Financial dilemmas

Early in the New Year Debussy was working on a ballet entitled Le palais du silence, commissioned for performance at London's Alhambra Theatre. As with so many projects, despite a change of title to No-ja-li, this would never be completed. Yet there is also a sign of work on the project that Debussy regularly turned to when in the depths of despair. In the sketch book for No-ja-li he wrote ‘Le Scorpion oblique et le Sagittaire retrograde ont paru sur le ciel nocturne.’ Robert Orledge has shown that this applied not to the ballet but to a scene in La chute de la Maison Usher. The inscription shows Debussy's familiarity with Tarot cards dating back to his interest in the esoteric and the occult during his youth. The relevance here is to the struggle between life and death in The Fall of the House of Usher. It echoed his own depressing, doom-laden situation and his obsession with this dark work. This state of mind can have done nothing to lift Emma's mood.

Now it was Chouchou rather than her mother who became ill with influenza, but naturally this caused Emma much anxiety. More worrying for Debussy, however, were his constant financial problems. Letters to his financier Bertault show his mounting despair, even his fear of a ring of the doorbell, all of which led to an ina-bility to concentrate. ‘I still can't work as I should … sometimes I envy those people who are dying of cold.’ Hence the essential undertaking of more foreign tours, all of which needed planning and preparation.

The year also brought further contact with the Hartmanns. On 5 February, in a recital at the Salle des Agriculteurs, Debussy accompanied transcriptions by Hartmann of his song Il pleure dans mon coeur and two piano preludes, La fille aux cheveux de lin and Minstrels, as well as Grieg's violin sonata.

Hartmann gave a vivid account of Debussy's attitude towards him. One day, prior to the concert, he entered to find the composer at his table ‘bare as always of any manuscript paper’. From Debussy's restless behaviour it was clear ‘he was suffering in silent, but not subdued agony’. He eventually explained to Hartmann that he was desperate to escape his situation of financial embarrassment.