Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in August 1862, the eldest of five children in a family with no musical background. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten and studied there for the next eleven years — winning the Prix de Rome in 1884 with the cantata *L’enfant prodigue*, though his subsequent submissions from the Villa Medici were received with growing official disquiet. His exposure to Mussorgsky, Wagner, and the Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition of 1889 each marked a step in the development of a personal harmonic and rhythmic language.

The orchestral *Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune* (1894) is conventionally taken as the point at which that language emerged fully formed. The works that followed — the *Nocturnes* (1899), the opera *Pelléas et Mélisande* (1902), *La mer* (1905), the two books of piano *Préludes* (1909–13), and the late chamber sonatas — set the terms for twentieth-century music as decisively as any single composer’s output had since Wagner. He worked extensively as a critic, often under the pseudonym Monsieur Croche.

Debussy was diagnosed with cancer in 1909 and the disease progressed through the years of the First World War, which he spent in occupied Paris. He died there in March 1918, during the final German offensive. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his orchestral, operatic and chamber works.