When Maurice Emmanuel published his analysis of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1926, he provided the public with the first serious study of this work, the premiere of which, in 1902, had had a lasting impact on an entire generation. As he himself admitted, he never was close to Debussy; yet, in his youth, he had had contacts with him at the Conservatoire. A meticulous observer, he kept from that period a set of detailed notes on the ideas and viewpoints of the "troublemaker" who, had the time, called himself Achille Debussy. Emmanuel's analysis is essentially based on the theory of a dualism between Debussy's command, from his earliest years, of a new musical language, as he had witnessed at the time when he improvised, and the less audacious works that preceded Pelléas, notably his Rome cantata, L'Enfant prodigue. Challenged first by Saint-Saëns, who questioned his taste for Debussy's art, then by Paul Landormy, Emmanuel justified his testimony by his own modal experiments as a composer, which caused him to be expelled from the Conservatoire and to become acquainted with Debussy, then auditing Ernest Guiraud's class. Beside his historical and musicological approach, Emmanuel examines dispassionately Debussy's oeuvre through the difficult, painful history of the failures of his early career as a composer. This article is completed by two appendiced: the first gathers three documents on the polemical exchange between Camille Saint-Saëns and Emmanuel; the second contains three letters between Emmanuel and Charles Koechlin concerning his theories on Debussy's early works.

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