Between 1893 and 1895 Debussy worked on an opera based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande. According to Grayson, this project always encompassed Debussy. "The discovery of Pelleas in 1893 was indeed a major turning point in Debussy's career, and, as his remarks imply, it was the production of this opera in 1902 that brought him international celebrity. From that point on, everybody did indeed know what he had done." Debussy was taking great chances when writing opera, it was a good way to have everyone laugh at you and your work and put you on a shelf like a book you couldn't get through.

His music stresses mood and nuances over patterns with pure melodies. It is impressive the way he created time standing still, by creating animated harmonic stasi

Debussy pushes his music forward into the Twentieth Century by incorporating techniques and scales from the past. La Cathedrale engloutie was composed in 1910 he composed this piece to portray a mythic submerged city that rises out of the ocean amid the tolling church bells and organ music, only to sink for hundred more years. He used the Catholic liturgy with religious symbols that brings back the use of the church modes that create his exotic unique color, timbre, and general overall unique feeling of the piece. Debussy is so skillful, an absolute genius in the way he goes about creating these sounds. He wanted to create a Cathedral raising, what better way could he have created the feeling of a church raising from the depth? He just incorporates the original sounds and symbols of the Roman Catholic Lithurgy. It is amazing how such great things are relatively simple. Organum is borrowed with the use of parallel chords in the Bass. Debussy builds three layers. The bass has planning, or parallelism; the middle part uses the modes as the religious symbols, and the top part emotes the long forgotten use of chant. Debussy knows how to delay arrival points, simply by taking his time to get to an arrival pitch by going all around that pitch but never arriving there until it is time.

. Debussy wrote music his own way, he envisioned his style and brought it to an audio canvass for all of us to hear, feel, and most of all visualize. He set a path that really can not be followed by any one due to the fact that if you were to write as he did, you would only be known as a second rate Debussy. He used techniques which had been heard a long time ago, and incorporated them in as a new idiom. If he wanted time to stand still he would just incorporate a pedal tone, relatively easy concept to create incredible effect. His style of composition is his own, and the term Impressionism is his spotlight, to show his ingenious way of capturing your mind visually with his unique coloristic qualities of timbre. He has etched his name into musical history for eternity. Impression is easily defined with his name alone, and the nation of France proudly professes that Debussy is there own, and Debussy would have like it no other way. Debussy had the ability to make anyone see and feel his art with his unique style of composition.

It fuses words, and sounds, from beginning to end, and has evoked opera lovers from all over the world.

Debussy's had an extraordinary way of depicting his characters with sound. His ability to make the listener feel the rage and anger in Gouland character which is built on the deep timbre of his voice. The feeling of love is in Melisande voice but it is not for Gouland, but for Pelleas. Debussy's establishes Melisande beauty with his music; the New Grove Dictionary of Opera describes her beauty,

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