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Ken Russell's The Debussy film (1965)

2005; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680500065097

1465-3451

John C. Tibbetts,

Music History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments John C. Tibbetts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses in film history, media studies, and theory and aesthetics. His Composers on Film: studies in musical biography will be published by Yale University Press in April 2005. Notes Joseph Gomez, Ken Russell (London, 1976), p. 35. Useful overviews and commentaries on Russell's biopics can be found in the following books and articles: John Baxter, An appalling Talent: Ken Russell (London, 1973); Stephen Farber, ‘Russellmania,’ Film Comment, 11, 6 (November–December 1975), pp. 40–47; Joseph Gomez, Ken Russell (London, 1976); Joseph Gomez, ‘Mahler’ and the Methods of Ken Russell's Films on Composers, The Velvet Light Trap, 4 (1975), 45–50; Ken Hanke, Ken Russell's Films (Methuen, NJ 1984), Robert Phillip Kolker, Ken Russell's Biopics, Film Comment, 9, 3 (May–June 1973), 42–45; Gene D. Phillips, Ken Russell (Boston, 1979). See also Diane Rosenfeldt, Ken Russell: a guide to references and resources (Boston, 1978). Russell himself has written about his work in several volumes: Altered States (New York, 1991); The Lion Roars: Ken Russell on film (Boston and London, 1993), and Directing Film: from pitch to premiere (London, 2000). The Debussy Film has been ignored in recent scholarship. Brief discussions of it can be found only in the earliest examinations of Russell's films. See Gomez, Ken Russell 33–35; Ken Russell's Films, P. Hanke, An Appalling Talent, p. 18, Baxter, pp. 116–117 and 128–129; and Phillips, Ken Russell, pp. 46–48. The present author is grateful to Mr Russell for the opportunity to view his own private print of The Debussy Film in his home in East Boldre, Brockenhurst, England. Russell, The Lion Roars, p. 100. After The Debussy Film, Bragg and Russell co-wrote a biopic about Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers. Another project, Nijinsky, was begun but never completed. ‘I still think it was one of the best things I ever wrote’, recalls Bragg. ‘Ken and producer Harry Saltzman both loved it, too. Nijinsky happened to be somebody I knew a lot about. I had read his diaries and all that stuff. Christopher Gable, a wonderful dancer and a fine actor, was going to portray Nijinsky and Oliver Reed was to be Diaghilev. For Oliver to have played a homosexual role in those days would have been a bold stroke. But then Nureyev came on the scene and said he wanted the role. And of course Harry said “Fine.” Poor Chris Gable. Nureyev even took his place as Principal Dancer at the Royal Ballet. I think I wrote one more draft, but I lost heart. Ken stayed on for awhile, but then he dropped out. After that, the script went all over town—I think even John Osborne had a crack at it. Finally, Herbert Ross made the picture [1980]. If we had had a little more luck, if we had gotten away with Nijinsky and if The Music Lovers had been better, we might have made more of a go at working together’. Bragg worked as a script consultant for Russell's Women in Love’. ‘What I did on that was to go through the Lawrence book with Ken and indicate the things in it that seemed absolutely essential, the key scenes. We talked it over in detail’. As producer/editor of the South Bank Show for London Weekend Television, Bragg has commissioned and broadcast many of Russell's composer-related productions, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner, Arnold Bax and, most recently, Elgar: Fantasie of a Composer on a Bicycle (2002). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Bragg are taken from two interviews with the present author, conducted at Television Centre, London, in 1977 and on 21 July 2003. The following is a chronological listing of Ken Russell's composer biopics: Prokofiev: Portrait of a Soviet Composer (1961), Elgar (1962), Bartok (1964), The Debussy Film (1965), Song of Summer [Delius] (1968), The Dance of the Seven Veils [Richard Strauss] (1970), The Music Lovers [Tchaikovsky] (1970), Lisztomania (1975), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1984), The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner (1990), Arnold Bax (1992), The Secret of Dr Martinu (1993), Classic Widows [William Walton, Bernard George Stevens, Benjamin Frankel, Humphrey Searle] (1995), and Elgar: Fantasie of a Composer on a Bicycle (2002). Russell has also produced The ABC of British Music, an overview of classical and pop British composers and musicians. At this writing, Russell has entered negotiations with Melvyn Bragg concerning a possible project about Antonin Dvořák. ‘I can’t read a note’, he says. ‘Years ago I tried following miniature scores while playing recordings on a phonograph; but I would get to the end of the last page only to find that the music was still playing on for another five minutes! That's the extent of my musicology! But as a listener I know the music I use in my films backwards and forwards’. