Where did Claude Debussy grow up and live?

📍2 Rue au Pain, 78100 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Île-de-France, France

1862 – 1918

“I was born Achille-Claude Debussy on the 22nd of August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town on the Seine west of Paris famous for its royal château and its forest. My father ran a china shop and my mother was a seamstress, and the family moved to Paris when I was four after financial difficulties. But the Saint-Germain childhood gave me the Seine landscape — the water, the light on water, the forests — that returned in my music throughout my life. La Mer, the Préludes, the Images — water and light and the natural world recur because they entered me before I had language. I studied at the Paris Conservatoire from age ten, won the Prix de Rome, went to Russia twice, heard Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and spent the rest of my life trying to capture sound's relationship to atmosphere.”

👍 LovedThe Seine landscape of Saint-Germain — the water and the light on water. The Paris Conservatoire's rigorous training that gave me the technique to break the rules effectively. The 1889 Exposition Universelle's gamelan music.

👎 DislikedThe poverty of the Paris years before success. The Conservatoire's conservatism that resisted everything I was trying to do. The cancer of my final decade.

Map showing where Claude Debussy lived — 2 Rue au Pain, 78100 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Île-de-France, France

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Claude Debussy's home at 2 Rue au Pain, 78100 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Île-de-France, France

📍 Street view today

Sources: Nichols, R. The Life of Debussy (1998), Cambridge University Press; Lockspeiser, E. Debussy: His Life and Mind (1962), Macmillan