Marius-François Gaillard and his pianistic contemporaries: Interpretation and style in the 78-rpm recordings of Debussy’s piano works

The surging popularity of Debussy’s solo piano works during the interwar years can be measured by the many eminent pianists who recorded 78-rpm discs for a wide range of European and north American record labels. Debussy’s miniatures were ideally suited to a recording technology that favoured individual pieces of around four minutes’ duration. Following the early disc recordings that were released during Debussy’s lifetime, at least eighty pianists recorded Debussy’s solo piano music on around thirty-six different labels between 1918 and 1939, the advent of electric microphone technology stimulating a recording boom in the late 1920s. While Alfred Cortot, George Copeland and Walter Gieseking quickly established reputations as leading Debussy interpreters, the now largely forgotten Marius-François Gaillard achieved the largest and most diverse body of Debussy recordings released by any individual pianist before 1937, being superseded by Gieseking only at the very end of the 1930s. This article assesses the legacy of Gaillard’s Debussy recordings comparing his interpretative approach, pianistic style and technique with that of his contemporaries and considers the reasons for his subsequent disappearance from the pianistic canon.