7/4–8). Crackling pizzicati and sizzling brass entries portray
the fiery coals upon which Sebastian is preparing to step. (The horns play “brassily” a
bit earlier, at reh. no. 2/6– 7).
background to the action here makes Sebastian’s daring feel at least

somewhat rooted in human life—and therefore more plausible.
Debussy’s music (see Ex. 3) is not directly exotic-sounding. Instead, con-
sistent with the broader paradigm that I discussed at the outset—the
“All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm—it emphasizes elements that
are, in some other way, consonant with the exotic premise. The crack-
ling flames and increasing heat and tension are suggested by string pizzi-
cati and ponticello tremolos, all rising in dynamic level from pp to f, and
by sudden interjections from the brass, including passages played in a
“brassy” manner (cuivrez). The fakir-saint’s confident footsteps are indi-
cated by steadily rising and falling phrases in the winds.
Are fire and footsteps exotic? They become so, I contend, when
the figure whom we see stepping upon the glowing embers is an exotic
holy man who advances calmly, having entered into a mental state
similar to what, fifty years later—in the context of a renewed Western
cultural fascination with Indian culture and religion—would be called
“transcendental meditation.”
During the remainder of act 1, the work’s primary Christian
context gradually asserts itself in three phases: first, a chant-like
proclamation of faith by the martyrs (and twin brothers) Mark and

Marcellian (Le martyre, no. 3, reh. no. 6; Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no.
10);48 then sudden beneficent smoothness as Sebastian reports that the
scorching coals feel to him as cool as white lilies (at the marking
Modéré); and, finally, a Palestrina-like a cappella motet for the angels’
praise of Sebastian’s deliverance (Le martyre, no. 3, reh. no. 12;
Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no. 16).49
Chaldean Sorcery and an Indonesian-Sounding

Goddess
Act 2, “La chambre magique” [The Chamber of Magic], musically very
strong, is unfortunately not represented in the orchestral Fragments. The

scene is the dark laboratory of the Eastern (Babylonian) sorceresses who
maintain the heavenly bodies in orbit. Figure 3 shows the very strange
and distinctly non-European garb devised by Léon Bakst for the seven
women who performed these non-singing roles.50
As in the episode of the danse extatique in act 1, Debussy’s music
makes no use of exotic style yet nonetheless helps a heavily exoticized
scenario make its impact. The prelude—accompanying our view of the
dark laboratory, with its Chaldean inscriptions and seven steaming cruci-
bles in which the fires of the planets, sun, and moon are burning—opens
with mysterious tremolos and other figurations on two open fifths a half-
step apart, and a notably ambiguous melody in the contrabassoon that,
among other things, arpeggiates a diminished-seventh chord (Ex. 4).
This passage is hard for us, the listeners, to make sense of.51 We
are, one might say, peering aurally into a dark space and trying to iden-
tify shapes and their secret purposes. Ravel may have had this
mysterious passage in mind when writing two (today much better-
known) sinuous contrabassoon solos: the one that opens his Concerto
for Piano Left Hand (1930) and the one that represents the Beast in
the movement entitled “Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête”
[Conversations between Beauty and the Beast] in the Ma mère l’oye
[Mother Goose] orchestral suite and ballet score (1908 –12).52
Particularly appropriate to the alchemical wonder-working of these
Mesopotamian sorceresses are two crystalline upward swoops on celesta
and harps (Ex. 5, using the bitonal double fifths from Ex. 4) and, in the
winds and harps, eerie augmented triads descending along a whole-tone
scale across several octaves (Ex. 6).53 Again, musical materials that are
not exotic in origin (and that, in this case, are almost “high-tech” for
their era) are invoked to characterize a strikingly exotic and backward
non-Western culture: Babylonian astrology.
Example 4. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1 (Prelude), mm.
3–7. A dark, winding melody for contrabassoon, against tremolos on two-fifths a
half-step apart.
Soon after, the voice of Erigone, a fabled virgin of pagan days

(sometimes identified by stargazers with the constellation and zodiacal
sign Virgo), is heard singing from beyond the heavy locked doors at the

Example 5. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1, (Prelude), reh.
no. 1/9–10. “Magical” swoops on celesta and harp (based on the same two fifths as in
Example 4).
Example 6. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2 (“La chambre magique”), no. 1, (Prelude), reh.
no. 2/6–7. Parallel augmented triads in the winds, descending along a whole-tone
scale.
back of the sorceresses’ chamber.54 Her radiant music freshens the

gloomy atmosphere. It also briefly challenges the work’s prevailing
Western frame. Whereas, elsewhere in Le martyre, offstage voices con-
sistently provide “correct” Christian interpretations of onstage events,
here the offstage voice presents a mystical, almost pantheistic vision, in
Example 7. Debussy, Le martyre, act 2, no. 2 (song for the voice of the Virgin
Erigone), mm. 1– 12. “Black-note” pentatonic writing on E, equivalent to better-known
“gamelan” passages in works of Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Britten, and others.
which human life is fleeting and merges seamlessly into the natural
world: “Mon âme, sous le ciel clément, / Était la soeur de l’hirondelle; /
Mon ombre m’était presqu’une aile” [My soul, under the gentle sky, was
sister to the swallow; my shadow was, to me, almost a wing].
Erigone’s gentle, emotionally restrained song (Ex. 7) alludes to a
tonally placid but rhythmically multilayered musical style from
Indonesia, an unexpected locale that lies some five thousand miles
further away from Rome (and Paris) than any of those explicitly invoked
by D’Annunzio (Turkey, Syria, and Babylonia). Erigone’s melody de-
scends and ascends in relaxed, delicate fashion along the (slendro-like)
pentatonic scale. Often her notes move in simple, even rhythm, like a
nursery rhyme, thereby suggesting her innocent nature. The solo winds
imitate the vocal line much as performers in a gamelan echo each other.

This remarkable song deserves to be examined as comprehensively as his
much better-known exploration of pentatonic-drenched gamelan style
“Pagodes” (from the Estampes for piano solo). That it has escaped the
attention of commentators—normally so quick to apply the “Exotic
Style Only” Paradigm—surely derives from the fact that the sung words
(unlike, say, the titles of “Pagodes” and Ravel’s “Laideronnette, impéra-
trice des pagodes”) give no hint of an East Asian ethnic context.55
Later in the act, Sebastian breaks open the doors, letting in the
voice of the Virgin Mary, who sings of the bright face of her pure child.
But the more sensuously enchanting—and intensely exotic—song of
Erigone, with its carefree, overlapping orchestral traceries, lingers in the
listener’s memory. Indeed, this Indonesian-style number seems to be the
solo vocal number from Le martyre ever to have established a perfor-
mance life on its own: Lucienne Tragin would record it in 1943 with
Francis Poulenc at the piano, the two elegantly conveying a mood of
unforced sensuousness tinged with the inevitability of loss.56
The Exoticness of Rome

