After Richard Wagner's visit to Paris in 1860, a veritable Wagner cult developed among the French cultural elite. The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the cult's leading lights, and this perhaps explains why Claude-Achille Debussy's (1862-1918) settings of Beaudelaire's poems are among his most 'Wagnerian' works. The atmosphere of raffinement which permeates Baudelaire's poetry is well matched to Wagner's dense, pregnant harmonic world. Debussy wrote these five songs between 1887 and 1889 at a time when he was very under the influence of Wagner. In 1888 and 1889 he attended all the performances at Bayreuth. This Wagnerian fever did not last long. When he attended the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 he encountered non-European music, and it was the Javanese gamelan bands that opened his eyes to a new world of harmony. Debussy then rapidly turned his back on Wagner's hitherto idolised chromaticism. The song that opens the cycle, Le Balcon, is one of Debussy most involved songs, and it is perhaps its grandiose scale that makes us suspect Wagner's influence. Harmonie du soir is interesting because of the way the music evokes the verse form built on the repetition of lines (in the text the lines of the four line strophes 2 and 4 appear again as the lines 1 and 3 in the succeeding strophe.) In the music of Le jet d'eau, Debussy renounces obvious Wagnerianism, perhaps inspired by the visual image of the water jets, and there is an almost complete absence of dense inner chromatic lines. It is hardly surprising that two decades later in 1907, Debussy still felt this song worthy of his attention, and he produced a version for orchestra alone. The fourth piece in the cycle, Recueillement, again inclines towards Wagner, although the musicologist Imre Fábrian also detects the influence of Liszt's church music. The closing song La mort des amants was actually the first to be written (in 1887, before his visit to Bayreuth), and he noted that “there could hardly be anything more Tristanesque.” The five Baudelaire songs represent an important step in the development of the French mélodie art song (as opposed to chanson), with their assimilation of the German vocal tradition. Gabriel Fauré hailed them as the first masterpieces of this genre.