Debussy

French composer Claude Debussy — experimental, adventurous, bohemian, unorthodox — stood at the vanguard of new classical music as the 1800s gave way to the 20th Century, saturating his compositions with colour and texture, and changing the way people heard the world. We begin our Debussy odyssey with the ever-gorgeous third movement of the Suite bergamasque, "Clair de lune", written with the poetry of Paul Verlaine in mind, and his breakthrough work, the revolutionary "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (again inspired by the work a poet, this time Stéphane Mallarmé) which is considered by many to have marked the start of modernism in music. Debussy hurls himself into The Sea, in Next Steps.

Although he was greatly influenced by the work of Richard Wagner, Debussy would ultimately lay down his own unique operatic groove with Pelléas and Mélisande, which premiered in 1902 and stood in sharp contrast to the Wagnerian style — as you'll hear from our extract from Act Three, Scene Four, Debussy chose to take the subtlest of routes to vocal delivery, relishing the fluidity of the French language (it was based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck). That work was followed, in 1905, by La mer which remains one of the century's great orchestral masterpieces: here we've included the opening movement, "De l'aube a midi sur la mer", as well as the wilder third movement. The composer picks up a prestigious award, in Deep Cuts.

Here, to get a sense of Debussy's development as a composer, we've chosen pieces that defined the earliest and the latest stages of his career. "L'enfant prodigue" is a one-act cantata — here performed by lyric soprano Kate Royal, with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields — for which young Debussy (aged 22) won the 1884 Prix de Rome. Some three decades later came the avant-garde Preludes (never intended to be performed in a series, but rather as individual pieces), including the melancholic "Des pas sur la neige" ("Footsteps in the Snow") and the far more dramatic "La vent dans la plaine" ("The Wind in the Plain").

As Oscar Wilde once quipped, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about", and when Parisians of the early 20th Century brought up the subject of Claude Debussy — honouring the composer with his own noun, Debussysme, or "Debussyism" — opinion was divided down the middle. Some critics loved his visionary, modernist style; others found it harder to grasp, but time has confirmed the man's genius, which we've tried to represent in these brilliant Essentials. Put simply, Debussy threw rigid notions of time and structure out of the window, choosing to redefine existing beliefs about flow, harmony and rhythm, and in the process he bridged the gap between the late-romantic period and modernism. His interest in ethnic, Eastern and antique forms of music only fuelled his talent and — together with the fact that he forged close creative links with symbolist poets like Baudelaire and Verlaine — confirmed him as the greatest of all the impressionists.