The pejorative interpretation attaching to the term ,Impressionism' was part of the ideological campaign being waged in conservative quarters on all artistic fronts against the movement which was thought to be responsible for the changes which were taking place in the world of art both in theory and practice. But as Impressionist painting gradually began to gain ground, the incriminating label ceased to be merely an expression of hostility, and was soon being used in a favourable sense. lt is interesting to observe how this change of attitude came about, because it helps to explain how the concept of ,musical Impressionism' came to be adopted by Debussy's contemporaries. Naturally we shall cite only the most significant opinions expressed on the subject at that time. With the exception of the report of the Secretary of die Acadèmie des Beaux-Arts, the term was first applied to the music of Debussy in 1894.

The occasion was a performance in Brussels of the cantata La Damoiseile élue, the text being a French translation of the poem by the English Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and two other works: the song-cycle Proses lyriques, with words by Debussy himself, and his String Quartet. Despite the generally courteous attitude of the Belgian critics towards an unknown composer, M. Kufferadi, in the Guide muskal blamed Debussy for his ,poitillisme', and compared the style of the Quartet with what he called die ,neoJapanese pictures of the Montmartre painters'; as for the Proses lyriques, they seemed to him to be 'pure cacophony'. An anonymous critic, writing in die Patriote praised the ,Impressionism' of the Quartet. Only Octave Maus - a Belgian man of  letters, promoter of the avant-garde, and founder of the weekly review L'Art moderne (1881) and the association known as Libre Esthétique - avoided using the tcrm, and emphasised the ,classic' character of die Quartet, seeing in it, nevertheless, ,a torrent of youth, and of audacious harmonies and unexpected resolutions' (3).
The first performance on 22 December 1894 in Paris of the Prélude ä l'après-midi d'un faune did not inspire the critics to make vague comparisons of this kind, although the writer of the programme note seemed to invite them to do so; but the three Nocturnes for orchestra, first performed in Paris On 27 October  1901 provoked a torrent of extra-musical assodations. One of the most interesting commentaries came from the pen of the critic of Le Courrier rnusical Jean d'Udine who, before becoming a disciple of Dalcrozc, had been seeking to establish a connection between sounds and colours, and had even published several studies dealing with this question (4).

He said among other things, in his artide: ,lt is impossible to imagine a more subtly impressionist symphony. Consisting entirely of sound-spots, it does not evolve within the framework of any precise rnelodic pattern, but thc way in which the chords and different 'timbres' are blended and manipulated - what the painters would call its ,,harmony" - gives it a kind of very strict homogeneity in which beauty of line is replaced by an equally plastic beauty resulting from the skilful way in which orchestral sonorities arc distributed and logically sustained.' Of the tbree Nocturnes; d'Udine preferred the second, Fêtes, because this music suggestcd to hirn a ,kind of ,Verlainisme a' la Fragonard' (5).
First introduced by a few critics, the idea of a correlation between Impressionist painting and Debussy's music gradually came to be adopted by the public who by now had had time to get accustomed to the art of Monet, Pissarro or Sisley, and even with Postimpresssionist painting. Proof of this can be found in an article which Camille Mauclair, a critic always prepared to cater for bis public's tastes, published in 1902 in La Revue Bleue. Mauclair - who thought lt was entitled to express an opinion on any artistic problem, and who was denounced by Gauguin for his dangerous incompetence in all rnatters pertaining to the avantgarde movernent (6) - had nothing much to add to the formula of ,lmpressionism by means of sound-spots' in the rnusic of Debussy; but the title alone of bis article, ,Musical painting and the fusion of the arts', showed the direction in which the arts in general were evolving at that time (7).

The conservative composers were more demanding, and were the ones to reject the imprecise stylistic forrnula transposed from the domain of painting to that of music. They would have preferred to possess a key better adapted to provide a clue to these works which were a source of perpetual ernbarrassrnent to them. The consternation into which they were plunged, for example, over the 'Nocturnes'  is reflected in a letter from Vincent d'Indy: the Director of the Schola Cantorum was trying to find a forrnuia wbich would be applicable to these pieces, but found, to his annoyance, that in fact they eould not be fitted into any accepted scholastic category: 'Sonata' ? Definitely not. Suite? Equally out of the question. Symphonic phonic poem? Despite the titles, Nuages, Fêtes, Sirènes - all very vague denominations - there is no literary programme, or suggestion of any dramatic content which would justify the erratic key changes and agreeable, but uncoordinated meanderings of these three pieces ... But they exist, and we have got to classify them somehow. But where? Under the heading "Fantasia" - I don't see where else we could place them' (8).

The rigid opinions of d'Indy, who had once somewhat rashly been considered Debussy's equal, were soon to be transformed into open hostility after the production of Pellèas et Mèlisande. He did not hesitate then to declare that: 'This music will not live because it is without form' (9). His opinions were to become still more virulent in his Treatise oii Composition; but there, too, although the notion of 'impressionism' had by then penetrated into his mind, d'Indy abstained from using the term: 'Debussy's aesthetic', he wrote, 'is an aesthetic based on sensations, and that is a principle which is scarcely compatible with the true aims of great art ... Debussy has been an apostle of harmonic "sensationism", just as Rossini was in regard to melody. Yet lüs harmonies have done no more to uplift the minds and hearts of his hearers than the cavatinas of Tlie Barber of Seville, which were written merely to display the charm and agility of the human voice. On these grounds, this kind of art must be judged inferior' (io).

