I have eight different versions of “The Sunken Cathedral” on iTunes. One version is played by Håkon Austbø—moody and sonorous. One is by Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming — interestingly murky, with good swinging bell-clanging. One is by Elaine Greenfield — brisker and lighter, performed on a 1907 Blüthner grand piano very similar to the one that Debussy owned. One is by Julian Lawrence Gargiulo — a live performance, with a distant energetic piano and audible chair creaks from a fidgeter nearby. One is by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli — part of the BBC Legends series, with a wrong note enshrined in it two minutes from the beginning. One is by Noriko Ogawa — full of nervous, restrained brilliance and unusual tempos. One is by Claude Debussy himself, playing distantly on a Welte-Mignon player piano in 1914. But my favorite version is by Paul Jacobs, the pianist for the New York Philharmonic, who died of AIDS in 1983. The microphone seems to be right inside Jacobs’s piano. That’s the version I’m listening to now. It’s so closely miked that when you swim into the center of the cathedral about halfway through and look around, the chords are almost unbearably loud — and at the end, when everything’s much softer, and mortality has been faced and accepted, you can hear the felt pads come gently down to dampen the strings as they ring out their last sound.
This piece was Debussy saying good-bye to everything. It isn’t specifically about the lost cathedral city of Ys, off the coast of Brittany, possibly near Douarnenez. That’s a crude, programmatic interpretation that was imposed on the music after the fact by a young critic named Dane Rudhyar and an older pianist named Alfred Cortot, neither of whom knew Debussy well or understood the way his imagination worked. Saying that “The Sunken Cathedral” is about the sunken city of Ys is like saying that “Footsteps in the Snow” is about the Abominable Snowman. It’s true that there is an opera by Édouard Lalo called The King of Ys about the flooding of Ys, based partly on a forged Breton ballad by Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, and true that Debussy had wildly applauded Lalo’s ballet Namouna while at the conservatory, and had memorized parts of it, including perhaps the scandalous waltz in which Namouna rolls a cigarette for her paramour — but he was less fond of Lalo’s son, Pierre, who became a powerful and malicious music critic for Le Temps, writing, of Debussy’s La Mer, “I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea.” “The Sunken Cathedral” is bigger and blurrier, more overdetermined, than the story of Ys. It’s really about all sunken frightening beautiful artful ruined human things. It’s about Poe’s city in the sea, and about the cathedral cliffs in Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams,” and about the sinking cathedral and the rising lake in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and about the real flood of the Seine in 1910 that submerged a railroad station in Paris — a newspaper writer called it the “Station of Ys”—and lapped at the foundation of Notre Dame Cathedral. And it’s about the fearsome ruined abbey H. G. Wells saw in his undersea story “In the Abyss,” and about Swinburne’s crumbling, wave-gnawed cathedral town of Dunwich — Debussy admired Swinburne, who was translated by his friend Gabriel Mourey and championed by his friend Pierre Louÿs — and about the watery bells in Brahms’s lost city of Vineta. And it’s about Gerhart Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell, and about Verlaine’s and Huysmans’s cathedrals, and about the “ville disparu” in Victor Hugo’s Légende des Siècles and the underwater reef with “the sublimity of the cathedral” in Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. And it’s about the article Proust wrote for Le Figaro on the death of the cathedrals. If France’s cathedrals were allowed to fall into ruin, Proust wrote in 1904, the country would be like a beach strewn with giant empty shells. It’s about the loss of nineteenth-century certainties. It’s about all these things. And it’s about Chopin’s preludes, too, which were submerged and dissolved and remade by Debussy, with new harmonic flavors and fragrances, and it’s about the two operas that Debussy knew he would never finish, one based on the Tristan story, and one based on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” and it’s about the Gothic arches of the inner harp of the piano that he knows he can’t play forever — the black box of hammers that outlives the hammerer. It’s about death and what survives death. It’s about burial at sea. It’s about all the plans and loves and flaxen-haired singers of Debussy’s idle youth that are now no more. It’s about the time he and his friend Gabriel Pierné cut out pictures from a bound edition of Le Monde Illustré and put them up in his room. It’s about the time that Debussy and his wife, Emma, and their young daughter, wearing a big floppy hat, had a wicker-basket picnic in dappled woods. It’s about morphine and despair and undersea sponges and the long-gone days of focused effort when he was a soon-to-be father composing La Mer. It’s about wanting to be a young prizewinning improvisational genius again, and knowing that this moment in C major was the best he could do now. Debussy didn’t normally write in the key of C major. He chose C major this time, I think, because C is like water, clear and simple and bright and transparent, composed entirely of white keys, but if you hold down the pedal and play the clear white notes together in a certain way, the sound becomes blurred and pale blue and lost in haze, like a distant monument seen through water. He swam closer toward the cathedral, and its image became more clearly defined, with pounding, towering, unblurred C major chords, until he reached middle C, or middle sea. That’s what the sunken cathedral is — it’s the piano of his whole life.
• • •
ON MONDAY I woke up feeling dull and lost, as sometimes happens on Mondays, and I drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where “The Sunken Cathedral” was first performed in the United States a little more than a hundred years ago, on July 26, 1910. The pianist was Walter Morse Rummel, a then famous songwriter who was the grandson of the inventor of the telegraph. Also on the program — I guess it was a long evening — were some Chopin pieces, some Couperin, some Handel, Rummel’s own piano sonata “To a Memory,” and two compositions by Edward MacDowell, “From a Wandering Iceberg” and “To the Sea.” Rummel was Debussy’s favorite pianist. Once Debussy wrote Rummel a praising letter, in his tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting, about a performance Rummel had given. “One doesn’t congratulate the sea for being more beautiful than cathedrals,” he said.
I got to Stockbridge at about noon, and after a lot of GPS’ing and driving around — always being careful to use my turn signal — I found the former Casino building where Rummel had played. In the twenties the building was moved to a quieter place out of town, and it’s now the main stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival. It was designed by Stanford White. This was where the cathedral first submerged itself in the United States. I looked at the white building from the car for a while, parked near a young birch tree, and I ate a carrot and felt very little emotion. Then I climbed a set of steps to a permanently locked door. Its windows were covered with a layer of rubberized diffuser, painted black, as were the three large arched windows on the front façade. They wanted it dark inside. An abandoned wasps’ nest was tucked into the doorway’s lower left corner. I took some pictures and got back in the car. I considered putting on my headphones and listening again to Paul Jacobs play “The Sunken Cathedral,” to beef up the occasion, but the building had been moved, after all. You have to choose your sunken occasions carefully.