Mer_--completed three years after the production of _Pelléas_--is
charged to the brim with his peculiar and potent quality.

[2] A revised version of these songs was published fifteen years later,
in 1903, dedicated _à Miss Mary Garden, inoubliable Mélisande_.

[3] M. Debussy sends me the information that, although the music of
_Pelléas et Mélisande_ was begun as early as September, 1893, he was not
finally through with it until nine years later. In the spring of 1901
the last scene of the fourth act (the love-scene at the fountain in the
park, with its abrupt and tragic close) was rewritten, and in 1902,
after the first rehearsals at the Opéra-Comique, it was found necessary
to lengthen the orchestral interludes between the different tableaux in
order that the scene-shifters might have sufficient time to change the
settings. These extended interludes are included in the edition of the
score for piano and voices, with French and English text, published in
1907.

[4] The above is written in July, 1907.

What are the more prominent traits of the music of this man who is the
product of no school, who has no essential affinities with his
contemporaries, who has been accurately characterized as the "très
exceptionnel, très curieux, très solitaire M. Claude Debussy"? One is
struck, first of all, in savoring his art, by its extreme fluidity, its
vagueness of contour, its lack of obvious and definite outline. It is
cloudlike, evanescent, impalpable; it passes before the aural vision (so
to speak) like a floating and multicolored mist; it is shifting,
fugitive, intangible, atmospheric. Its beauty is not the beauty that
issues from clear and transparent designs, from a lucid and outspoken