Composed c1890; 5 minutes 

“This was the age of the ‘wonderful arabesque,’” Debussy wrote, “the free play of sonorities whose curves, whether flowing in parallel or contrary motion, would result in an undreamed-of flowering.” The French composer was describing the polyphonic lines of Bach, though he could equally have been describing the curving, intertwining lines of the Art Nouveau decorative style of the 1890s, the poetry of Baudelaire, or the emerging impressionism in music which the composer himself was exploring late in the 19^th century. Debussy disliked the term ‘impressionism’ and described his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, written in the early 1890s—and often taken as the quintessential example of musical impressionism—as a ‘general impression’ of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. The beautiful, dreamlike Rêverie is from this period, an early work, likely composed in Paris around 1890, shortly after Debussy returned from two years in Rome. Its pensively modal melody and fluid accompaniment, tonally ambiguous at the beginning, frame a chordal central section.