Different yet again in tonal language, orchestral color, and exotic impli-
cations is the passage, early in act 3, in which Diocletian commands his
cithara-playing male singers to “blind the impious one” (aurally) with
the “radiance” of the hymn to Apollo (Ex. 8).57 The words of the
hymn consist of an almost syntax-free string of epithets, suggesting the
emptiness of pagan theology and the servility of Roman courtiers and
functionaries: “Hymn of Joy! Golden Lyre! Silver Bow! . . . Beauteous
Sovereign crowned with light!”58 Another composer might have set such
phrases to straightforward operatic-style choral music of regal and divine
glory, as if to reinforce the conventional notion that Rome was (with
Greece) the cradle of Western civilization.59 A third composer would

have employed music that was faintly modal, and bland in orchestration,
thereby rendering it, in Michael Walter’s apt term, “colorless.”60
Debussy’s setting, by contrast, is colorful in the extreme, as quirky and
unique as any of his more obviously ethnic portrayals in the work
(Ex. 8). Indeed, one might call this hymn of the cithara players
exotically bizarre, with the important exception that the exoticism is
conveyed by a musical dialect that is freshly invented rather than
conventionally associated with the locale (and, in this case, era) in
question.
Immediately obvious to the eye is the white-note tonal language of
the hymn: not one accidental is to be seen until the shift to a kind of E
major in the last phrase. The key signature is two sharps, but the music

consistently avoids the two modes typical of functional tonality (i.e., D
major and B minor). Instead, it briefly establishes, one after the other,
three further modes that are available within the seven notes of the dia-
tonic two-sharp scale: A-Mixolydian, E-Dorian, and F-sharp-Phrygian.
The constant modal shifts make the hymn an instance of the harmonic
technique that Nicholas Slonimsky would later term “pandiatonicism.”61
This technique—i.e., restricting the music to a single seven-note dia-
tonic (“white-note”) scale and abruptly shifting the tonal center (and,
hence, mode) within that scale—points back to Satie’s Gymnopédies
(1888, orchestrated by Debussy in 1897) but also ahead to 1920s-era
Stravinsky, 1940s-era Copland, and such composers of the present day
as John Adams and Arvo Pärt.62
Intriguingly, this obsessive exploring of successive modes other
than major and minor is not wildly different from the Christian-style
(or, we might say, “Cathédrale engloutie”-style) opening of Le martyre
(first measures of Ex. 1) or from the powerful choral paean that ends
act 2.63 But harmony in this Hymn to Apollo (from act 3) is intensely
inflected by texture, rhythm, and the manner in which the men’s
chorus declaims D’Annunzio’s words (which are, unlike in some other
numbers in Le martyre, unrhymed). These seventeen remarkable
measures feature much stolidly unison singing in an energetic but
off-kilter 5/4 meter, perhaps recalling the 7/4 of the Jewish soothsayers
in Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ (1854). The French words sometimes
end up misaccented, as happens nowhere else in Le martyre. The
estranging effect of the 5/4 meter is reinforced by the robotic accom-
paniment (for full string orchestra and three harps), which
consists mainly of triads (or open fifths) that stomp up and down the
scale in “unthinking” parallel motion and in nearly unbroken quarter-
note rhythm.
Example 8. Debussy, Le martyre, act 3, no. 3 (hymn of the cithara players), mm.
1–12. Harmonies sequencing mechanically to different modes available with the notes
of the D-major scale, and to stolid quarter-note rhythms. Détaché duplets on a single
pitch for violins in harmonics.
As compositional experiment, this brusque, punchy music is fasci-

nating. In context, though, it suggests how oppressive and unfeeling the
Roman Empire of the story is, especially by contrast to the sweet flow or
pious churchliness of one or another of Le martyre’s pointedly
“Christian” passages. In perhaps no previous musical work was the
Roman Empire—or do we see it as specifically the Empire’s Eastern
half?—presented as so exotic, antipathetic, and incomprehensible, so
unredeemably Other, so profoundly un-Christian (in all senses of that
word).64
Markers of Easternness
Soon after this comes the one extended passage in Debussy’s score for

Le martyre that most plainly fits the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm: the
lamenting of the Women of Byblos over Sebastian, who has just
described and enacted Christ’s despair in the garden of Gethsemane.
These four linked laments (Ex. 9) incorporate markers that had long
been used by composers to tell the listener that she or he is now “in”
the Middle East. The exotic effect of the music was no doubt further
reinforced by the costumes of the women (Figure 4) and by their contin-
ual verbal references to the local Semitic god Adonis (whom they mista-
kenly believe Sebastian to be).
The passage concludes the Gethsemane scene, in response to
Sebastian’s vivid reference to (and miming of ) Jesus’s imminent death:
“Sa sueur tombe comme gouttes de sang, trempe la terre” [His sweat
falls like drops of blood, soaks the earth]. The horror-stricken women’s
chorus enters with what we might call Lament A (first measures of
Ex. 9), a fluid descending chromatic melody line over a sudden forte
orchestral passage, full of dissonant chords and tritonal pounding in the
timpani.65 The chorus’s melody bears a striking resemblance to the de-
scending chromatic vocal lines in two exotic opera arias by Rimsky-
Korsakov that would soon become worldwide favorites: the “Song of the
Indian Guest” from Sadko (1898; this aria is popularly known as “Song
of India” or, in French, “Chanson indoue”); and the “Hymn to the Sun”
from Le coq d’or (1909; this aria is performed by the queen of a fantasy
land, called Shemakha, in Central or East Asia). It may be that Debussy
was, like Rimsky-Korsakov, primarily drawing upon well-established
exotic conventions of Middle Eastern style (such as in the aforemen-
tioned aria from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila). But the possibility of a
direct influence should not be excluded. True, neither Sadko nor Le coq
d’or had been performed in Paris by 1911. But their piano-vocal scores
had been available in print since, respectively, 1896 and 1907.
Furthermore, the French singing translation published in the Sadko

score had been prepared by Louis Laloy (in conjunction with Michel
Delines), a music critic who, in the intervening years, had become a
trusted friend of Debussy’s and had written his biography.66 Composers
of Debussy’s day, it helps to remember, had many ways of getting to
know other composers’ music, not just (as most listeners needed to) by
attending a live performance.
The ribbons of half-steps continue in Lament B (“Ah! Tu pleures
le Bien-Aimé!”—Ex. 9 at reh. no. 6), but upwards as well as down, the
several vocal parts sometimes engaging in wedge-like contrary motion.
In Lament C (“Hélas!”—Ex. 9, reh. no. 6, at upbeat to m. 5), half-steps
now alternate with an even more specific intervallic marker of the
Middle East: the augmented second (between C-natural and D-sharp,
the latter curiously spelled as an E-flat).67

