During the last decade of his life, Debussy underwent two very painful operations for cancer that left him, as he put it, "a walking corpse." With the outbreak of war, he often lacked enough money to buy food or even pay for heat. He fretted that the advancing German army would soon occupy Paris. He continually feared for the future of French civilization. Yet through it all, often in pain from the cancer and related surgery, he kept composing. In 1915, Debussy planned to write six sonatas for various instruments as a salute to the 17th and 18th century instrumental traditions of France, particularly those contributions of Rameau and Couperin. He completed only three before he died. The first is a sonata for cello and piano and the third is for violin and piano. The second, The Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, is one of Debussy's most complex compositions. The themes of all three movements are closely related; those from the first movement are recalled in the second in the form of a highly developed minuet, then in the finale in a fantasia. Musicologist Ernest Newman described the texture of the sonata as having "the combined delicacy and strength of refined porcelain." The music has a mood of gentle melancholy. Debussy stated, "It is terribly sad and I don't know whether one ought to laugh or cry at it. Perhaps both. The further I go, the more I am horrified by a deliberate disorder, which is nothing but aural bluff, and also by those eccentric harmonies which amount to nothing but flirting with fashion. How much has to be explored, and discarded, before reaching the naked flesh of emotion?"

-- Kendall Briggs