Paris at the turn of the century was obsessed with the interrelations of the arts. It was a time when artists and writers spoke of poetry as music, sounds as colors, and paintings as symphonies. The music of Claude Debussy, with its unique textures and dazzling colors, was the perfect counterpart of the bold new painting in France, the canvases of Manet, Monet, and Degas from the Impressionist generation, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec in the eighties and nineties, and Matisse in the new century.

Debussy drew inspiration, too, from the sensual poetry of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarme; the exotic sounds of the Orient; the circus and the music-hall; and the playful world of his little daughter Chou-chou. In the first years of the twentieth century, his keenly visual imagination and his awareness of the piano as an instrument of illusion gave birth to music of a confident originality, a new music entirely at one with the instrument that creates it.

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British pianist Paul Roberts uses his love and understanding of the repertoire and his musical imagination to probe the sources of Debussy's artistic inspiration, relating the "impressionist" titles to the artistic and literary ferment of the time. With clarity and insight, Roberts touches on all the principal technical problems for a performer of Debussy's piano music.

His many suggestions about interpreting the music, coming from a pianist who has performed the repertoire extensively, will be particularly valuable to performers as well as listeners.