Finally, the lament tapers off in the voices (Ex. 9, at reh. no. 7),
moving into the orchestra—flutes and violins, playing piano and dolce
what we shall call Lament D—while six women in unison wail
“Adonis!” (In the orchestral Fragments—last pages of mvt. 3—Laments
B and C and the unison cries of “Adonis!” over the orchestra’s Lament
D are variously transferred to English horn and/or oboes, no doubt
because of those instruments’ Middle-Eastern associations.)68
Lament B is punctuated by little repeated-note interruptions in the
harp. Though their rhythm derives immediately from that of the afore-
mentioned forte timpani entry in Lament A, these détaché duplets, as I
shall call them, have a significant connection also to analogous détaché
duplets (likewise on a single pitch) in notable operas set in the Middle
East, such as Aida (the Nile Scene that opens act 3, appearing in
Ex. 10) and, even more similar in musical detail, Massenet’s Hérodiade
(Ex. 11).69 This figure—equal-value repeated notes on a single pitch—
does not derive from musical traditions of the Middle East. Rather, it is
an invented device that, when played against a long-held pedal tone (as
occurs in two of these instances: Lament B and Ex. 11), evokes qualities
long imputed to Middle-Eastern societies by people in Europe and
North America: stasis and rigid ( perhaps ritualistic) repetition rather
than forward movement and flexible growth.
Pedal points in music evoking the Middle East (or other exotic
locales) are usually placed in the low instruments, as, for instance, in
those moments by Verdi and Massenet (Exx. 10– 11). In Debussy’s
Laments B and C, the pedal (a long A-flat) is given out by solo winds:
flute for a full four measures, then clarinet, oboe, or both together. And,
significantly, the pedal is trilled. This thirteen-measure-long trill is an
almost exact quotation—except that it is about an octave lower—of
Example 9. Debussy, Le martyre, act 3, no. 4, reh. no. 5/2 to reh. no. 7/2 (appearing
in condensed and adapted form as the end of Fragments symphoniques, mvt. 3, from reh.
no. 25, mm. 2 onward). The Women of Byblos sing typically exotic (“Middle Eastern”)
intervals in their several successive laments over: “le bel Adonis” [fair Adonis]. Example 9
continues on next page.
what was (and remains) the most memorable extended wind trill in the
history of Western music, namely the one (on A) for flute in Richard
Strauss’s notorious exotic opera of six years earlier, Salome (Ex. 12; the
work received its Paris premiere, in French, in 1907, three years before
Debussy began composing Le martyre). Surely it is no coincidence that
Strauss’s long-held wind trill occurs at the moment when the title
Example 9. Continued.
character sings desirously about her beloved Middle-Eastern male and

Christian martyr, the decapitated John the Baptist. The infamous words
(derived from Oscar Wilde): “I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan.”
Though Sebastian (as noted earlier) has just mimed Jesus’s impending
crucifixion, the Lebanese women mourn him as if he were a handsome
young lover: “le bel Adolescent, couché dans la pourpre du sang” [the
beautiful Youth, lying bathed in the purple of blood]. Indeed, they still
call him by the name of their own local (Semitic in origin) pagan adoles-
cent god: Adonis. Debussy’s (unconscious?) echo of the most famous

Example 9. Concluded.
Example 10. Verdi, Aida (1871), act 3, mm. 1–2. Détaché duplets across four octaves
portray the placidity of nighttime by the Nile.
and controversial moment from Salome adds a further level of cultural

commentary to D’Annunzio’s scene, intensifying its aura of sacrilege and
perversity.
At the end of act 4 of Le martyre, after Sebastian has expired from
his arrow-wounds, the Eastern-style choral passage returns once more,
reworked in various ways and finally turned into a stirring funeral
march.70 Now the chromatically descending tune is sung by all the
Syrians (male and female).71 They no longer refer to Sebastian as
Adonis; this presumably indicates a first step away from paganism and
toward spiritual enlightenment. Nonetheless, they do repeat the Women
of Byblos’s earlier prediction that the dead man is headed toward “the
darkened portals . . . [of ] gloomy Hades.” We thus see that the Syrians
still have no concept of the Christian Heaven, despite all they have wit-
nessed of Sebastian’s devotion.

Example 11. Massenet, Hérodiade (1884), act 2, scene 1, mm. 8–11. Détaché duplets
on a single pitch for a semi-timeless scene in the Middle East: Herod, reclining in his
chamber, is waited upon by servants and yearns for the beautiful young Salome.
The Joys, and Colorlessness, of Heaven

The pagans are hopelessly mistaken. D’Annunzio shows this by moving,
without comment or pause, to the brief act 5. Set in Heaven, against a
painted backdrop that, in the original production, gleamed with rays of
celestial light, this brief final act consists primarily of statements of praise
(for Sebastian’s sacrifice) from God’s apostles and angels and a culminat-
ing paraphrase of Psalm 150 (“Praise the Lord with flute and lyre!”).72
This wonderfully affirmative music stands in sharp contrast to the
chromatic and augmented melodic motion—often over a long-held
pedal—that Debussy, in the two previous acts, had repeatedly assigned
to unbelieving Middle Easterners (Lebanese women, and the people of
Syria) and that was, in his day, an unmistakable marker of non-Western
exotic ethnicity. Exotic musical markers helped Debussy convey the
limited insight of heathen peoples, their blindness to what we encounter
at the very end of act 5: the transcendental, all-embracing Christian
vision of blessed life after death (rebirth in Christ), embodied in splen-
did music of diatonic and clearly Western glory. This concluding
number presents a grand series of I –IV– V (tonic –subdominant – domi-
nant) affirmations by the chorus, and then the bracing coda, heavily
pentatonic in tonal language, shown in Example 13.73
Debussy scholar Denis Herlin, in a recent study, agrees with many
of the reviewers of the premiere performances that act 5, with its gran-
diloquent Christianizing, is “by far the least successful” part of the
score.74 I would have said the same thing until I heard the Michael

Example 12. Strauss, Salome (1905; Paris premiere 1907, in French). “I have kissed
your mouth, Jochanaan.”
Tilson Thomas recording, in which the final minutes sound as convin-

cing as anything else in Debussy’s score. Indeed, I might argue that the
end of Debussy’s act 5 helped bring a spirit of joy and light back into
Western religious music, a field of musical productivity that, during
much of the nineteenth century, had suffered from an excess of gloomi-
ness or, worse, timid tastefulness.75 True, these triumphant, repeated
rising arpeggios for two solo sopranos in unison on “Alleluia” do not
sound much like what most of us think of as “Debussy.”76 But this may
be a limitation on our own part. Perhaps we have typecast Debussy as
writing in a certain highly refined and often oblique manner, whereas he
often took on a grand, more direct manner when writing works for large

Example 13. Debussy, Le martyre, act 5, reh. no. 9/1-2. Joyous affirmations of
spiritual rebirth.
forces—not least at the two ends of his career, e.g., in the Fantasy for
Piano and Orchestra (1889– 90) and La damoiselle élue (a kind of
secular cantata, 1888–89, rev. 1902) or, among later works, the orches-
tral Images (1905 –12) and the astounding ballet Khamma (composed in
1912 on commission for the notorious “Salome dancer” from America,
Maud Allan, and orchestrated by Charles Koechlin).77
The Importance of the Exotic for Debussy

