Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture - a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
Debussy in a letter to his pupil Raoul Bardac in 1906

Claude Debussy

Starting Points

Listen to an aanalysis of La Mer
(scroll down to Debussy)

Connections with J.M.W. Tturner, Hokusai, Renoir & Monet - Themes of reflections. Link with Poe (symbolist) attempted to write an opera The Fall of the House of Usher

Impressionist Influences in the Music of Debussy - Shengdar Tsai

The Absent Voice: C. Debussy's La Damoiselle Élue. This "Public Lecture Online" page provides background information and a general introduction to the lecture. The focus of the lecture will be on the relationship between music and literature -- How does Debussy's work require listeners to rethink traditional notions of narrative, narrator, plot, and listener involvement.

The design for The Wave is a deified version of the sea made by a painter who lived in a religious terror of the overwhelming sea surrounding his country on all sides; it is a design which is impressive by the sudden anger of its leap into the sky, by the deep blue of the trnasparent inner side of its curve, by the splitting of its crest which is thus scattered into a shower of tiny drops having the shape of animals' claws.
Edmond de Goncourt

Classical Music Notes - Debussy

Essentials of Music - Debussy

Words to search for -
Impressionism
Symbolist poetry Verlaine Mallarme
Degas Monet Renoir
Chopin Liszt Wagner