Claude Debussy was born on today (August 22) in 1862! Happy birthday to the master!
The Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (L.73) was composed in 1889–90 and never performed in Debussy’s lifetime. When a Paris concert was arranged and he learned that only the first movement would be played, he pulled the parts from the stands before the rehearsal began. He would rather the piece not be heard than heard incompletely. It wasn’t premiered until 1919, a year after his death.
The second movement, Lento e molto espressivo, is where you can hear Debussy becoming Debussy. The harmonic language is not yet his — there is still a lot of the Conservatoire in it — but the color sense is already there. Debussy thought of music the way painters think of light: chords held not for where they are going but for what they sound like standing still, textures layered until they blur at the edges, melody dissolved into atmosphere. The Germans asked what a chord meant. Debussy asked what color it was.
The year he wrote this piece, 1889, was also the year of the Paris Exposition Universelle, where he heard the Javanese gamelan for the first time. That encounter — the interlocking percussive textures, the hovering harmonics, the complete indifference to Western voice-leading — would eventually become Pagodes and La Mer and everything after. In the Fantaisie, you can just barely hear him standing at the door.
Debussy uses the flute well too. Hear the 2nd movement Lento: