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Musical Impressionism is the name given to a movement that arose in the late 19th century and continued into the middle of the 20th century.
Originating in France, musical Impressionism is characterized by suggestion and atmosphere, and eschews the emotional excesses of the
Romantic era .
Impressionist composers favoured short forms such as the nocturne , arabesque, and prelude , and often explored uncommon scales such as the whole tone scale .
Perhaps the most notable innovations used by Impressionist composers were the first uses of major 7th chords and the extension of chord structures in 3rds to five and six part harmonies.

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Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colours, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugène Delacroix . They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the modern world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors.
[1] The
Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air . Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they portrayed overall visual effects instead of details. They used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour, not smoothly blended or shaded, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense colour vibration.

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Monet
Manet
Pissaro
Renoir
Sisley

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Post-Impressionism developed from Impressionism. From the 1880s several artists began to develop different precepts for the use of colour, pattern, form, and line, derived from the Impressionist example: Vincent van Gogh , Paul
Gauguin , Georges Seurat , and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec .
These artists were slightly younger than the Impressionists, and their work is known as post-Impressionism. Some of the original Impressionist artists also ventured into this new territory; Camille Pissarro briefly painted in a pointillist manner, and even Monet abandoned strict plein air painting.
Paul Cézanne , who participated in the first and third
Impressionist exhibitions, developed a highly individual vision emphasising pictorial structure, and he is more often called a post-Impressionist

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Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning.
Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism , anti-idealistic movements which attempted to capture reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. These movements invited a reaction in favour of spirituality , the imagination , and dreams; the path to symbolism began with that reaction

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The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for
"fluidity”.
Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul .
Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour.

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In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences, which also speaks tellingly of forêts de symboles — forests of symbols —
Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
(There are perfumes that are fresh like children's flesh, sweet like oboes, green like meadows
— And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, having the expansiveness of infinite things, like amber, musc, benzoin, and incense, which sing of the raptures of the soul and senses.)

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The symbolist aesthetic had a deep impact on the works of Claude Debussy . His choices of libretti , texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the symbolist canon. Compositions such as his settings of
Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera Pelléas et Mélisande with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck , and his unfinished sketches that illustrate two Edgar Allen Poe stories, The
Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher , all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by symbolist themes and tastes. His best known work, the
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , was inspired by
Mallarmé's poem, L'après-midi d'un faune .

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Mallarmé's mature style anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the next century.
Most of this later work explored the relationship between content and form, between the text and the arrangement of words and spaces on the page.
Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English .
The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry. When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page.
For example, Mallarmé's Sonnet en '-yx' opens with the phrase ses
purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the ' pure sound ' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions.
These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.

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Richard Wagner that have had such a profound influence on the artistic and intellectual life of
France. His Romanticism influenced the French symbolists so greatly that they named their major journal La Revue Wagnerians. His musical themes, dramatic structures and philosophical tropes recurred in the works of almost every major French composer before
World war One.

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Wagner's musical vocabulary and orchestration tantalized the French. It was de rigeur for French artists and intellectuals to make their pilgrimage to
Bayreuth and there they could listen, be overwhelmed and scrutinize all of the
Wagner canon. Those that went had a life changing experience in one way or another but when they came back the French musical language particularly in opera was imbued with deeper chromaticism and a wider vocabulary of modulation. These traits are seen famously in Massenet who rivals and critics termed "Mademoiselle Wagner.”
Perhaps the most famous innovation that Wagner is associated with is the leitmotiv technique. The idea of unifying a work through flexible interwoven motives provided a way out of the "number opera" approach that was inherited from the Classical Period. If there was one outstanding reason that made Wagner the most compelling influence of his time it was his acute awareness of the problem confronting Romantic Opera in the latter half of the
19th Century: How to free opera from its dependence on easily recognizable and limiting structural forms, arias, duets, ensembles and recitative, and replace it with a more flexible yet recognizable system based on the drama of the story as opposed to the structure of the music. The problem preoccupied most composers of the time, but Wagner was public and prolific about it and his solutions were the ones that were disseminated.