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Claude Debussy Biography

in full Claude Achille DeBussy

(1862 - 1918)

Related Works

Orchestral music
1886 Printemps
1894 Prélude à ‘L'après-midi d'un faune’ (Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of A Faun’)

1899 Nocturnes
1905 La Mer (The Sea)
1912 Images
Operas
1902 Pelléas et Mélisande
Ballets
1913 Jeux (Games)
Piano music
1901 Suite, pour le piano
1905 Suite bergamasque
1903 Estampes
1905,1907 Images
1908 Children's Corner
1910,1913 Preludes, 2 books
1915 Studies
2 Pianos
1915 En blanc et noir (In White and Black)
Chamber music
1893 String Quartet
1915 Cello Sonata
1915 Sonata for flute, viola and harp
1917 Violin sonata
Incidental music
1911 Le martyre de St Sébastien
songs
1891,1904 Fêtes galantes
1898 Chansons de Bilitis
c60 others
Choral music
1888 La damoiselle élue (The Chosen Maiden)

» More

Related Sites

Information Web page about the music of Claude Debussy

(born Aug. 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25, 1918, Paris) French composer. Born into near poverty, he showed an early gift for the piano. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1873, and soon thereafter he was employed as pianist by Nadezhda von Meck, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's patroness. Influenced by the Symbolist poets and Impressionist painters, he was early inclined toward a compositional style of great originality, shunning the strictures of traditional counterpoint and harmony to achieve new effects of great subtlety. Regarded as the founder of musical Impressionism, he used unusual voice leading and timbral colours to evoke pictorial images and moods, especially of languor and hedonism. His significance in weakening the hold of traditional tonal harmony equals that of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Arnold Schoenberg. Given his effect on such composers as Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Pierre Boulez, he can be seen as the most influential French composer of the last three centuries. His works include the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), the orchestral works Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and La Mer (1905), and the piano Préludes (1910, 1913).