Stephen Walsh's (flawed) take on Debussy

Claude Debussy has always been an elusive composer for me. Not only musically, since I have always found his works -even his most celebrated- hard to get into, but also personally: most of the information I have read about his life is disconcerting -and far from flattering.
   Nonetheless, Debussy plays a towering role in French music, so if you’re passionate about it you can’t really ignore him. Besides, there are not a lot of reliable biographies on this enigmatic composer, so even if you are willing to know more from him, you don’t really have a lot to choose from. That being said, as soon as I found out that Stephen Walsh had written a book on Debussy, I was looking forward to reading it. However, it has not been not warmly received, which I found perplexing since I greatly enjoyed his essential two-part biography on Igor Stravinsky. I decided to read it because I have always believed that it is better to read something, however flawed, than to stay ignorant about a certain issue. Unfortunately, I have to agree on almost every flaw certain critics have pointed out. First of all, I couldn’t identify the type of book I was reading. I didn’t know if it was a plain biography or a more technical commentary about his works. And Walsh is aware of this. He even brought it up on the Introduction, but in the end it didn’t make any difference. The prose is inconsistent: certain passages are eloquent of Walsh’s scholarship, but others are just weak. The author comes off repetitive and what he keeps bringing up is not really that interesting. He also comes up with too many metaphors or analogies that are hard to comprehend. His comparisons of Debussy’s works to the Nouvelle Vague, for example, are bewildering. Walsh does not bring anything new to the table either. His remarks on Debussy’s paradoxical link with Wagner has been discussed so much that reading it once again ends up archaic. I didn’t truly discover anything fresh or insightful about Debussy’s life or work either, which is something that I always expect from a biography. Debussy is a subject that is not hard to articulate. Maybe Walsh failed at profiling him because of his inherent nature. I just hope that maybe someone will pay justice to Claude Debussy and can write a book at the level of his importance in music history.