Class, Courtship, and <i>habitus clivé</i>: Debussy’s <i>mélodies</i> and the Politics of Social Mobility

This article examines Debussy’s romantic relationships between 1897–99, the mélodies they inspired (Chansons de Bilitis, Nuits blanches), and their concomitant contexts of social class, class habitus, and social mobility. Throughout his career, Debussy’s mélodies were dedicated to bourgeois women who possessed not only the cultural disposition and musical training to appreciate them, but also the drawing rooms and pianos to perform them. This genre provided the composer with moments of musical intimacy with the women he was hoping to marry and, as a result, served as a potential means of entry into the social class above him. By focusing on one genre and its associated social class, this article demonstrates the ways in which Debussy used the mélodie to negotiate social advancement and, more broadly, sheds light on the class and gender politics of Parisian cultural life. While the case could be made that all of Debussy’s music was written for bourgeois consumption—and thus implicated in his desire for social ascension—his mélodies provide the most tangible link between the music he composed, the women he courted, and his repeated attempts to raise himself into the bourgeoisie through marriage.