Still, several of those works (the Fantasy, in its full version; the orches-
tral Images; and Khamma) make very happy play with a variety of exotic
or at least regional and folk styles, in a way that the final pages of Le
martrye do not. It may in fact be the case that Debussy—however much
he defended the work against charges of sacrilege by insisting on his
“sincere” response to the “idea of Ascension”—felt more comfortable,
generally, with concrete images of earthly joys and sorrows.78 Such
images, as we have seen, occur at numerous moments in acts 1– 4 of Le
martyre, whether overtly or (as in the case of Erigone’s quasi-Javanese
nursery song) covertly. Perhaps Debussy was less comfortable, finally,
with rapturous but culturally bleached affirmations of a transcendental

Divinity, as in the Alleluias of Example 13.
Distinctions between various exotic styles (long established or
newly invented) and the more normative materials of Western music—
in other words, distinctions between “Them” and “Us”—were a crucial
part of what made music, for Debussy, worth composing. Surprising
though it may seem, there is more exoticism in Debussy—and there is
more to that exoticism—than we have realized. As our examination of
Le martyre de saint Sébastien has demonstrated, even such inherently
ethnic-neutral elements as a long trill or a two-note figure on a single
pitch can, when placed in an exotic nonmusical context, acquire power-
ful exotic resonance. We will do a better job of noticing and evaluating
the full range of exotic portrayals in the works of Debussy—and, indeed,

many other composers—if we no longer restrict ourselves to the “Exotic
Style Paradigm” but instead adopt the much broader “All the Music in
Full Context” Paradigm.
Notes
Ralph P. Locke is professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman
School of Music, and senior editor of the University of Rochester Press’s Eastman
Studies in Music. His books include Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (1986),
Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (2009), and (as contributing co-editor)
Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (1997). Locke is a
five-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His 2005 article in Cambridge
Opera Journal on exoticism in Verdi’s Aida received the H. Colin Slim Award
(American Musicological Society). Email: rlocke@esm.rochester.edu.
The present study was first presented at meetings of the American Musicological
Society (New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter) on March 30, 2008; at a session orga-
nized by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations (during the American
Musicological Society’s 2008 conference in Nashville); and at the University of North
Carolina (Chapel Hill), April 5, 2008. The following read drafts, commented helpfully
on specific points, or shared their unpublished writings: Annegret Fauser, Denis Herlin,
Eiko Kasaba, Peter Lamothe, Anne MacNeil, and Marie Rolf. Lamothe, in addition,
shared with me his copies of crucial documentary materials from 1911, and Herlin and
Kasaba kindly made available previously unpublished portions of the forthcoming criti-
cal edition of the full orchestral score of Le martyre. Illustrations were kindly provided
by the staff of Special Collections and Rare Books at the Sibley Music Library of the
University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music (David Peter Coppen, Matthew
Colbert, and Emily Mills). A shortened version will be appearing, in Italian translation,
in Beyond the Stage: Musical Theatre and Performing Arts between fin de siècle and the
années folles, ed. Michela Niccolai and Giuseppe Montemagno.
1. Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009). See also a separate essay, “Doing the Impossible: On the
Musically Exotic,” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (2008): 334–58. A shortened
version of “Doing the Impossible” appeared as “L’impossible possibilité de l’exotisme

musical,” in Musique, esthétique et société en France au XIXe siècle: Liber amicorum
Joël-Marie Fauquet, ed. Damien Colas, Florence Gétreau, and Malou Haine (Liège:
Mardaga, 2007), 91–107.
2. In the present article, I mention—without the use of quotation marks—various
styles that were constructed by Western composers to represent various groups widely
perceived as exotic or Other, e.g., the Hungarian Roma (often called—sometimes even
by themselves—Gypsies or, in Hungarian, cigány) and Middle Easterners. I rely upon
the reader to understand that I am not referring to actual music of these various
peoples but, rather, to often limited and stereotypical images of them within Western
high culture.
3. See, for example, Ralph P. Locke, “Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen:
Unexplored Borrowings and Transformations,” in Stage Music and Cultural Transfer:
Paris 1830 to 1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, forthcoming).

4. The process just described is, not surprisingly, similar in film and on television: see
my Musical Exoticism, chaps. 9 –10.
5. The few references to the exoticism of Le martyre tend to be brief and to operate
exclusively within the “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm, e.g., “variously influenced by folk
song, medieval ballad, Renaissance polyphony and Asian music” (Michael Tilson
Thomas, in the essay “My Approach to Performing ‘Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien’,”
8–9, quotation from p. 8, in the booklet to his recording—see n. 21), and “cromatismo
melodico, di ispirazione orientale, centrato su intervalli di seconda eccedente . . . nel
coro delle donne di Byblos” (Bruno Gallotta, “Estetica e funzione della music di
Debussy nel Martyre de saint Sébastien,” in Carlo Santoli, ed., L’Arte del tragico: l’avven-
tura scenica del Martyre de Saint Sébastien di Gabriele D’Annunzio dal 1911 ad oggi
[Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000], 25–26, quotation from p. 26).
6. On the creative absorption of elements of Spanish music in “Ibéria,” see Matthew
Brown, Debussy’s Ibéria (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 36–64.
7. Three D’Annunzio-centered accounts of Le martyre are Rubens Tedeschi,
D’Annunzio e la musica (Scandicci: Discanto/Contrappunti, La Nuova Italia Editrice,
1988), 61–79; Annamaria Andreoli, “D’Annunzio e il Martyre de Saint Sébastien,” in
“I consigli del vento che passa”: Studi su Debussy, atti del Convegno Inernazionale-Teatro alla
Scala, ed. P. Petazzi Milano, 2–4 giugno 1986, Quaderni Musica/Realtà no. 21, 308–36;
and Carlo Santoli, D’Annunzio: la musica e i musicisti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 217–46.
8. Four Rubinstein-centered accounts of Le martyre are Michael de Cossart, Ida
Rubinstein: A Theatrical Life (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987), 29 –47,
56– 58, 90–96; Vicki Woolfe, Dancing in the Vortex: The Story of Ida Rubinstein
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 51 –63, 93–98, 160–61, 164–66;
Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 143–52; and
Charles R. Batson, Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater:
Playing Identities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 16–43.
9. Fokine’s contribution is largely lost to us. Bakst’s is documented in a number of
books, including Sylvie Forestier, et al., Saint Sébastien: Rituels et figures [exhibition cata-
logue] (Paris: Ministère de la culture, Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux,
1983), 156 –61; Santoli, L’Arte del tragico, 49 –69, 75– 76 (images erroneously stated as
being from 1929), 120–28; and idem, “Léon Bakst, Stage Designer for the Première of
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Gabriele D’Annunzio,” in Saint Sebastian: A
Splendid Readiness for Death [exhibition catalogue], ed. Gerald Matt and Wolfgang Fetz
(Bielefeld: Kerber, 2003), 104 –16.
10. The plot summary in Figure 1 is, inevitably, misleading as D’Annunzio’s text does
not consistently differentiate between actions happening onstage and direct or indirect
analogies to specific Christian figures, e.g., Saint Anthony (see n. 42).
11. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Le martyre de saint Sébastien: Mystère composé en rythme fran-
çais (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1911), 199–200, vv. 2953– 54, 2963 –64. “chevelure d’hya-
cinthe”; “Que les dieux / justes conservent ta beauté / pour l’Empereur, Sébastien!”
12. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 233, vv. 3529–31.
13. Dicoletian is, among other things, a pointed critique of the bored fin-de-siècle
aesthete who turns all humans into toys for his pleasure. The Emperor announces his

