-a new way of evolving and
combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic
structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely
distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser
degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior
to the appearance of _Pelleas et Melisande_, he had put forth, without
appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and
individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three
orchestral "sketches," _La Mer_ (composed in 1903-1905 and published in
the latter year), the piano pieces _Estampes_ (1903), and _Images,
Masques, l'Ile joyeuse_ (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in
Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed
Damozel" (_La Demoiselle Elue_), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices,
female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet
was played by Ysaye and his associates; in 1894 his _Prelude a
l'Apres-midi d'un Faune_ was produced at a concert of the National
Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, _Nuages_ and
_Fetes_, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third,
_Sirenes_, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it
was not until _Pelleas et Melisande_ was produced at the Opera-Comique
in April, 1902, that his work began seriously to be reckoned with
outside of the small and inquisitive public, in Paris and elsewhere,
that had known and valued--or execrated--it.

In this score Debussy went far beyond the point to which his methods had
previously led him. It was, for all who heard it or came to know it, a
revelation of the possibilities of tonal effect--this dim and wavering
and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer
fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing
dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its
exquisite and elaborate art--this music which drifted before the senses
like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive,
imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex,
innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent
unmistakably grave and sincere; yet it spoke without emphasis:
indirectly, flexibly, with fluid and unpredictable expression. It was
eloquent beyond denial, yet its reticence, its economy of gesture, were
extreme--were, indeed, the very negation of em