Home listening - Debussy the great modernist, ‘more radical than Stravinsky’

The Guardian 0

Tom Service hails the French composer’s abstract music-making, while Warner Classics and Deutsche Grammophon go head to head with centenary Complete Works box sets

• One hundred years ago today, the composer Claude Debussy died in Paris, at the height of first world war air raids on the city. In his 55 turbulent years, often ostracised by society for his passionate affairs and bad behaviour, he had transformed the musical world with a wholly distinctive new musical language. His influence seems ever more potent and important as time goes on.

Alongside Stravinsky and Schoenberg, it was Debussy who created the sound of the 20th century, not by cutting his roots with tradition, but by dissolving formal boundaries to create a magical new grammar of sound out of the materials of the past.