What we first hear in Debussy’s music, is the strangeness of the harmony, the use of certain scales, not so much new as unfamiliar.  Also the employment of sequences of fifths or seconds.  He often takes his subjects from nature, but in this case seems to prefer a sky less blue and a landscape more atmospheric than those of Italy, more like his native France.  His music, when known sufficiently, will reveal a sense of proportion, balance and the most exquisite taste.  It may lack strength at times, it may lack outbursts of passion and intensity, but it is the perfection of refinement.

Mr. Ernest Newman, in writing of Debussy, warmly praises the delightful naturalness of his early compositions.  “One would feel justified in building the highest hopes on the young genius who can manipulate so easily the beautiful shapes his imagination conjures up.”

The work of the early period shows Debussy developing freely and naturally.  The independence of his thinking is unmistakable, but it does not run into wilfulness.  There is no violent break with the past, but simply the quickening of certain French qualities by the infusion of a new personality.  It seemed as if a new and charming miniaturist had appeared, who was doing both for piano and song what had never been done before.  The style of the two Arabesques and the more successful of the Ariettes oubliees is perfect.  A liberator seemed to have come into music, to take up, half a century later, the work of Chopin—­the work of redeeming the art from the excessive objectivity of German thought, of giving it not only a new soul but a new body, swift, lithe and graceful.  And that this exquisitely clear, pellucid style could be made to carry out not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort, is proved by the lovely “Clair de Lune.”

Among Debussy’s best known compositions are “The Afternoon of a Faun,” composed in 1894 and called his most perfect piece for orchestra, which he never afterward surpassed.  There are also Three Nocturnes for orchestra.  In piano music, as we have briefly shown, he created a new school for the player.  All the way from the two Arabesques just mentioned, through “Gardens in the Rain,” “The Shadowy Cathedral,” “A Night in Granada,” “The Girl with Blond Hair,” up to the two books of remarkable Preludes, it is a new world of exotic melody and harmony to which he leads the way.  “Art must be hidden by art,” said Rameau, long ago, and this is eminently true in Debussy’s music.

Debussy composed several works for the stage, one of which was “Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien,” but his “Pelleas and Melisande” is the one supreme achievement in the lyric drama.  As one of his critics writes:  “The reading of the score of ‘Pelleas and Melisande’ remains for me one of the most marvelous lessons in French art:  it would be impossible for him to express more with greater restraint of means.”  The music, which seems so complicated, is in reality very simple.  It sounds so shadowy and impalpable, but it is really built up with as sure control as the most classic work.  It is indeed music which appeals to refined and sensitive temperaments.