The painter Cezanne once famously derided Monet, writing "he is nothing but an eye," and as many have suggested concerning Claude Debussy and his equally original musical language, it could be said of him with some justification that "he was nothing but an ear." And it is interesting to find the germinal spirit of Debussy's particular form of musical Impressionism already taking shape palpably within a number of his earliest works, not least his piano pieces written before the end of the nineteenth century. Debussy himself once remarked that "every sound you hear can be reproduced. Everything that the keen ear perceives in the rhythm of the surrounding world can be represented musically. To some people, rules are of primary importance. But my desire is to reproduce only what I hear."

At first of course, it was probably inevitable that cross-currents of inspiration should become entangled, and so in certain cases, as with Debussy's Ballade slave of 1890, the music doesn't always seem to quite match the impressions it actually arouses. Sometimes, he later changed the titles of pieces hoping this might reduce ambiguities, though often revised designations seemed to have little in common with the actual musical content. That is certainly true of Debussy's Ballade slave, published in 1903 in a version for solo piano. Curiously, however, as Frank Dawes shows, "the qualifying adjective was dropped only when the piece was reissued in 1903. That adjective, however, gives us a clue to the character of the piece, and the kind of influences that went into its making." And at this point, in 1903, when the work became known simply as "Ballade," a version for piano, four hands was also offered for sale by Debussy's publishers. Although the work is almost totally monothematic, and also features much repetition of the basic motifs, it is tangibly Russian in character, and remarkably for Debussy, it is also constructed around the principles of variation technique. But as Frank Dawes concludes, "despite the Russian flavour of the theme, the pianistic lay-out more often recalls the early style of Fauré, though there is a hint of Debussy's great sea music in the section marked 'animez peu à peu', with its wide-flung left hand arpeggios."

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