Claude Debussy celebrated with a Google Doodle

Google has marked the 151st anniversary of the birth of the composer Claude Debussy with a musical “doodle”. 

Visitors to the home page of the search engine are today greeted with an animated, moonlit scene of an old-fashioned street.

Set to Clair de Lune, one of the Frenchman’s most celebrated pieces, streetlights and house lights flicker on and off while cars and boats glide serenely by.

The Google Doodle ends as two boats cross paths and their occupants share a red umbrella beneath the falling rain.

Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and died on March 25, 1918, in Paris.

One of his country’s best known composers, he developed a new system of harmony and musical structure that in many ways reflected the ideals the contemporary Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers espoused.

But he rejected the label “impressionist,” insisting on one occasion: “I am trying to do 'something different'...what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics.”

Besides Clair de lune, his other best known works include Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, from 1894, the 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and La Mer, from 1905.

The title Clair de lune, which means moonlight, refers to a folk song that was used as the traditional accompaniment to scenes of the love-sick Pierrot character in the French pantomime.

The piece forms the third movement of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, which dates from 1890 to1905.

The composer had a series of high profile love affairs and left his wife, Rosalie Texier, for a woman called Emma Bardac.

He was diagnosed with cancer in 1909.