_Sirènes_, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it
was not until _Pelléas et Mélisande_ was produced at the Opéra-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 naïve 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 emphasis. Is it strange that
such music--hesitant, evasive, dream-filled, strangely ecstatic, with
its wistful and twilight loveliness, its blended subtlety and
simplicity--should have been as difficult to trace to any definite
source as it was, for the general, immensely astonishing and unexpected?
There was nothing like it to be found in Wagner, or in his more
conspicuous and triumphant successors--in, so to speak, the direct and
royal line. Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner;
nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite
as obviously, were the Russians. The immediate effect of its strangeness
and newness was, of course, to direct the attention of the larger world