Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony was mocked for conjuring up a ‘wooden nightingale’ and a ‘Swiss cuckoo’, Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel resembled ‘an hour of new music written for lunatics’; Wagner's Wotan was ‘majestic, empty and insipid’; Gluck's music was ‘almost uniformly pompous’; and modern composers, in catering to the tastes of their public, were reduced to ‘something midway between the monkey and the servant’. Debussy was certainly not afraid to speak his mind and his published articles will always make entertaining reading. In contrast to the musical reviews of his peers his comments were hard-hitting, uncompromising and, on occasion, deliberately inflammatory. What prompted him to publish such savage remarks and what he hoped to achieve by them are no less fascinating; an examination of the issues concerned provides insight into the concerns of Debussy the musician.

When Debussy's first articles appeared in La revue blanche between April and December 1901, they met with a mixed response that ranged from laughing indulgence to downright hostility. That any young composer, as yet relatively unknown, should have the presumption to challenge the supremacy of composers like Beethoven and the current idol, Wagner, was beyond the comprehension of most. However, it was not unexpected by those who had been unpleasantly surprised at the recent premiere of the first two Nocturnes at the Concerts Lamoureux on 9 December 1900. Debussy's music was also a marked departure from what one was accustomed to hearing, and the scorn for the musical past and criticism of the musical establishment in his articles was just what one would expect from such an ‘original’ composer, a term that quickly acquired negative as well as positive connotations in relation to Debussy's music.