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Ken Russell derive from the present author's interviews on 3 June 2002 and 13 July 2003 with Russell at his home in Brockenhurst, East Boldre, England. Henry-Louis de la Grange, ‘Meine Musik ist gelebt’: Mahler's Biography as a Key to His Works, Opus, 3, 2 (February 1987), p. 14. Song to Remember was a Columbia picture, directed by Charles Vidor and starring Cornel Wilde as Fréderic Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand. Released in 1945, it garnered many favorable reviews. However, writing in the New York Herald Tribune on 26 January 1945, critic Otis L. Guernsey, voiced serious objections: ‘“A Song to Remember”’ is not a motion picture to remember. Its two-hour Technicolor contemplation of Frederic Chopin's life is a gilded screen biography whose hero conforms to all the Hollywood conventions governing historical celebrities … . Such liberties may be taken with historical details if the cause of drama is served thereby—but fiction has not turned out to be more stimulating than truth in the glossy monotone of “A Song to Remember”’. In his analysis of Russell's films, Robert Phillip Kolker further extrapolates this strategy: ‘It is a conflict in which no one wins, not the subject, not his contemporary world, not the popular myth, and certainly not the audience who come to a biographical film with certain expectations’. See Kolker, ‘Ken Russell's Biopic,’ p. 42. Looking back on his career, Russell refers to the ‘unspeakable reviewers’ as a ‘bigoted lot’, for whom attacks on his work has become a ‘blood sport’. ‘Having been pursued for years by unspeakable reviewers’, he notes, ‘perhaps I have developed a taste for blood myself…’ See The Lion Roars, p. 151. Melvyn Bragg—now Lord Bragg of Wigton—is a prolific novelist, screenwriter, biographer and broadcast producer. As Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television (LWT), he supervises arts programming for four channels in British broadcasting, ITV, BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4. Bragg goes on to claim that Watch the Birdie inspired Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up: ‘There is no doubt that Antonioni lifted his famous “blow up” sequence from the central section of Ken's film. A straight lift. Ken made photographers “sexy” ‘for the first time’. Melvyn Bragg claims that although he researched Edward Lockspeiser's works, he neither met with nor consulted him on the writing of the script. The first volume of Lockspeiser's definitive two-volume biography, Debussy: His Life and Mind (New York), appeared in 1962. That same year Marcel Dietschy's La Passion de Claude Debussy appeared in French (translated into English in 1989). At that time, Dietschy estimated that despite the nearly 90 original studies devoted to Debussy that had been published since 1907, ‘we are unable to discern his presence accurately, either as a musician or as a man … [He] still remains a psychological puzzle to most music lovers and even to some serious students’ (p. vii). Likewise, Lockspeiser complained that a particularly esteemed study, Leon Vallas’ Claude Debussy et son temps (1932), had been concerned primarily with establishing Debussy as a national composer who liberated French music from German domination. ‘We can no longer accept this view’, writes Lockspeiser. ‘The national attributes of Debussy's work, which are plain enough, were over-emphasized by an earlier generation partly from a desire to revolt against the unalterable fact of a German musical hegemony…’ (p. xv) Lockspeiser also charged that Vallas had also ‘prudishly closed his readers’ eyes to what he judged were the less acceptable features of his personality’ (p. xv). Lockspeiser sets out his own agenda: ‘I see no other composer who so closely realized the musical ideals to which the writers and painters of his time openly aspired’ (p. xvi). Volume two of Lockspeiser's monumental work appeared in 1965. BBC Written Archives, Reading. Undated article in Radio Times, File T32/1, 095/2. Quaint as it might seem nowadays, producers Normal Swallow, Humphrey Burton and Huw Wheldon followed BBC strictures of the 1950s in strongly objecting to Russell's desire to use actors to impersonate composers. ‘This kind of thing would be much more effective if the people concerned were suggested rather than literally