Described as an "impressionist" composer, a label he refuted, Claude Debussy
paved the way for 20th-century modernism with his Prelude to the Afternoon of a
Faun, his blurred piano works and his opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Born in
Saint-Germain-en-Laye on August 22, 1862 into a modest family with an
earthenware shopkeeper father and a seamstress mother, Achille-Claude Debussy
began piano lessons with Mme Mauté de Fleurville, the mother-in-law of poet Paul
Verlaine, who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. He entered the Paris
Conservatoire at the age of ten, in 1872, where his...