Claude Debussy composed nineteen songs in all (they represent almost 1/3 of his total output) to texts by the poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96). It is possible to trace the composer's links with the Verlaine family to his childhood, and specifically to the piano lessons he received as a boy of ten from the poet's mother-in-law Antoinette-Flore Mauté de Fleurville. She coached him for the demanding entrance examinations of the Paris Conservatoire, and was the first to urge him to actively seek a career in music. Curiously, however, although the young Debussy must have met Verlaine from time to time during his studies, there is no record of any later meetings in the composer's adulthood, and yet Verlaine's influence on Debussy's creativity is quite unmistakable.

Verlaine's influence also extended to Gabriel Fauré, and it is interesting to contrast respective settings of the same poems, "En Sourdine" and "Clair de lune" by each composer, to evaluate their differing approaches to accompaniment, melody, and harmonic treatment. In the poem "Votre âme est un paysage choisi" ("Your soul is a chosen landscape"), the first line of the song "Clair de lune", Verlaine invites the listener or reader to watch a troupe of Commedia del'arte players, who try to convince us that illusion is in fact reality, reasoning that the soul is the best proving ground for the attempt. The text, with its references to maskers singing of love, moonlight, and ecstasy to the accompaniment of the lute, "sets the birds to dreaming and makes the fountains sob."

Debussy himself made two settings of the poem, the first in 1892 and the second exactly a decade later. As Arthur B. Wenk shows in his book Debussy and the Poets, "the latter piece was supposedly a revision of the first, though it is in fact a completely new song, affording a completely new interpretation of the original poem. Debussy's first setting gives Verlaine's lines a generally optimistic, luminous atmosphere, established by cascading triads and the predominating major mode of the piano accompaniment."

By contrast, the later version is altogether darker and more somber in color than its predecessor, with heavier dependence upon the minor mode, even to the extend of starting out with a D sharp minor pentatonic scale. Interestingly, Fauré's setting casts another, and very different perspective on Verlaine's text, dominated by the songs of the maskers themselves, with an accompaniment in minuet style. Each of the respective versions still manages to capture the enigmatic, whimsical and fleeting atmosphere of the poet's imagination, and as Arthur B. Wenk suggests, in Debussy's case, particularly in his earliest setting, "the association of accompanimental motives with moonlight and fountains brings to mind an idea which applies even more strongly in some of the other Verlaine settings. This is Debussy's habit of letting the piano represent nature."

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