His prize entitled him to three years' residence at the Villa Medici in Rome to give him the opportunity to compose. But he was deeply unhappy there, and returned to Paris after only two years.
Paris in the late 1880s and 1890s was a ferment of new musical, literary and artistic ideas. In his native city, Debussy absorbed many disparate influences, including the exotic sounds of a Javanese Gamelan ensemble that he heard at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889;...