From the first, Debussy's music lent itself to all kinds of convenient critical labels, of which the most fashionable has always been 'impressionist'. In this book the doyen of Polish musicologists examines Debussy's output against the twin backgrounds of his upbringing and of contemporary movements in the other arts besides music. He concludes that the 'impressionist' analogy between music and painting has been too deceptively obvious, and that the movement with which Debussy's art is most deeply impregnated is Symbolism. This he shows by a review of the general aesthetic ferments of this age, by close analysis of Debussy's music, his early works in particular, and by well-directed quotation from Debussy's own many writings on the subject. In the course of his argument he leads the reader down many unexpected bypaths in aesthetics; his book is both an original contribution to musicology and a philosophical meditation on the whole of the art of this unusually fertile and adventurous period.