First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
Meaning of the quote
When a composer wants you to perform a piece of music, they don't want you to just sing the notes. They want you to forget that you're a singer and instead focus on expressing the emotions and story behind the music. This helps you become the character or feeling the composer is trying to capture, rather than just reciting the words. By forgetting you're a singer, you can truly bring the music to life.
About Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy was a French composer who is considered one of the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is sometimes referred to as the first Impressionist composer, although he rejected the term. Debussy’s innovative compositions, including orchestral works like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, have had a lasting impact on classical music.
More quotes from Claude Debussy
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Extreme complication is contrary to art.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
French classical composer (1862-1918)
There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Music is the silence between the notes.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
In opera, there is always too much singing.
French classical composer (1862-1918)
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
French classical composer (1862-1918)