SUITE Dreams
The Debussy Suite
The Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, East Sussex
Charles Debussy was France’s great modernist musical composer, an aural accompaniment to the Impressionist art of Monet and Renoir. After scooping the Prix de Rome in his early 20s, he settled in Paris writing a series of sensual orchestral works and piano pieces that would transform classical music at the turn of the century.
By 1905, however, he had separated from his first wife Lilly, who would attempt suicide as a result, while embarking on a scandalous affair with Emma Bardac, a Parisian singer and mother of one of his pupils. Rather than jetting to another European capital to escape the fallout from his infidelities, Debussy instead spent the summer in Eastbourne on England’s south coast.
Debussy chose to hole up in The Grand Hotel, a five-star establishment built in 1875 and affectionately known as “The White Palace”. Looking out from the bay window of Suite 200 across the English Channel, it was here that the composer put the, perhaps his most ambitious orchestral work. Though it was prompted as much by depictions of the sea in art and literature, Debussy was clearly smitten with the view from the hotel, which he described in a letter to his publisher as “a charming peaceful spot... the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness”.
