In the new era of Internet publishing and self-promotional Web sites it might seem that the comprehensive services that Durand et Cie provided for Debussy (and Ravel) in the first quarter of the last century no longer had any relevance. Like his father Auguste before him, Jacques Durand acted for his chosen composers as a benevolent factotum. This combination of legal and artistic adviser, impresario, public relations officer, moneylender and personal friend seems like a forgotten ideal in what is now a much more commercially orientated world. Thus, in a halcyon age when composers composed and publishers saw to everything else, Debussy could disdain the activities of the ‘business-man’ and pursue a path of financial incompetence in the knowledge that he was by no means unique and that Durand would always be there to put things right. Becoming something of a recluse after the scandals surrounding his marital life in 1904, Debussy might, in retrospect, have been attracted to the concept of managing all his affairs from a home computer: but as the only practical skills for which he showed any aptitude were cordon bleu cookery and gardening, I have severe doubts about this.

During the upheavals of the First World War the relationship between composer and publisher in France changed very little. Making light of the paper shortages and restricted concert life, Jacques Durand continued to bring out Debussy's new works within months of their completion, and he also embarked on a new and comprehensive French edition of the classics. With a far from scholarly brief, Debussy was put to work on Chopin, and Ravel on Mendelssohn, so that French pianists would never need German editions again. Debussy had earlier contributed Les Fêtes de Polymnie (1908) to Durand's equally well-meaning collected edition of Rameau, inaugurated under the general editorship of Saint-Saëns in 1894. After the Great War and Debussy's death the contractual advances paid to such composers as Ravel at last began to rise substantially. But it was the runaway success of Ravel's Bolero in the 1930s through technically improved recordings that assisted the breakdown of the old order and the move towards a more commercial postwar world, in which success would come to be measured as much in financial as in artistic terms. For, as Ravel freely admitted, Bolero was simply a superbly orchestrated crescendo with only minimal musical content.