early as September, 1893, he was not
finally through with it until nine years later. In the spring of 1901
the last scene of the fourth act (the love-scene at the fountain in the
park, with its abrupt and tragic close) was rewritten, and in 1902,
after the first rehearsals at the Opera-Comique, it was found necessary
to lengthen the orchestral interludes between the different tableaux in
order that the scene-shifters might have sufficient time to change the
settings. These extended interludes are included in the edition of the
score for piano and voices, with French and English text, published in
1907.

[4] The above is written in July, 1907.

What are the more prominent traits of the music of this man who is the
product of no school, who has no essential affinities with his
contemporaries, who has been accurately characterized as the "tres
exceptionnel, tres curieux, tres solitaire M. Claude Debussy"? One is
struck, first of all, in savoring his art, by its extreme fluidity, its
vagueness of contour, its lack of obvious and definite outline. It is
cloudlike, evanescent, impalpable; it passes before the aural vision (so
to speak) like a floating and multicolored mist; it is shifting,
fugitive, intangible, atmospheric. Its beauty is not the beauty that
issues from clear and transparent designs, from a lucid and outspoken
style: it is a remote and inexplicable beauty, a beauty shot through
with mystery and strangeness, baffling, incalculable. It is unexpected
and subtle in accent, wayward and fantastic in rhythm. Harmonically it
obeys no known law--consonances, dissonances, are interfused, blended,
re-echoed, juxtaposed, without the smallest regard for the rules of
tonal relationship established by long tradition. It recognizes no
boundaries whatsoever between the different keys; there is constant flux
and change, and the same tonality is seldom maintained beyond a single
beat of the measure. There are key-signatures, but they strike one as
having been put in place as a mere yielding to what M. Debussy doubtless
regards indulgently as an amiable and harmless prejudice. His melodic
schemes suggest no known model--they conform to patterns which
intertwine and melt and are suddenly and surprisingly transformed; they
are without punctuation, uncadenced, irregular, unpredictable,
indescribably sensitive and supple. There is a marked indifference to
the possibilities of contrapuntal effect, a dependence upon a method
fundame