seen’, wrote Swallow in a memo to the Head of Films, dated 7 April 1959 (BBC Written Archives, Reading, File T32/1, 001/1). Wheldon, likewise, warned that such dramatizations could result in a product that ‘will seem hollow, like cardboard, as most of them do’ (quoted in An Appalling Talent, Baxter, p. 122). However, Russell gradually won concessions . In his Prokofiev (1961), for example, he was allowed to photograph an actor's reflection in a pool of water; next, for Elgar (1962) he was permitted to use several actors in long shot (but without dialogue) to impersonate the composer as a youth, a young man, and in middle age; and for his third composer film, Bartok (1964), he photographed actor Boris Ranevsky in closeup (but again, without dialogue). The Debussy Film (1965) marked the first time an actor (Oliver Reed) impersonated a composer and spoke lines. Debussy died on 25 March 1918. Three days later his funeral procession was witnessed by a mere handful of mourners, including Gabriel Pierné (his estranged friends Louÿs and Eric Satie were absent). Lois Laloy, who attended the funeral, later observed that ‘several women shopkeepers questioned each other at their doors and glanced at the streamers on the wreaths. “II parait que c’etait un musicien”’ they said’ (in Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2, p. 225). Phillips, Ken Russell, p. 47. Quoted in Baxter, An Appalling Talent, p. 116. Quoted in ibid., p. 123. Russell was doubtless attracted to the masochistic nature of d’Annunzio's drama: Sebastian urges archers to impale him with arrows so that his pain will arouse their sympathetic love; and there is a scene in which Sebastian dances on burning embers. BBC Written Archives, Reading. File TX 65.05.18. To be precise, the actual composition of La Mer preceeded Debussy's visit to Eastbourne. He finished the piano score on 5 March, several months before arriving at Eastbourne in July. He probably completed the orchestration some time in August, before his departure. Biographer Marcel Dietschy notes that Debussy found Eastbourne ‘peaceful and charming’, and that he found an ‘almost animal relaxation there’. Moreover, he completed there another ‘water’ piece, the Reflets dans l’eau. See Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy (Oxford, 1990), p. 138. Debussy first performed La Mer in London on 1 February 1908 at the Queen's Hall. Lockspeiser claims that his receptions in England were usually warm and sympathetic: ‘Debussy's music became as fully understood in London as it had been Paris among the followers of Mallarme’ (Debussy, vol. 2, p. 120). For an overview of the reception in England of Debussy's music, see Roger Nichols, ‘The reception of Debussy's music in Britain up to 1914,’ in Richard Langham Smith, (ed.), Debussy Studies (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 139–153. For an overview of the English Aesthetic Movement's influence on French Symbolism, see Philippe Julllian, The Symbolists (London, 1973), pp. 8–19. See also Richard Langham Smith, ‘Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites,’ Nineteenth Century Music, V, 2 (Fall 1981), pp. 95–109. In a letter dated 28 June 1965 to a Miss Ann Beach, Russell assessed his position as an arts filmmaker. ‘Most English people seem to resent a native making the sort of film I do (good or bad); what's O.K. for a continental film director certainly won’t do for an English one and one born and bred in television at that’. BBC Written Archives, Reading. File T32/1, 095/2. In his autobiographical book, The Lion Roars, he declares, ‘I sometimes think I would fare better in the hands of British critics if I was called Russellini. They may forgive Fellini his excesses, but I am chastised for being theatrical…’ (p. 82) Two years after The Debussy Film Russell cast Oliver Reed as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Dante's Inferno, a film whose fantasy sequences greatly expand on the style and effect of the earlier film. The portrait of Rossetti, like so many of Russell's other artists, reveals a man caught in the crossfire between his idealization of life and love and his bitter confrontations with life's harsher realities. ‘From the film's very first images Russell's visual imagination never falters’, and the film's heavy usage of fire, water, and mountain symbolism bespeaks of much that is to come…’ Hanke, Ken Russell's Films, p. 35. Information on this play is scant. In October 1904, notes Lockspeiser, ‘Lilly's histrionic attempt at suicide created a mountainous scandal in the artistic world of which there are echoes in Henry Bataille's play, La femme nue, known to have been based on this episode in Debussy's private life’ (Debussy, vol. 2, p. 6). However, according