The operas of Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) created a sensation in French musical circles during the 1890s. According to the critics, Le rêve (1891) and L'attaque du moulin (1893) offered the first truly French alternative to Wagnerian music drama. During the same period Claude Debussy began asserting his signature style in his first great works, such as Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), and Pelléas et Mélisande (although the opera premièred in 1902, the short score for a substantial portion of the work was written between 1893 and 1895). In this essay I compare the works of Bruneau and Debussy during this decisive decade, paying particular attention to their musical language and poetic associations: the tonal symbolism of F-sharp major and C major in the operas; the conjuring up of dream worlds through whole-tone scales; rhythmic organization (abrupt contrasts combined with the use of liquidation and motivic elimination); and the use of offstage voices to create a sense of distance and stereophonic effects. Richard Langham Smith and Jean-Christophe Branger have both sensitively explored the parallels between Bruneau and Debussy. As they concentrated primarily on the connections between Le rêve and Pelléas et Mélisande, I seek to broaden the discussion: first, by examining a larger group of works, and second, by situating them more precisely within the context of composition in contemporary French music circles. I do not want to minimize the aesthetic differences that distinguish Debussy from Bruneau, or to reduce the former to a slavish imitator of the latter. Still, for a young composer in the 1890s seeking to escape the temptations of Wagnerism, Bruneau's operas would have stood out on account of their success and originality; we should not dismiss a priori the possibility that Debussy was inspired by these works.

On a historiographical level, several studies have endeavored to contextualize Debussy's music in relation to composers and repertories that have since become canonic, such as Richard Wagner (1813–83) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), and the music of Java and other Far Eastern cultures presented at the 1889 Paris World's Fair.