phasis. Is it strange that
such music--hesitant, evasive, dream-filled, strangely ecstatic, with
its wistful and twilight loveliness, its blended subtlety and
simplicity--should have been as difficult to trace to any definite
source as it was, for the general, immensely astonishing and unexpected?
There was nothing like it to be found in Wagner, or in his more
conspicuous and triumphant successors--in, so to speak, the direct and
royal line. Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner;
nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite
as obviously, were the Russians. The immediate effect of its strangeness
and newness was, of course, to direct the attention of the larger world
of music, within Paris and without, to the artistic personality and the
previous attainments of the man who had surprisingly put forth such
incommensurable music.

Achille[1] Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye
(Seine-et-Oise), France, August 22, 1862. He was still a youth when he
entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied harmony under Lavignac,
composition under Guiraud, and piano playing with Marmontel. He was only
fourteen when he won the first medal for _solfege_, and fifteen when he
won the second pianoforte prize.

[1] He no longer uses the first of these given names.

In 1884, when he was in his twenty-second year, his cantata, _l'Enfant
prodigue_, won for him the _Prix de Rome_ by a majority of twenty-two
out of twenty-eight votes--it is said to have been the unanimous opinion
of the jury that the score was "one of the most interesting that had
been heard at the _Institut_ for years." While at the Villa Medicis he
composed, in 1887, his _Printemps_ for chorus and orchestra, and, in the
following year, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," of which
the authorities at the Conservatory saw fit to disapprove because of
certain liberties which Debussy even then was taking with established
and revered traditions. He performed his military service upon his
return from Rome; and there is a tradition told, as bearing upon his
love of recondite sonorities, to the effect that while at Evreux he
delighted in the harmonic clash caused by the simultaneous sounding of
the trumpet call for the extinguishing of lights and the sustained
vibrations of some neighboring convent bells. From this time forward his
output was persistent and moderately copious. To the year 1888 belong,
in addition to _L