French composer and pianist Claude Debussy was BOTD in 1862. Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, he grew up in poverty in suburban Paris. In 1872, aged 10, he entered the Conservatoire de Paris where he studied piano and composition, and secured the patronage of Russian heiress Nadezhda von Meck. He rose to public attention in 1884, winning the Grand Prix de Rome with his cantata L’Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Child) and earning a three-year residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. His 1885 piano Suite bergamasque, featuring Claire de lune (Moonlight), showcased his lyrical sensibility and deceptively simple compositional style, becoming one of his most beloved pieces. After two years, he returned to Paris, socialising with fellow composers Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla, and ploughing through a series of mistresses before marrying Marie-Rosalie “Lilly” Texier. He developed an innovative approach to harmony and musical structure, breaking from 19th century musical traditions to create what he called “symphonic sketches”. Much of his work was inspired by the paintings of Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet, though he rejected any classification of his own work as “Impressionism”. Fascinated by the Gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, he strove to locate hidden dream states in his work, best expressed in his 1984 symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) and his 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande. In 1903, he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. His reputation crashed spectacularly the following year, when he began an affair with Emma Bardac, the wife of a Parisian banker and the mother of one of his music pupils. When Emma became pregnant, he abandoned Lilly, who subsequently attempted suicide. To escape the resulting scandal, Debussy and Emma moved to England, settling at a seaside hotel in Eastbourne, where Emma gave birth to their daughter. The coastal setting and his new role as a father inspired some of his best-known compositions, including La Mer (The Sea), and Le Coin des enfants (Children’s Corner). They returned to Paris in 1905, where Debussy was invited to join the governing council of the Conservatoire. He received a number of high-profile commissions, including composing the musical mystery play Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian), created with Gabriel D’Annunzio and choreographer Mikhail Fokine. Following the success of the Ballets Russes’ ballet set to L’après-midi d’un faune, company director Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Debussy to compose the 1913 ballet Jeux, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. In his final works, the piano pieces En blanc et noir (In Black and White) and Douze Études (Twelve Etudes), he pushed his music further towards abstraction, prompting his arch-rival Camille Saint-Saëns to write “the door of the Institut [de France] must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities.” Debussy died of cancer in 1918, aged 44. Now considered one of the most significant composers of the 20th century, his work influenced musical Modernists including Stravinsky, Ravel, Bela Bartók, Leoš Janáček, Olivier Messiaen and John Adams, and jazz musician Bill Evans. He was played as a heterosexual horndog by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell‘s 1965 TV docudrama The Debussy Film. Biographers and music historians have speculated that Debussy may have been bisexual, pointing to his decadent lifestyle and coterie of homosexual friends, including his long-term patron Edmond de Polignac.