CHAUSSON (Ernest). Lot n° 22

Autograph letter signed to Claude Debussy, dated Luzancy, Thursday [4 May 1893], 4 pages in-12 (179 x 116 mm), in a modern red half-maroquin folder. Touching testimony of the deep friendship between the two composers. Here is already that I fall on your back for a commission, he ironizes. But, he adds: I am very sure of your friendship. This certainty is quite delightful to me. And as it is reciprocal, isn't it, everything is for the best [...] I feel a fierce desire to work. There are moments when it seems to me that I am going to make a mouthful of "King Arthus" [...] I am doing the last cleaning of the "Concert" and I realize that I forgot to take the separate parts of the quartet. Would you be so kind as to come and get them from me [...] I may be called back to Paris at any moment by an imminent birth, and I would like to take the complete manuscript to Bailly [Edmond Bailly, their common publisher]. He railed against the noise: A fairground merchant playing the trumpet, an odious trumpet. That is no longer a game! And the silence of nature, then! In a postscript, he asks for news of him and also of Das Rheingold, giving Wagner a swipe in the process: to be deaf, intermittently, and at will, that would be pleasant. At the beginning of 1894, Debussy gave several recitals of Wagner's works and used to borrow scores from Chausson.