After about the year 1905 the term 'l impressionism' was commonly applied in France to the music of Debussy. The public was beginning to get accustomed to the idea of a new musical style thus designated by the critics, but this idea was still far from being as precise as it was to become later on. In the course of the ideological battles in the art-world, before the heavy artillery of a scientifically inspired literature on the subject came into action, the critics were attacking their opponents with weapons of a lighter calibre. It was the French critics who, generally speaking, had launched the term 'musical Impressionism'; but it was above all the Germans who had founded their structural analysis of Debussy's works on a scientific basis.

This does not, of course, mean that no one in France had studied Debussy's musical procedures (cf. for example René Lenormand's book on Modern Harmony which for a long time was the basic work in this field ; but these studies were too superficial to serve as a basis for aesthetic speculations of a more general order, Debussy was not a unique case in France of an artist who had a real horror of treatises packed with technical analyses; he believed that, so far as the beauty of a work of art was concerned, it would 'certainly' never he possible to discover "how it was done" ; consequently, what need was there for detailed analyses? The tendency to classify the human sciences into rigidly specialised compartments, with the result that their common aims and awareness of the bonds uniting closely related disciplines were often lost sight of owing to linguistic distinctions and peculiarities, had always been contrary to the French way of thinking. Being entirely free from the 'scientific complex' characteristic of men and countries endowed with a less rich cultural tradition, French humanist thought never enclosed itself in ivory towers or cultivated science for its own sake or for the sak-e of a limited ilite. On the contrary, indifferent to the risk of incurring the reproach of superficiality, it had always shown a desire to maintain contact with the 'consumers' of culture and to serve their interests rather than overwhelm them with its own erudition. This may account for some of its weaknesses perhaps, but also for its undisputed merits upon which, however, it is unnecessary to dwell at this point.

As we have just seen, it was thanks to the Germans, and especially to their 'penchant' for classifying artistic phenomena, that the concept of 'musical Impressionism' became firmly established, outwardlv at least, and found a permanent place in the vocabulary and literature of musicologists. lt all began with a study of the correlations existing between various forms of art and lmpressionist painting - a study which had become fashionable thanks to Richard Hamann's book, which had a great vogue at that time, "Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst" (1907). Although by extending the stylistic category of Impressionism to include all paintings of that period, including the pointillisme of Seurat and Signac, Hamann reached some apparently paradoxical conclusions (e.g. he found 'impressionist' features in the works of Wagner, Liszt, Bruckner, Wolf, Reger and Strauss, without even mentioning Debussy), he was nevertheless the first to attempt to extend the concept of an Impressionist style by means of structural analysis. Thus, for example, in loud and frequently dissonant chords he saw a parallel with the technique of juxtaposing little spots of colour-, while the disappearance of tonality reminded him of the lack of perspective in the Impressionists' Pictures (13).

Hamann's work has contributed to the specification and extension of the use that has been made of the new stylistic category. As early as 1911 Werner Weisbach saw in Impressionism not j ust a movement which started in the second half of the nineteenth century, but one which in a much wider sense is exemplified in the art of old masters such as Tintoretto, Fragonard, Goya and Hokusai (14).

A year later E. Koehler published his work on the Goncourt brothers as pioneers in the Impressionist movement in literature , soon to be completed by detailed analyses of the style and syntax of the Goncourts . The theses of  Hamann and Weisbach were to find a striking echo in Oswald Spengler's famous book- announcing the decline of  Western culture. lt is noteworthy that Spengler, like Hamann, when speaking of musical Impressionism, also went no further than Wagner and Bruckner (17).

