Hershey Felder, Canada’s gift to the world’s stage as actor, musician and playwright, is returning –online– to Los Angeles on Nov. 22 in “A Paris Love Story,” celebrating the life, music an numerous romantic liaisons of French composer Claude Debussy.
Growing up in Montreal’s tightly knit Jewish community, Felder recalled in an interview that “Debussy was my first childhood love, but I never thought I would tell his story.”
Debussy, who lived from 1862 to 1918, “painted his music in colors…somehow it showed me how to get through hard times and deal with the difficulties of the world,” Felder added.
That is high praise from a man who, starting wish his portrayal of George Gershwin at the old Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip some 21 years ago, has since recreated the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, as well as Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein and non-musician Abraham Lincoln.
Felder’s youthful love for Debussy’s music was nourished by the composer’s sweeping “La Mer”, the evocative “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un fanne” and the mystical “Clair de Lune.”
Debussy needed all the consolation he could draw from music, for “his parents didn’t think much of him and hardly paid him any attention. They thought of their son as a loser,” Felder observed.
Even for an era when extra-marital relations were commonplace, Debussy was a womanizer of considerable proportions. “Womanizing was a psychological aspect of the man and also a sign of the times,” Felder said. “Debussy was a complicated person.”
The composer’s most lasting liaison was with the Jewish Emma Bardac, born Emma Moyse (Moise is French for Moses). She was a talented singer and initially his mistress and then his wife and mother of his adored daughter.
Although France was notorious for its anti-Semitism during Debussy’s life (which included the notorious Dreyfus Affair), the composer was unaffected by the oldest hatred, Felder said. “His God was embodied in his art. What he hated was the dilettante, he readily took other composers to task, and he was thoroughly anti-establishment.”
Composer David Cox noted in 1974 that Debussy “created a new, instinctive, dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective…a kind of art, in fact, which seemed to reach out into all aspects of experience.”
After Felder finished his run of “Beethoven” in Los Angeles two years ago, he told the Journal that this would be last one-man show on famous musicians, but he obviously relented. His current return engagement is sponsored by the Wallis theater in Beverly Hills.
