Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was a French composer sometimes described as the first Impressionist composer, though he rejected the label himself. Admitted at the age of ten to the Conservatoire de Paris, he studied there for eleven years before finding his own voice as a composer against the disapproval of the school's conservative professors. He achieved international fame in 1902 with his only completed opera, Pelleas et Melisande, and his orchestral and piano works, including Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Clair de Lune, moved away from the German symphonic tradition his contemporaries inherited toward a distinctive harmonic language that influenced composers across the twentieth century.