Impressionism

Impressionism, a stylistic movement that flourished briefly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in French music. The Impressionist movement in music was led by the French composer Claude Debussy. Influenced by the paintings of the French Impressionists and by the poetry of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, musical Impressionism emphasized tonal colour and mood rather than formal structures such as the sonata and the symphony. Debussy, an active critic as well as a composer, viewed Impressionism as a reaction to both the formal emphasis of the Classical Style of such composers as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven and the emotional richness of the Romanticism of composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. In pursuit of this goal, Debussy developed a combination of new and ancient devices in his music. On the one hand he used the whole-tone scale and complex, hitherto unexploited intervals of the ninth and higher; on the other hand he returned to the parallel fourth and fifth intervals of medieval church music. These technical features were fully developed in Debussy's early orchestral work Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), based on a poem by Mallarmé. The extensive piano literature composed by Debussy required new performing techniques, including generous but sensitive use of the pedals to create an indistinct wash of sound.

French Impressionist music continued to develop in the work of Maurice Ravel. Other French composers of the impressionist school were Paul Dukas and Albert Roussel. Outside France, various aspects of Debussy's style were imitated by a number of composers, such as Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, Ottorino Respighi in Italy, and Manuel de Falla in Spain.

By the beginning of World War I in 1914, the over-refinement and technical limitations of musical Impressionism provoked adverse criticism from composers and critics alike. A new group of anti-Romantic French composers, Les Six, influenced by Erik Satie, satirized and revolted against these excesses. Eventually, Impressionism, which had been conceived by Debussy as a revolt against Romanticism, came to be regarded as the final phase of Romantic music.