Creating a balanced picture of such a deliberately enigmatic character as Claude Debussy is no easy task. But so great is the fascination that his life and music have exerted that ‘performers, writers and analysts have been peeling away the layers of the onion that is Debussy’ ever since Louise Liebich first approached the chopping board way back in 1907. And as Roger Nichols aptly continues: ‘I think it is some measure of his greatness that the more we peel, the more we find.’ Coincidentally, both Liebich and Nichols ninety years on begin by quoting Debussy's veiled warning to future biographers that ‘Another man's soul is a thick forest in which one must walk with circumspection’, and I make no excuse for reusing this ideal quotation here, or for assuming that readers will refer to the accompanying chronology on pp. xiv–xviii above for the well-known landmarks in Debussy's career.

Debussy very rarely bared his own secretive soul, and if he was hardly a model of circumspection himself, he disliked its absence in others. The thick forest in which his shadowy operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande begins can be seen to have parallels with his own life, for it surrounded a dream-world controlled by destiny in which happiness was rare, and from which there was no escape except in death. If Maeterlinck's Symbolist play provided Debussy with a musical way forward in 1893 and eventually brought him the fame he had dreamed of when it was staged in 1902, it nevertheless did not satisfy the cravings of the ‘happiness addict’ who, for a variety of reasons, became increasingly reclusive and miserable during his final years.