plan of having Sebastian laid upon the floor and smothered with jewels and flowers:
“Non. Je veux rire. Je cherche des façons nouvelles. J’invente des modes nouveaux”
( p. 211, vv. 3166–68).
14. For simplicity, I refer to the five sections of the work as “Acts.” D’Annunzio,
reviving a usage from medieval church mystery-plays, use the term “Mansions” (i.e.,
successive locations). In Leonard Bernstein’s English-language adaptation, they are
called “Windows” (i.e., stained-glass windows, as in a church).
15. Further on origins of Le martyre and on later performances, see Emile Vuillerzmoz,
“Autour du Martyre de Saint-Sébastien,” in Revue musicale 1, no. 2, special Debussy issue
(December 1, 1920): 155 –58; D. E. Inghelbrecht, Mouvement contraire: souvenirs d’un
musicien (Paris: Domat, 1947), 213 –25; Germaine Inghelbrecht, D. E. Inghelbrecht et
son temps (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1978), 68 –71; Germaine and
D. E. Inghelbrecht, Claude Debussy (Paris: Costard, 1953), 192–214; Edward
Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (London: Cassell, 1962 –65), 2:10, 15, 153–54,
157– 67, 272, 276; Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 217–36; Eiko Kasaba, “Le martyre de Saint-Sébastien: Etude sur
la genèse,” Cahiers Debussy, nouvelle série, nos. 4–5 (1980 –81): 19–37; idem, “Retour
sur Le martyre de saint Sébastien,” Cahiers Debussy, nouvelle série, no. 24 (2000): 57– 78;
Ivanka Stoı̈anova, “Saint-Sébastien, mythe et martyre,” Silences, no. 4: special Debussy
issue (May 1987): 131– 35; François Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie critique, suivie
du catalogue de l’œuvre (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 335–42, 344, 353, 369, 376, 550–52;
Denis Herlin, “Le martyre de saint Sébastien,” in Opéra et religion (Saint-Etienne: Presses
de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006), 201– 26; and Peter Lamothe, “Theater Music
in France, 1864– 1914” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2008),
207– 38. Lamothe presented his main findings on Le martyre in a paper at the
American Musicological Society meeting, Los Angeles, November 2006, entitled
“Quite Far from that State of Grace: Debussy’s Le martyre de saint Sébastien as Incidental
Music.” For a critical assessment of Le martyre, see Massimo Mila, “Sulla situazione del
‘Martyre de Saint Sébastien,’ ” in “I consigli,” 400–407. (That same volume also con-
tains an Italian version of the aforementioned article by Stoı̈anova.)
16. The productions of 1911 and onward are documented, visually and otherwise, in
Revue musicale 234 (1957), an issue entitled Le martyre de Saint-Sébastien, de la création
1911 à la reprise à l’Opéra de Paris 1957; and in Santoli, L’Arte del tragico, 71 –119 (but
not 75 –76, which are from 1911), 129 –34 (Palermo l999). The La Scala 1929 perfor-
mances (conducted by Arturo Toscanini) omitted act 2; they thereby removed from the
work all trace of Babylonia as well as Erigone’s exotic song (discussed below). A 1995
production at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice featured, as Sebastian, Kader Belarbi, a
renowned French ballet dancer whose father was Algerian. The performances thus
suggested the history of Western imperialism: European soldiers overseas, slaying an
unarmed native male of somewhat dark coloring (see photos in Santoli, L’Arte del
tragico, 113–16). Robert Wilson’s 1988 Paris Opéra Ballet version (with additional
choreography by Suzushi Hanayagi) embodied Saint Sebastian in two dancers, a woman
and a man, the latter being Sebastian’s spirit, who has returned to witness his own
martyrdom. See Matt and Fetz, Saint Sebastian, 84 –87, and two articles (overlapping in
content) by Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times: “A Visionary ‘Martyre’ In a U.S.
Premiere,” July 11, 1988, and “Robert Wilson’s Stunning Images: Do They Add Up?”
July 24, 1988. In the latter article, Kisselgoff notes that “Mr. Wilson’s vision is too
clean-cut to effect the merger of religious and erotic ecstasy. When Mr. Wilson, follow-

ing the [D’Annunzio] scenario, has the women onstage confuse Christian worship with
the worship of Adonis, no one seemed even to notice a point that caused scandal in
1911.” Wilson used an orchestra-only recording (i.e., without the lines for solo voices
and chorus) and added a prologue set on a sinking ship. Kisselgoff saw the latter as
pointing a “universal” moral about the decline of empires. A video of the end of act 2,
featuring Jean-Christophe Paré (and including obvious choreographic references to
Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune), can be viewed at ,http://youtube.com/
watch?v=jjHhzeE2JgY..
17. W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks, 99 –102. Decades earlier, Berlioz’s
version (1859) of Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice had analogously reworked the
opera’s central role—the demigod Orpheus—for a mezzo-soprano, the great Pauline
Viardot.
18. Herlin, “Le martyre,” 214; further excerpts from the early reviews are excerpted in
Lamothe, Theater, 207 –38.
19. The movement titles of the Fragments are simply 1: “La Cour des Lys,” 2: “Danse
extatique et Final du 1er Acte,” 3: “La Passion,” 4: “Le Bon Pasteur.” These titles do
not nearly compensate for the loss of the words in those passages that, in the complete
work, also included parts for voices. Also, the Fragments score contains no program
note at all. The reader/listener thus cannot learn what on-stage actions the different
passages in the four movements were meant to illustrate (such as that the “Ecstatic
Dance” in movement 2 takes place on charbons embrasés), much less what actions occur
in passages of the complete work that are not represented in the Fragments (notably the
entire act 2, in Babylonia).
20. Recordings by, e.g., Monteux, Barenboim, and Conlon; also, on a DVD, Valéry
Gergiev in Rehearsal and Performance, RM Arts IM9255RADVD.
21. Le martyre de saint Sébastien, mystère de Gabriele D’Annunzio, musique de Claude
Debussy: Analyses et Textes destinés à accompagner les exécutions symphoniques établis par
Germaine Inghelbrecht (Paris: Durand, 1948). Splendid “live” performances of Debussy’s
complete music for Le martyre, with much or all of the Inghelbrechts’ shortened narra-
tion, were recorded under Inghelbrecht (three different ones have been released on
CD). Equally fine are studio performances conducted by Eugene Ormandy (2 Columbia
LPs: M2S 609), Michael Tilson Thomas (Sony Classical CD SK48240), and Kurt
Masur (on Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic, vol. 1; this 3-CD set, released by
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, also contains Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion).
Tilson Thomas’s recording removes some of the spoken lines from musical numbers, so
as to permit the music to make an effect on its own. Charles Munch recorded for RCA
Victor all of Debussy’s music and declaimed the Inghelbrechts’ text himself. (The
Victrola LP re-release removed the speaking; the CD restored it.) Louis de Froment
recorded most of the music (for Vox), with some narration. Claudio Abbado can be
seen conducting a lengthy “suite” with solo singers but without narration on a DVD
entitled Abbado in Lucerne (Euroarts, 2005). Three recordings from the pre-stereo era
were conducted by André Cluytens, Ernest Ansermet, and Victor Alessandro. The
Cluytens used narration adapted by Véra Korène, the other two no narration.
22. The Bernstein recording is now available as Sony Classical CD SMK 60596.
23. Claude Debussy, Oeuvres complètes, series VI, vol. 4, ed. Eiko Kasaba (Paris:
Durand-Costallat, forthcoming).

