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Debussy’s Jeux
With its premiere on 15 May 1913, Debussy’s music for Jeux is in many ways just as revolutionary as Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring.
Starting to show his move away from his earlier works, almost a reaction against the ‘impressionist’ style just a year after L’après-midi d’un faune - perhaps the work now lauded as one of the clearest depictions of the genre. However, despite Debussy’s notably different harmonic language in Jeux, with notable absence of the familiar whole tone scale from his earlier works, this new style had no chance to further develop in an orchestral setting, with this being his last specifically-orchestral work before his death in 1918.