to Modern World Drama: an encyclopedia (New York, 1972), the play was written four years later, in 1908. The question of Debussy's character has been hotly debated. In his study of Debussy, The Gallic Muse (New York, 1967), Laurence Davies describes him as ‘a natural hedonist and voluptuary’ whose ‘highly sensual instincts constantly sought an outlet in clandestine affairs which were designed to bring him as much pain as lasting happiness’ (pp. 57–58). Lockspeiser's view is more tempered. He quotes a letter from Pierre Louÿs to Madame de Saint-Marceau: ‘I know personally that Debussy is incapable of having lived in the way that he is said to have lived. I know this also from two people who have known Debussy for twelve years and are as revolted as I am by the dark intrigue of which he is the center … I know of nothing more distressing than to see a man thus dishonoured…’ (Debussy, vol. 1, p. 185). Debussy himself described his nature in a letter written in 1892: ‘I am … ready for adventures, ready to put my dreams into action so long as this doesn’t mean being brought down to earth to find them reduced to nothing by the wretched facts of reality’ (in ibid., vol. 1, p. 169). Briefly stated, beginning in 1889, he lived with mistress, Gabrielle Dupont, off and on for almost a decade in a humble, single attic room at 42 rue de Londres—furnished sparely with three chairs, a bed and a piano. While the relationship was stormy, as the film depicts, Lockspeiser deplores the ‘large amount of vulgar literature’, which is ‘based on no reliable evidence’ that has appeared in its wake. In 1897, after discovering evidence of one of Debussy's infidelities, Gaby unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Debussy wrote about the incident to Louÿs, in words that are echoed in The Debussy Film: ‘Gaby, with her steely eyes, found a letter in my pocket which left no doubt as to the advanced state of a love affair with all the romantic trappings to move the most hardened heart. Whereupon—tears, drama, a real revolver and a report in the Petit Journal’ (in Debussy, vol. 1, p. 187). Then, in 1899 Debussy met Rosalie (Lilly) Texier. They lived together for a time, separated and then married only after Debussy's ardent proposals. Their first few years together were marked by misfortunes—Lilly was operated on and signs of tuberculosis were discovered, his income from the publisher Hartmann dried up after his death. Seven years later, in 1904, he abandoned Lilly for Emma Bardac, a wealthy Jewish heiress with a child from her first marriage. Dietschy claims that Bardac was Debussy's ‘ideal’ woman, ‘pretty, stylish, intellectual, outgoing cultured, a musician and singer, affectionate, rich, and separated from her husband’. The affair ‘made such an uproar that it created at first a vacant space around the man guilty of having produced it and who suffered more from it than was then suspected’ (ibid., pp. 136–137). Now it was Lilly's turn to attempt suicide. Lockwpeiser notes: ‘Suicide is an inverted form of aggression, and one must imagine both Gaby and Lilly to have been headstrong, violent women, though skilful enough to avoid death in their attempts at suicide. It is possible that they were also inspired by strong histrionic motives’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 188). After years of a bitter divorce proceeding with Lilly, Debussy married Bardac in 1908, after the birth of their daughter, Claude-Emma (‘Chouchou’). Russell and Bragg's depiction of a rather sinister and manipulative Louÿs is at odds with Lockspeiser's view. He objects to the ‘unfortunate reputation’ Louÿs has acquired, based on the ‘pomographic interpretation’ of his poetry, namely the cycle Chansons de Bilitis (1895), and the novels L’Homme de Pourpre une volupte nouvelle and Aphrodite (Debussy, pp. 160–161). While admitting that details of the nature of the relationship with Debussy remain obscure, Lockspeiser is prepared to state that Debussy generally benefited from Louÿs’ friendship, influence and patronage— ‘nor is there any sign that Louÿs used his friend's financial dependence to exert a selfish power in their relationship’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 168). The two men collaborated on several projects that were never finished—including two unfinished ballets, Aphrodite (unfinished) and Daphnis et Chloe [sic], and a symphonic suite on Le Voyage du Roi Pausole. Brought to completion was Debussy's song cycle, Chansons de Bilitis (1898), based on Louÿs’ poetic cycle. Quoted in Baxter, An Appalling Talent, p. 29. Russell's choice of the music from Debussy's La damoiselle elue (‘The Blessed Damozel’) in the context of Pre-Raphaelite paintings is apt. Debussy took his text from Gabriel