For Élodie Vignon, the decision to record Debussy's complete piano works in chronological order was born of what the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune was in Debussy's day: a revelation! For her, playing this music is like entering a cocoon that belongs to you alone.

This first volume (generous with 2 CDs) of the three that will make up the complete works, naturally begins with Debussy's early works, pieces directly inspired by poems by Mallarmé and Verlaine and which embrace the mysterious dimension of the sensory imagination. In the years that followed, he increasingly freed music from the polarisation exerted by the tonal note, keeping the sound space open and ultimately initiating spectral music.

Debussy liked to draw inspiration from memories when composing, in order to maintain a distance between his own emotions and those he wished to arouse in the listener. Alfred Cortot spoke of evoking sensations rather than feelings, thus rejecting the late-Romantic aesthetic of emotional identification between composer and listener: an obligation that seemed too constraining to Debussy to be able to give rise to an open dialogue with the listeners of his work.

Giving the impression of being invented as it is played, Debussy's music invites us to dream, to better understand the complexity of the world.