24. E.g., “fourth to eighth measures after reh. no. 3” (so the measure at reh. no. 3 is
counted as m. 1). The piano-vocal score—which, unfortunately, lacks rehearsal
numbers—was prepared by André Caplet and is still available from Durand, in a
version that adds to the singers’ parts an English-language translation by Hermann
Klein (below the French text or occasionally, for lack of space, over the staff ). The
spoken cues are given in French only. The original French-only piano-vocal score
(essentially identical, except for the lack of English sung words) seems no longer to be
available for sale. A copy has been made available at the Sibley Music Library website:
http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4061. The original Durand edition of the prelude to act 2
(full score)—one of the many passages lacking in the Fragments—has been made avail-
able at the Sibley Music Library website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4218. Sibley
Library also owns a Durand edition of the prelude to act 3.
25. Proust’s letter to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, [May 23, 1911], in
Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1976–93) 10:288–90.
26. On the work’s early reception, see especially Herlin, “Le martyre.”
27. Theo Hirsbrunner does state that “nowhere else [in Debussy’s output] is exoticism
so strong as in Le martyre de saint Sébastien”; but his discussion restricts itself to what he
calls “exoticisms” (in the plural, i.e., stylistic markers of the exotic). His two examples
are the lamenting of the Women of Byblos (its frankly Middle Eastern style elements
will be discussed below) and a Japanese mode that he feels is “recalled” in act 1, no. 1
(reh. no. 1, mm. 12 –13, equivalent to Fragments, mvt. 1, reh. no. 1, mm. 12–13)—
Debussy und seine Zeit (Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag, 1981), 120–23.
28. Lamothe, Theater, 207– 38.
29. Bentley, Sisters, 144 –45: “As D’Annunzio’s St. Sebastian she would be pierced by
Christian sacrifice not pagan debauchery. It was as if this particular Salome wanted to
reverse roles and play John the Baptist.” This is, of course, partly true. The role of
Sebastian is less overtly Middle Eastern (and sensuous in a different way) than female
roles that Rubinstein had danced for Diaghilev, e.g., Cleopatra, and—in Sheherazade—
Zobéı̈de. But the role remains that of a young Middle Easterner who (here despite
himself) arouses sexual desire in a Roman ruler.
30. See, for a recent example, Riccardo Sica, “Dai Balletti Russi al Martyre de Saint
Sébastien: La magia dell’Oriente nei décors di Léon Bakst,” in Santoli, L’Arte del tragico,
43– 46 ( p. 43: Bakst’s set for act 1 is like “una miniatura islamica”).
31. Debussy was not the first composer that D’Annunzio approached. Roger-Ducasse,
for example, considered the collaboration but declined to participate. Perhaps
D’Annunzio hesitated to ask Debussy first, out of fear that he might prove unwilling to
work to the poet’s specifications. Debussy did, in fact, chafe at what turned out to be a
tight time frame. In the end, he chose not to set to music a number of additional pas-
sages that, in the margins of the printed libretto, are indicated as having been “given
sound” by him (“Magister Claudius sonum dedit”). He also hired André Caplet to help
with the orchestration of many sections. Rumors that Caplet even composed some of
the music are no longer accepted by most Debussy scholars.
32. Forestier, Saint Sébastien; and Matt and Fetz, Saint Sebastian. In the Renaissance
depictions, Sebastian tends to be emaciated, like a starved prisoner, or (less often)
bearded and muscular, like a Hercules or Samson. In the Baroque era and later (e.g., in

paintings of the 1860s–70s by Gustave Moreau), he tends to be a soft-skinned adoles-
cent, beardless and sometimes nearly androgynous.
33. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 92 (“mes élus de la cohorte d’Emèse”). The archers are
plainly non-Christian. Sebastian, they declare, is as beautiful as Adonis ( p. 32).
34. D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 216 (and, on 195, the author’s description of the statues
of dozens of gods in this scene, including “Balmarcodès, le Seigneur des danses, venu de
Béryte”). In act 1, “Les Gentiles” speak condescendingly of Jesus as “cet Asiatique mort
au gibet!” ( p. 60). Soon after, members of the crowd cry out “Minotaure, Minotaure
d’Asie, gorgé de vierges et d’adolescents!” (p. 78). In Greek mythology, the vicious
Minotaur—half-human and half-bull—lived on the island of Crete, to the East of
Greece, and devoured numerous Athenian youths and maidens until he/it was slain by
Theseus.
35. In act 4, the chief of Sebastian’s Syrian archers, Sanaé, pleads with Sebastian to
flee by boat from the impending death-by-arrows. “Si tu es sauf . . . /avec ton visage/
divin tourné vers l’Orient,/vers l’héritage de ton âme,/vers l’héritage de ton dieu,/
n’auras-tu pas une plus sainte/guerre et une victoire plus/grande que cette insatiable/
mort?” [Once you are safe . . . with your divine face turned toward the East, toward the
heritage of your soul, won’t you have a holier war, a greater victory, than this insatiable
death?]—D’Annunzio, Le martyre, 248, vv. 3667– 76.
36. A copy of the program book is at the Bibliothèque Nationale (BnF-ASP Ro
5260). An entire issue of L’illustration théâtrale (May 27, 1911) was devoted to Le
martyre, and the same was true of Le théâtre (no. 299, first two weeks of June 1911).
A copy of the latter is BnF-Arts du Spectacle Ro 5262.
37. Philippe Jullian, Robert de Montesquiou, un prince 1900 (Paris: Librairie
Académique Perrin, 1965), 310. (The Sassanid empire, centered in Persia, lasted
from the third to the seventh centuries AD) According to some reports,
Montesquiou helped D’Annunzio improve some wordings in the French text and
stepped onto the stage in rehearsal to demonstrate to Fokine one appropriate gesture
for Sebastian (309, 311).
38. See n. 23.
39. Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London: B. T. Batsford,
1985), 153 –85.
40. See Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan
Reference USA, 2005), s.v. Adonis. D’Annunzio also enjoys, at times, inserting the
(related) Hebrew name for God, Adonaı̈.
41. Lucian of Samosata [or Shimsheta, a city on the west bank of the Euphrates],
attrib., The Syrian Goddess (De Dea Syria), trans. Harold W. Attridge and Robert
A. Oden (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 14–17 (sections 6 –8), also 4 (on
Lucian’s use of Greek names for the Semitic gods). D’Annunzio’s sources (and some
that he possibly did not know, at least directly) were surveyed at the time in Gustave
Cohen, “Gabriele D’Annunzio et Le martyre de Saint Sébastien,” Mercure de France, June
16, 1911, 688 –709. Perhaps the single most widely read source of stories about
Sebastian and two saints associated with him, Polycarp and Tiburtius, was and remains
chapter 23 in the thirteenth-century compendium The Golden Legend. One or more of
these three saints break hundreds of pagan idols, smash an expensively constructed