Sarrazin's prose translation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem, written in 1847. Commentator John R. Clevenger notes a kinship between Debussy and Rossetti: ‘Rossetti had broken with established academic tradition in both poetry and painting, much as Debussy was trying to do in music. Hence the young composer must have felt a strong aesthetic kinship with Rossetti…’ See John R. Clevenger, ‘Debussy's Rome Cantatas,’ in Jane F. Fulcher, (ed.), Debussy and His World (Princeton and Oxford 2001), p. 70. Rossetti was a painter and poet and one of the founders in 1848 of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement celebrating the religious intensity of art and medieval Christianity before the advent of the Renaissance masters. Rossetti's text describes the sorrow felt by a woman on her first day in Paradise as she mourns her lost love back on earth (‘The blessed damozel leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven…’). Twenty-five years later, Rossetti reworked the subject in a painting (shown in Russell's film), which depicted the celestial female in Paradise, stars glittering in her hair, looking down at her grieving earthly lover, occupying a panel in the lower quarter of the painting. The image fascinated Debussy (who owned a copy) and the Symbolists. ‘What they admired in Rossetti's painting of the Damozel’, writes Lockspeiser, ‘was again the symbolism of line or arabesque. They cherished, apart from the melancholy of her greenish-blue eyes, the peculiar curve of her sensual protruding upper lip, her copper-coloured locks and the curvature of her swan-like neck repeated in the draperies of her celestial gown’ (Debussy, vol. 1, p. 120). An especially useful overview of Debussy's interests in and relationships with Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist and Impressionist painters can be found in Leon Botstein, ‘Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Painting and Debussy's Break with Tradition,’ in Fulcher, (ed.), Debussy and His World, pp. 141–179. Prélude à l’après-midi d-un faune (1894), first performed in Paris on 23 December 1894, is a musical interpretation (‘a very free illustration’) of the poem by Stephane Mallarme about a faun's emergence from a dream, his dual attraction for two nymphs and his relapse back into sleep. Russell reverses this erotic dynamic—in The Debussy Film we see a young woman attracted to two men, the actors portraying Louÿs and Debussy. The ambivalence of tonality in this and other music by Debussy provides a useful paradigm for understanding the essential ambivalence between fact and fancy in biographical fantasies like The Debussy Film. Russell and Bragg's interpretation of the skirmish between Debussy and Maeterlinck, while based on fact, is exaggerated, to say the least. Received opinion has been that because Debussy chose soprano Mary Garden to sing the eponymous Melisande in Pélleas et Mélisande instead of Maeterlinck's mistress, Maeterlinck challenged him to a duel. ‘Maeterlinck angrily exploded in a stormy protest’, writes Lockspeiser, ‘followed by a challenge to a duel and the threat of a beating with his walking-stick’ (Debussy, vol. 1, p. 201). Debussy did not respond with the swashbuckling antics depicted in Russell's film; rather, he reportedly collapsed and called for smelling salts. Maeterlinck retired and the duel never took place (although it is alleged that Maeterlinck took this matter seriously and took fatal target practice on his black cat (ibid., p. 188). Lockspeiser doubts that Maeterlinck was angered principally by the choice of female singers; and he disputes the allegation that Debussy acted in an underhanded fashion in choosing Garden to sing the role. Rather, Debussy was ‘concerned merely to support the singer best suited for the part’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 201). Lockspeiser further speculates Maeterlinck's anger grew out of his perception that Debussy's opera would rival his play: Pelleas ‘as a play is in fact an opera libretto in search of a composer. Without the music the play has certainly a period significance, though nothing of the symbolism that is made to reverberate so disturbingly in Debussy's score’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 202). Beginning in the years shortly after the turn of the century, Debussy was fascinated to the point of preoccupation with Poe's story. Lockspeiser notes that Debussy must have noticed the affinities between it and his own Pélleas et Mélisande: ‘In Pélleas the old castle in the imaginary kingdom of Allemonde, lugubrious and haunting its inhabitants with painful memories, is a counterpart of the crumbling House of Usher’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 