Claude Debussy wrote La Belle au bois dormant, for voice and piano, L. 74 at some point around 1880. Its text is by E. V. Hyspa and it is a good example of the composer's work when still a student, still finding his own artistic voice. Debussy had found himself in the service of Nadezhda von Meek, an eccentric Russian patron who brought him into realms of learning and life experience that would be of decisive importance throughout the rest of his life. The song La Belle au bois dormant (sleeping beauty) is not a masterpiece, but it does display certain qualities of aesthetic character that would be continually refined throughout his musical career.

Debussy had an uneven scholastic career, with highs and lows and a considerable amount of good luck. Certain instructors inside the Conservatoire disliked his blunt opinions, which flew freely in the face of academic protocol. During 1878 and 1879 he won no prizes in the requisite music competitions, which disqualified him from competing further. However, in 1879 an instructor named Marmontel got the seventeen-year-old student a job playing piano for the mistress of the president of France, Jules Grévy. From there Debussy moved on the entourage of Mme. von Meck, Tchaikovsky's patron in 1880. For an awkward teenager, Debussy proved himself to be an apt courtier, praising the music of Tchaikovsky to gain further favor with von Meck, and declaring a musical alliance between French and Russian composers. Her response was to have the lad travel with her to Moscow, Naples, Rome, and Vienna. Von Meck had no carnal designs on the talented lad, but his Romantic exploits during these journeys suggest a talent for wooing that would hold sway over his judgment throughout his life. By this time, all his interest in becoming a concert pianist was dashed in favor of a career as a composer.

His amorous talents became developed during his time with von Meck, and works such as La Belle au bois dormant demonstrate a luxuriant warmth that accommodates the atmosphere of seduction. The subject of the song is a woman dreaming of a brave and agreeable knight. There is a clear recognition of female sensuality in the poem, as the sleeping woman dreams of an ideal male; most people want their appetites recognized and celebrated, and women's desires were not frequently explored with such generosity in the 1880s. She is not the cause of male recklessness or frustration, nor is she in any way feeling discomfort in her desirous dreams. Debussy's decision to set this particular poem demonstrates laudable insight for a teenaged male. The setting of the song is not especially original, but the dreamscape he provides for the sleeping beauty honors the reposed subject with a direct melodic line does that suggests a clear, non-neurotic relationship to the her feelings for the anonymous knight. There is nothing in the music that patronizes the dreamer. Occasionally the accompaniment carries with it understated heroic themes and depictions of knight's steed in gallop, so that he does not remain abstract but rather a palpable love object. Not only is the text's setting compassionate, it is vivid.

The fantasy element of the poem also factored heavily in Debussy's later output. His preoccupation with puppets and other objects of interest to children, such as the subject matter of his piano suite Children's Corner, became as developed a part of his musical vocabulary as his eroticism. Often, these two streams of interest, fantasy and sensuality, came together in his more Pagan-oriented works from the turn of the century.

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