Word: bohemianism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Bohemian garret-&-starvation conception of a great artist does not apply to Sibelius. Since 1897 he has enjoyed a modest pension from the Finnish state, which has provided him with leisure to compose. At his house at Jarvenpaa he lives the secluded life of a highly respectable country gentleman. His five daughters have long since gone forth to marry and raise families of their own. He and his wife live alone, looked after by two maids. He relishes good food and drink, smokes continually the best and largest Havana cigars, is partial between meals to well-aged whiskey served...
...symbolist like Poets Mallarme and Verlaine; others called him an impressionist like Painters Renoir and Monet. The latter title stuck. His work-fastidious, poetic, voluptuous and all but perfection in technique-had an immense influence on the composers of the early nineteen hundreds. Besides a picture of an incurable Bohemian, Biographer Thompson offers a systematic critical study of all of his compositions, from the slightest piano piece to L'Après-midi d'un Faune and Pelleas et Melisande...
This engaging character was Achille-Claude Debussy, who died in 1918. He had to wait until last week and the appearance of his first American biography*-his third in English-for a book that would do justice to his lush Bohemian personality and his stature as a composer. Author Thompson, music critic of the New York Sun, paints an intimate picture. Debussy not only resembled a cat; he lived with live cats and collected porcelain cats. His living cats were always grey angoras, always named Line. His women were less uniform. To him the four most important were Mme Vasnier...
...other personal respects M. Debussy was equally Bohemian. A short-legged, thick-set man, seldom in funds, he was forever wandering indolently into Left Bank and Montmartre cafes. There he would sit in a cape and large felt hat, ordering rarebits and English ale, rolling his own cigarets. He preferred the circus to the opera, and disliked listening to music, though he accepted several jobs writing music criticism for Paris publications. He finally succumbed to cancer of the rectum one spring when Big Bertha was dropping shells into Paris...
...temporary visit. It turned out to be a permanent exile. In Paris he met his odd mate, Mathilde Mirat ("the loving creature, who has been at my side and with whom I have been quarreling every day for the last six years"). And there he plunged into the quasi-Bohemian, quasi-revolutionary circles with which Paris was awhirl in the days of the Commune. Heine made German enemies by his polemical bitterness, French friends by his personal charm, contributed briefly to a radical weekly edited by Karl Marx. In Paris, at 58, he died-crying "Paper! Pencil!" The wonder...