In 1909, when Claude Debussy began work on his Preludes for piano, he could look back on a number of recent successes, not least the British premiere of his opera Pelleas et Melisande. He published these 24 pieces, in two books of 12 each, in 1910 and 1913 they thus date from the watershed between the composers impressionistic middle period and the striking neo-Classicism of his later years. The Preludes are immensely varied in character, from the tender Fille aux cheveux de lin to the impassioned, brilliant Feux dartifice. Moreover, Debussy creates a quite new aesthetic by dispensing with motivic and thematic development. Instead, individual sections and melodic fragments seem merely juxtaposed or else pass seamlessly one into another.

Time and again a synaesthesis of sense and impression is found in Debussys works here, the very title of Les sons et les parfums tournent dans lair du soir combines the senses of hearing and smell. The musics associative nature is clear from a contemporary description of Feux dartifice: Motionless clouds of Bengal lights, from which a few sparks break

free like rockets, crackling, before slowly descending like stars, whirring suns, dazzling, multicoloured rays of light, all that shimmers and gleams in the night the whole magic of light lies in this music.