ABSTRACT
After completing his studies in 1930, Maurice Blanchot became a journalist with the conservative Paris daily Journal des debats. Though he quickly found his niche as a commentator on domestic, then predominantly international, affairs, his apprenticeship consisted, as he wrote in later life, in “learning to do everything in order to be able to do everything”. The presence of Artur Toscanini and the participation of Felix Weingartner were proof that this festival did not just celebrate a French musician. There could be no better reminder that the part of our national spirit that found expression in Debussy corresponds to the art of music in its purest and most general form. The gap or divergence that the word alludes to but does not close is the very milieu in which the soul apprehends the movement of beauty and art. It is to there that Debussy’s music penetrates, giving us the intense illusion of another world, the sensuous presence of poetry.
