“It doesn’t hurt from time to time to put a composer of the importance of Debussy in his rightful place, given that his life’s work suffers terribly from pigeon-holing,” says Zoltán Kocsis. It is partly for this reason that the Palace of Arts is presenting a six-part series providing a cross-section of the French composer’s oeuvre, and partly to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth in the 2012/13 season. Although the music remains central, the essence of this series of evenings is also to emphasise the literary context against which the works were created, completing the experience with historical documents from the age in question. The musical focus of the fifth evening in the series is the song cycle composed to the verse of Paul Verlaine, Fêtes galantes, an infinitely refined set of songs which is sharply contrasted by a number of documents testifying to Debussy’s stormy private life. The performance thus deals with the relationship between art and real life: about how Debussy, who became a topic of the scandal-sheets after the attempted suicide of his first wife, or Verlaine, whose love life was no less tempestuous, approached the question of portraying love through art.

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