196). ‘Without a doubt’, writes Harry Halbreich in his program notes for the 1985 World Premiere recording on the Angel label, ‘[Debussy] deeply projected himself into the doomed character of Roderick Usher, that strangely refined being, ready to perish for the love of beauty, and to whom he gives Edgar Allan Poe's features’. Debussy's original intentions were to compose an evening's entertainment based on ‘Usher’ and ‘The Devil in the Belfry’. The actual letter contains this strikingly similar passage: ‘These last days I have done much work on La Chute de la Maison Usher. It is an excellent means of strengthening one's nerves against any kind of fear. Nevertheless, there are times when I no longer see the world around me, and if the sister of Roderick Usher were suddenly to appear I shouldn’t be extremely surprised’ (in ibid., vol. 2, p. 142). True enough, at the time of the release of Russell's film and of the second volume of Lockspeiser's biography, there had been no recording of the ‘Usher’ fragments. In his program notes, Harry Halbreich explains that the few fragments of music left at the composer's death included a sketch for a ‘Prelude’ and a 21-page manuscript consisting of the vocal score of the entire first scene and the beginning of the second, with only the scantiest indications of orchestration. In 1976 there were two attempts to ‘realize’ the music by the Chilean composer, Juan Allende-Blin, and another version by two Yale University musicologists, C. Abbate and R. Kyr. Allende-Blin's reconstitution consists of four hundred bars of music (Editions Jobert, 1979), which he scored for a large orchestra, and which sketch out the narrative, beginning with Roderick's opening monologue and concluding with his outburst at the final destruction of Usher. ‘This music is of extraordinary beauty and novelty’, writes Halbreich, ‘with a harmonic freedom constantly leaping over tonal boundaries … whose piercingly expressive strength is well-nigh unbearable in its intense despair’. The Debussy Film afforded Russell his first opportunity to translate Poe to the screen. Like Debussy, he has been preoccupied from an early age with Poe's famous tales. ‘When I was twelve, I painted scenes from “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Usher” and other stories, much in the manner of the horror movies I was seeing’. This depiction of the ‘Usher’ tale, so starkly symmetrical in its compositions, so cleanly limned in its lighting and set design, offers a total contrast to Russell's recent The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002), a broadly caricatured home movie—shot with a Camcorder with the assistance of his sons, Alex and Xavier, and other friends and starring James Johnson as ‘Roddy’ Usher—in which the eponymous House is a large, inflatable device—rather like a children's toy—that collapses at the moments of final destruction. Debussy employed similar words on many occasions, such as in a letter to his stepson, Raoul Bardac on 25 February 1906: ‘Music has this over-painting, it can bring together all manner of variations of colour and light—a point not often observed though it is quite obvious’ (in Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2, p. 16). This is rather simplistic. Debussy's views on the extra-musical implications of musical expression are much more complex and need careful examination, as Leon Botstein's essay, ‘Beyond the Illusions of Realism,’ demonstrates: ‘[Debussy's] comments on the nature of music return again and again to visual metaphors and analogies appropriated from the contemporary discourse on developments in modern art’ (p. 143). At the same time, continues Botstein, ‘in Debussy's view, music had to move away from descriptive naturalism, the subordination of music to a narrative and a linguistically evident didactic purpose’ (p. 147). In sum, concludes Botstein, Debussy deploys ‘rhythmicized time and the color of sound’ to ‘make the experience of life transcend a reductive notion of the external world’ (p. 160). Madame D. G. de Tinan was Chouchou's half-sister, Dolly Bardac. She inspired the title of the Gabriel Faure's delightful suite for piano duet, Dolly. It was in her arms that Chouchou died of diphtheria 16 months after her father, in 1919. BBC Written Archives, Reading, File T32/1, 095/2. Transcript of critics’ forum, from the office of Helen Rapp. BBC Written Archives, Reading. File T32/1, 095/2. Russell's own on-set activities paralleled aspects of the Debussy story. In his autobiography, Altered States, Russell reveals that just as Debussy and Gaby were involved a tumultuous affair, so were Russell and the actress portraying Gaby, Annette Robertson, entering into an ill-fated affair (pp. 104–105).