model of the heavenly bodies (which emperor Chromatius employed for divination),
and, forced to choose between offering incense to the gods or to tread barefoot on
glowing coals, tread the coals and declare that the embers feel like roses. At the
climax, Sebastian is shot full of arrows “to such an extent that one would have
thought him a porcupine” (an image that D’Annunzio put into the mouth of
Diocletian, as reported by Sanaé; libretto of Le martyre, 248). See Jacques de
Voragine, La légende dorée, trans. and ed. Alain Boureau et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004),
136– 37.
42. “Io! Io! Adoniastes!” (vv. 3488–95 and further verses not set by Debussy). The
moment is made profoundly dramatic by the evident battle going on in Sebastian’s soul—
a battle between the temptations of worldly power and the spiritual power of Christian
belief (from D’Annunzio’s stage directions: “les soulèvements de sa poitrine indiquent la
violence du combat invisible”—Le martyre, 230). In the stage directions on pp. 225 and
226, Diocletian’s attempts at tempting Sebastian are equated with the demons and wild
beasts that assailed Saint Anthony, though the latter’s many years in the Egyptian desert
are reduced to forty days and nights. The latter is a standard time-length in the Bible, as
in the stories of Noah, Genesis 7:4, Moses on Sinai, Exodus 24:18, and, most relevant
here, Christ in the wilderness, Mark 1:13 (also Matthew 4 and Luke 4).
43. See the discussion of two eighteenth-century non-European tyrant
figures—Handel’s Belshazzar and Rameau’s Huascar—in chapter 5 of my Musical
Exoticism or in my “Broader View.”
44. Further on musical features of this prelude and the one to act 2, see Eiko Kasaba,
“I due preludi orchestrali del ‘Martyre de Saint Sébastien,’ ” trans. Joanne Maria Pini, in
“I consigli,” 374 –9.
45. B-flat –C-flat –E-flat –F: a B-flat eleventh chord missing its third degree (and with
the ninth degree flatted). In one of the earliest books on Debussy’s music, Daniel
Chennevière (a young composer who later became better known under the name Dane
Rudhyar) specifically praised this passage as one of the work’s “mélodies [qui] se
répandent en ondes larges et vibrantes”—Claude Debussy et son oeuvre (Paris:
A. Durand et fils, 1913), 42.
46. This passage is lacking in the Fragments. Text in D’Annunzio, Martyre, 93 –94,
vv. 1442–59.
47. Albright, Quantum Poetics, 255 –57. Stoı̈anova mentions the Bulgarian nestinari
as an equivalent phenomenon (“Saint-Sébastien,” 136). On the origins and function
of firewalking as a means of healing oneself and as a sign of union with God and/or
a particular saint, see Loring Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The
Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), e.g., 58 –63 (spirit possession, i.e., an individual
establishes a “positive, permanent relationship with a spirit other”), 207–12 and
285 –88 (scientific explanation that the relatively fluffy embers have low thermal
conductivity).
48. In the Fragments symphoniques, the two mezzo-sopranos singing in unison are
replaced by four unison trumpets.
49. Transferred in the Fragments symphoniques to high winds and strings. Movement 2

of the Fragments then concludes with the march, fanfares, and grand crescendo accom-
panying Sebastian’s vision of the arrival of the Seven Seraphim, and a brief few chords
for chorus (reworked for orchestra alone) welcoming the Seraphim.
50. A photograph reproduced in several places (e.g., Orledge, Debussy, 222) shows six
of the seven magiciennes wearing this costume. (The coarse-looking backdrop seems to
have nothing to do with Le martyre. Stage designs by Bakst and photographs from the
first production—e.g., in Orledge, Debussy, 219—show an impressive throne room.)
Several people who have looked at that photo have asked me, with some reason,
whether at least one or two of the sorceresses were played by male actors en travesti. But
the program from the 1911 performances (see n. 36) plainly names seven women
(Mlles Dalci, Gonzales, and so on).
51. It is a more purely modernist chord (or, as some music theorists would have it,
“simultaneity”), being truly bitonal and therefore not reducible to a single triad with
various additions and alterations. This pedal chord is notably more puzzling than other
passages in Le martyre that involve harmonically static arpeggios, tremolos, and/or pedal
points, e.g., Ex. 2 discussed above (which has one half-step in it, not two; the Archers
of Émèse then sing this eleventh-chord-without-third as a rising melody—act 1, no. 2,
mm. 2–3). The pedal chord suggested at the beginning of the prelude to act 4 is, like
Ex. 2, an eleventh-chord (now on A-flat), but more angst-ridden, because the fifth
degree is raised to an E-natural, and the flatted eleventh (D-flat) creates a dissonant
clash with the chord’s major third (C).
52. Ravel originally composed Ma mère l’oye for piano duet (1908–10), then orches-
trated and expanded it as a ballet sometime in 1911. The first performance of
the orchestral version was in January 1912.
53. Though excluded from the Fragments, this prelude is of course included on all
recordings of the complete score. Caplet’s (often ineffective) piano version of this and
other excerpts from Le mystère is recorded by Boaz Sharon on Unicorn-Kanchana
DKP(CD) 9103.
54. There are two Erigones in Greek mythology, but only one seems to have remained
a virgin. Icarius was taught by Dionysus to make wine; two shepherds, thinking he had
poisoned them, killed him; Icarius’s daughter Erigone found his body and hanged
herself on a tree. The other Erigone was daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra; she
bore a child (Penthilus) with her half-brother Orestes. The text’s reference to the aspho-
dèle probably refers to the Asphodel Meadows of the underworld and thus to the early
death of Icarius’s daughter Erigone. (Yellow asphodel flowers were reputed to be the
sole food of the dead.)
55. This perhaps explains a remark by Mervyn Cooke: “In only one work of Debussy’s
[“Pagodes”] does the pentatonic scale occur prominently in a specifically Oriental
context”—“‘The East in the West’: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music,” in
Jonathan Bellman, The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern University
Press, 1998), 258 –80, 347 –50 (260). Hirsbrunner, like most commentators on Le
martyre, omits mention of Erigone (Debussy, 120–23).
56. A 1943 recording, on Francis Poulenc, pianiste et accompagnateur (Pathé Marconi
LP C04712538M [1973]).
57. D’Annunzio, Martyre, 209.

