Ideas of the avant-garde dominated the culture of late nineteenth-century Paris. Symbolist poets like Mallarmé questioned notions of conventional representation in language, and post-Impressionist painters Gauguin, Seurat, and Cézanne were engaged in a similar project. As composer and critic Paul Dukas wrote,

Impressionism, symbolism, poetic realism were all merged in a great current of enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellectual passion. Painters, poets, sculptors were all bending questioningly over the material of their mediums, dissecting or recomposing them according to their desires—all trying to give to words, sounds, color, and design, new nuances and significances.

Claude Debussy applied these ideals to music, resulting in some of his most significant works of the 1890s:  L'aprés-midi d'un faune (1894), the Proses lyriques (1893-94), and the Nocturnes (1897-99).

Along with Mallarmé’s avant-garde aesthetics, Debussy took great inspiration from nature. As he enthused in an interview about a decade after the Nocturnes’ composition,

I have made mysterious Nature my religion ... When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration.

Consisting of three movements— “Nuages” (Clouds), “Fêtes” (Festivals), and “Sirènes” (Sirens)—the Nocturnes put on full display Debussy’s attunement to the world around him. As Debussy describes, “Nuages” depicts “The unchanging aspect of the sky, with the slow and melancholy passage of clouds dissolving into a vague grayness tinged with white.” Debussy brings this image to life through undulating woodwinds that gently give way to the full orchestra, creating a tightly woven tapestry of sound that evokes both the vast sky’s sameness and its remarkable variety.    

 “Fêtes,” Debussy explains, “reflects the movement, the restless dancing rhythms of the atmosphere, interspersed with brusque bursts of light. There is also the episode of a procession—a dazzling and wholly visionary pageant—passing through the festival and blended with it. But the background of uninterrupted festival persists with its mixture of music and luminous dust participating in the universal rhythm.” Perhaps the most striking moment amid the “restless dancing rhythms” takes place at the midpoint of the movement. After a dramatic pause, the “visionary pageant” is announced with a muted march and distant trumpet fanfare. Yet despite this disruption, Debussy seamlessly returns to the “universal rhythms” of the “uninterrupted festival.”

The mercurial sea, an especially appealing subject to Debussy, figures prominently in “Sirènes.” (As the composer wrote to his publisher in 1903, “The sea has been very good to me. She has shown me all her moods.”) Debussy adds an eight-part chorus of soprano and alto voices to this final movement, which according to its composer, depicts “the sea and its endless rhythms. Then amid the billows silvered by the moon, the mysterious song of the sirens is heard; it laughs and passes.”