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Impressionism, movement in painting and music that developed in late 19th-century France in reaction to the formalism and sentimentality that characterized academic art and much 18th- and early-19th-century music. The impressionist movement is often considered to mark the beginning of the modern period in art and, to a lesser degree, in 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 Stephane Mallarme, musical impressionism emphasized tonal color 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 such composers as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven and the emotional richness of romantic 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 the medieval church modes. 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.
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 of 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 overrefinement and technical limitations of musical impressionism provoked adverse criticism from composers and critics alike. A new group of antiromantic 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.
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