58. The first word, Paı̈an ( paean), was both the word for a hymn and a name for
Apollo in his role as healer.
59. The marches, ceremonial processions, and grand choruses in “ancient” operas of
the nineteenth century (e.g., Mosè in Egitto, Semiramide, or Nabucco) tend not to differ
greatly in style from those in operas set in much more recent times (e.g., Le prophète or
Faust).
60. Michael Walter, “Exotik oder Farblosigkeit: Antikebilder in der Oper des 19.
Jahrhunderts,” Humanistische Bildung 19 (1996): 117–25.
61. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, rev. Nicolas Slonimsky, 8th ed.
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), s.v. Slonimsky, Nicolas.
62. Further on pandiatonicism, see Stephen Jaffe, “Conversation between SJ and JS
[i.e., between the author and himself ] on the New Tonality,” Contemporary Music
Review 6, no. 2 (1992): 27 –38.
63. Or some of the cadences in act 5, e.g., reh. no. 8, mm. 2 and 4.
64. Henry de Curzon, at the time of the work’s premiere, caught at least some of this:
“Voici . . . bientôt, synthétisant toute la révolte de l’ancien monde contre l’aube nou-
velle, les voix paı̈ennes chantant leurs vains symboles”— “La partition de M. Claude
Debussy pour le Martyre de Saint Sébastien,” Le théâtre 299 (June 1911): 18– 19 (19).
65. The chorus’s “Ah!” is simply removed from the Fragments version (not reassigned
to instruments), though what remains—the dissonant forte chords and the tritone
timpani beats discussed earlier—is amply powerful.
66. Laloy’s Claude Debussy was published in 1909. The Sadko aria does not seem to
have been published separately until the next year (1912). In the last years of his life,
Debussy repeatedly discussed expanding Le martyre into an opera; Laloy was slated to
write the libretto, based freely on D’Annunzio’s text. The French words in the 1907
score of Le coq d’or were by M. D. Calvocoressi, another prominent French music critic;
Calvocoressi had published a pathbreaking book on Mussorgsky in 1908 and was
particularly friendly with Ravel.
67. That is, degrees 3 and 4, if we hear the tune as implying the tonic note A.
68. See earlier discussion, regarding Ex. 2.

69. Interestingly, there are two two-note repetitions in the “Paı̈an” chorus as well
(Ex. 8); their being assigned to violins in harmonics (arco, plus the second violins pizzi-
cato, plus a harp) gives them an etiolated character.
70. Before he is killed he enacts a vision of the Good Shepherd coming to carry away
a beloved sheep. The Shepherd is indicated by a broad-breathed melody, with confident
rising-fifth leaps (Martyre, No. 2, reh. no. 3, mm. 1 –12; this became, with a short new
coda, the final eighteen measures of Fragments, mvt. 4, at Très modéré).
71. Chennevière praises what I assume is this passage and the Act 4 statements of the
same material as “des lamentations d’une intensité de désespoir encore jamais atteinte”
(Claude Debussy, 42).
72. See stage photo in Orledge, Debussy, 226.
73. On pentatonicism as a marker of ecclesiastical style, see Day-O’Connell,

Pentatonicism, 8–9, 99–142. The three successive half-cadences (I –IV –V) come after
reh. no. 6.
74. Herlin, “Le martyre,” 225.
75. Subsequent religious works that follow in Debussy’s joyous footsteps include
Poulenc’s Gloria (1959) and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (1965). See Ralph P. Locke,
“[Berlioz:] The Religious Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter
Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96 –108 (esp. 96 –97); trans-
lated by Jean-Claude Teboul as “Les oeuvres religieuses,” in Ostinato rigore: Revue inter-
nationale d’études musicales 21, special Berlioz issue (2003): 73 –86.
76. On the Bernstein recording, the rising arpeggios seem to be taken by a full section
of choral sopranos; on the Tilson Thomas recording, by one soprano (Sylvia McNair,
superbly).
77. This reaction to the directness in sections of Le martyre was present from the start.
Henry de Curzon, in a thoughtful review of the first performance, reported that “certain
‘Debussyists’” were “disappointed” (déçu[s]) not to find the composer’s usual features in
this score, such as “endless subtleties of dynamics, strange refinements in sonority, and
a morbid search for unusual effects” (d’infinies subtilités de nuances, d’étranges raffinements
de sonorités, la curiosité morbide d’effets rares—“Partition,” 18).
78. For Debussy’s statement in Comoedia, on the day of the scheduled first perform-
ance (May 18, 1911), see Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure, 2nd rev.
ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 326– 27.

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Locke San Sebastien

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Unacknowledged Exoticism in

Debussy: The Incidental Music for Le

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doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdn017 90:371 –415

“characterizing”: that is, for conveying mood, gesture, personality, and

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Neo-Medieval but Also Exotic

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Scellez sa bouche avec la torche!

[Seal up his mouth with the torch!

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golden necklaces . . . and flowers, “for he is beautiful” (car il est beau).13

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producers of religious and other “ancient” spectacles.17 In the case of Le

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acts, orchestral passages to support extended speech or mime ( primarily

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“That Young Man from Asia”

for D’Annunzio to include in a work about this particular saint. After

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César, César, aux yeux de lynx, je danserai, je danserai, si je suis le

Jesus and Sebastian are thus presented, by Sebastian himself, as “young

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Figure 2. Ida Rubinstein in the vaguely European-Renaissance costume for act 3, in

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piano-vocal score, plus the various orchestral excerpts mentioned earlier.

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Figure 6. A dark-complexioned augure (seer) serving Emperor Diocletian. From Le

In some spots, this proliferation of exoticisms strengthened the primary

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The poet’s seemingly idiosyncratic emphasis on regions beyond

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seeing—in quasi-ritualistic annual repetition—the blood that Adon shed

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And the Syrian people (Chorus Syriacus) respond without hesitation by

La damoiselle élue—will find themselves on familiar ground. The orches-

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gracefulness of Jesus—and, by reflection, of Sebastian, the onstage char-

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background to the action here makes Sebastian’s daring feel at least

proclamation of faith by the martyrs (and twin brothers) Mark and

Chaldean Sorcery and an Indonesian-Sounding

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Soon after, the voice of Erigone, a fabled virgin of pagan days

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back of the sorceresses’ chamber.54 Her radiant music freshens the

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The Exoticness of Rome

Greece) the cradle of Western civilization.59 A third composer would

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As compositional experiment, this brusque, punchy music is fasci-

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Furthermore, the French singing translation published in the Sadko

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character sings desirously about her beloved Middle-Eastern male and