Composed 1915; 12 minutes 

The First World War was a bleak time for Debussy. In his early fifties and suffering from cancer, he was also tormented by anxiety for his young son and other family members serving on the front. For a year, he was unable to compose. But in the summer of 1915, while staying in the seaside town of Pourville, he began once again to “think in music” and composed “like a madman.” “I have finished Douze Études for piano, a cello sonata, and another sonata for flute, viola and harp in 
the ancient, flexible mould with none of the grandiloquence of modern sonatas,” he wrote to a friend. “There are going to be six of them for different groups 
of instruments.”

Although Debussy planned six sonatas, he completed only three. All were conceived as a rejection of the Austro-German romanticism he had come to abhor during the war. Instead, they draw on the legacy of 18th century French keyboard composers. To emphasize this lineage—and with a sense of patriotic pride—Debussy signed the scores “Claude Debussy, Musicien Français.” 

The Cello Sonata, composed in just a few days in late July and early August 1915, perhaps shows this connection to the past most clearly. Its Prologue begins with quiet melancholy and builds in nobility and eloquence, unfolding in an improvisatory manner through shifting time signatures. The Sérénade, marked “fantastic and light,” flits between gestures and textures rather than being ‘developed’ in the traditional (Germanic) way. The Finale follows without pause, opening with the fierce flair of a Spanish corrida, though its mood quickly shifts, returning through mercurial changes of mood and image, to the stately, neo-Baroque world of the opening. Debussy told his publisher he was pleased with a sonata whose “proportions and almost classical structure, in the best sense of the word” he regarded very highly.