So was Debussy an Impressionist? In his authoritative entry on Debussy for the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the French musicologist François Lesure strongly argues no. He places Debussy in the Symbolist movement in French literature and arts, which thrived for about a dozen years starting in 1885. It’s an aesthetic Debussy characterized, Lesure writes, by “rejection of naturalism, of realism and of overly clear-cut forms, hatred of emphasis, indifference to the public and a taste for the indefinite, the mysterious, even the esoteric.“
 
Bron: nytimes.com