"Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien is a masterpiece that has not yet been understood. Debussy wrote his Parsifal that day." Thus opined Emile Vuillermoz in 1920 of Debussy's score for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, composed in 1911 as incidental music for the miracle play of the same title by Gabrielle d'Annunzio. Edward Lockspeiser describes it as "incidental music of a special kind, rather like the music in the medieval mystery and nativity plays that were enacted in churches ... it brings into relief the lament of the twin brothers, Marc and Marcellien, before the miracle, the weeping of the women of Byblos at the death of their Adonis, and Sébastien's ecstatic dance on the burning coals. There is a prelude to each of the five acts and numerous orchestral and choral interludes."

The work was commissioned by the dancer and choreographer Ida Rubinstein, who took the title role at the first performance on May 22, 1911, at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Le Martyre was heavily censured. Even the Bishop of Paris publicly denounced the portrayal of religious subject matter on stage, though many secular critics found Debussy's attempts at writing quasi-sacred music, possibly in the mold of Wagner's "sacred" music drama Parsifal, as distasteful as it had been ill-advised. Debussy himself quickly rallied to his own defense, and wrote: "Is it not obvious that a man who sees mystery in everything will inevitably be attracted to a religious subject? Even if I am not a practicing Catholic and not a believer, it did not cost me much effort to rise to the mystical heights which the poet's drama attains."

But did he rise to those heights? All the evidence points to this score having been written in great haste (Rubinstein had requested it for immediate production), and most of the work was left to the conductor and Debussy disciple André Caplet to orchestrate. Debussy, moreover, was ill at the time, and just weeks before the premiere, he wrote to the publisher Durand, "I tell you, I'm at the end of my tether."

The 1911 production was not well received, partly because it offended the scruples of Catholic zealots, but also because of the inevitable polarities which arise when a Frenchman sets an Italian poet's text, and the production features scenery by a Russian, Léon Bakst, one of Diaghilev's acolytes. Debussy later revised the work, and it has been successfully performed as an oratorio, in which relevant portions of d'Annunzio's play were chosen by Roland Manuel, and used to introduce a series of vocal and orchestral interludes. A further version also exists, in which Caplet took five movements of the original score and reworked them as an orchestral suite.

Following early protests, d'Annunzio and Debussy issued a joint statement aimed at clarifying the objectives of Le Martyre, which was described as "the lyrical glorification not only of the splendid Christian athlete (of the title) but of all Christian heroism." As Lockspeiser concludes, "[t]he confusion between Christian and pagan virtues arising from the identification in the play of Christ and Adonis provoked an enraged onslaught ... it may be argued, however, that Debussy had an equally profound conception of divinity exemplified in Le Martyre itself, and aptly described as the work of a pagan musician who sees God in all things."

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