The reason why German musicology before the First World War had not made much progress in the direction indicated by Hamann and Weisbach (and this may be due to certain shortcomings in Hamann's work - he was not a musician) is above all because the works of Debussy were at that time very little known in Germany. lt was only in the post-war period that numerous analytical studies began to make their appearance with the object of proving that Debussy's 'lmpressionism' was not a mere superficial label, but a stylistic procedure based on scientific laws. The long series of works on this subject opened with Ernst Kurth's book on Romantic harmony and its culmination in Wagner's Tristan (1920) (18); this book was destined to play a decisive part in musicology, even outside Germany, thanks to the wealth of ideas it contained, and the very convincing use made in it of analytical methods. lt would be no exaggeration to say that developments in musicology during at least a quarter of a century were due to Kurth's ideas, whether the conclusions drawn were favourable or not.
Kurth's views on the music of Debussy have contributed greatly to a proper understanding of his role and his importance in the history of the music of our time. Starting from the principle that developments in musical form depend largely on an immanent psychic energy which is constantly disturbing, and even disrupting and destroying the rationalised and functional harmonic system, Kurth showed how the kinetic energy represented by melody had attained its peak with the music of the Romantics, gradually transforming itself, since Tristan, into a potential form of energy easily assimilated by pure sonority combined with colour; this tendency
reached its climax in the music of Debussy. Kurth arrived at the following conclusion: 'The path of Debussy follows Wagner's, even though he himself ... had declared that his aim was to liberate music from the influence of Wagner.' By coupling Debussy and Wagner together in the same decadent movement, and insisting that harmony was the almost essential ingredient of Debussy's method of composition, Kurth seemed to confirm the thesis of Hamann, and to indicate the chief direction in which future researches would have to be pursued if they were to lead to the discovery of the 'true image', of Debussy's rnusic. Could S. von Hausegger have been right when, ten years earlier, having agreed to contribute, along with a couple of Parisian hack writers, to a pamphlet attacking Debussy, he spoke of his music as being effeminate, bizarre, decadent and without any future, and devoid of melody, rhythm or form (ig)? The article was mischievous and caricaturist; but neither the 'objective' studies of L. Fabian, affirming that for Debussy harmony was his primary creative impulse with melody in second place (2o), nor those of W. Harburger, who thought that the sole criterion of musical Impressionism was the negation of any constructive principle (7 1), contributed anything to the basic question. Ever since the first writings of Werner Danckert recognising Liszt, together with Wagner, as the cofounders of musical Impressionism (2z), not forgetting the various studies by H. Kölsch, Otto Wartisch, Heinz Günther Schultz, Jakobik and many others who mentioned in passing the name of the composer of Pelléas et Mélisande, all these authors invoked especially and almost exclusively the question of harmony as the link which connected Debussy with Impressionism.

Many years later, in a lecture on dodecaphonic music which Arnold Schoenberg gave at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1941, he said that 'it was the harmonies of Richard Wagner which had disrupted the logic and constructive powers of harmony. One of the consequences of this state of affairs was the use of what were called "impressionist" harmonies such as we find especially in Debussy. Devoid of any constructive significance, these harmonies are often used to produce effects of "colour"; their object is to express atmosphere and pictorial images. ln this way, however, atmosphere and images, though of extra-musical origin, do become constructive elements, and in the end take their place among other musical functions' (73).

The phenomenological method of musical analysis which, in Kurth's case, took as its starting point the work as a field of conflicting energies, and in the case of Mersmann, as an 'organism' activated by 'tectonic forces' (24), was an attempt to reconcile analysis with a unique kind of 'hermeneutic' sui generis and create a bridge between a work and its perception; and this is the explanation of its success in musicology. But so far as Debussy was concerned, the conclusions arrived at by the adepts of this method did not differ noticeably from the results already obtained by the French critics following their intuition.

The image of musical Impressionism and of the music of Debussy as presented by the musicologists seems very similar to that which Emile Vuillermoz offered to French audiences, pointing out that 'the mechanism of the theory of Bergson corresponded exactly to that which inspired the researches of Claude Monet or Debussy: substitute for the word "conscience" the word "perception", and you will have discovered the philosophical basis of both pictorial and musical Impressionism. . . The Impressionist seeks to translate and transpose into the vocabulary of lines and colours, volumes and sounds, not the external and realistic aspect of things, hut the impressions aroused by them in our own sensibility. lt means responding to their most secret language and most intimate confidences - capturing their irradiations and listening to their inner voices. For things see, things speak, things have a soul ... Impressionism is a mode of expression which more than any other can claim to illustrate this truth, since it can grasp it behind and beyond outward appearances. Tristan already foreshadowed a kind of sentimental impressionism, transforming love into an enchanted landscape, and then describing amiably all its most subtle nuances and, so to speak, its most mysterious rays of illumination' (2 5).

Speaking of individual works, Vuillermoz gave, for example, the following description of the second series of Images for piano: Cloches à travers les feuilles, Et la 1une descend sur le temple qui fut and Poissons d'or: 'These titles, which suggest to our imagination definite objects, apply in reality to very advanced technical studies corresponding to the pointilliste techniques of the painters. Debussy is undertaking here what is almost a scientific demonstration of Impressionist composition, especially in the first tableau. . . . What the musician wishes to represent is the passage of the sound-waves through the air, opening and closing like a fan - clashing and mingling, giving off an iridescent glow as they meet, and suffusing the air with an atmosphere of poetry and dreams. The bells of Claude
Monet's vibrant cathedrals also play their part in this quivering tissue of sounds, every delicate nuance of which is disseminated, decomposed and muted, as it were, by the foliage through which they pass. And it is through his skilful use of the whole-tone scale that Debussy has succeeded in realising this spectral analysis of sound which is almost a laboratory experiment, but is still from beginning to end an astonishing and enchanting musical experience' (z6).

One might simply ask to what extent such an explanation, hased on a long-standing tradition and a large number of important studies, is justified, and to what extent it represents the truth. But before attempting to answer this question, we must first consider a problem which cannot be avoided whenever one wishes to verify opinions which have become firnily embedded in the social conscience.