The Los Angeles Opera is staging Debussy’s only complete opera, Pélleas et Mélisande. A masterful response to the stylistic gauntlet thrown down by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Debussy’s Pélleas sets to music the Symbolist play of Maurice Maeterlinck—another take on the “star-crossed-lovers” theme. I’ll be looking specifically at the many influences that helped to shape Debussy’s unique, modernist musical language from the music of the Wagner to the avant-garde (and anti-German) model of Erik Satie, from the colorful harmonies and orchestrations of the Russian Five to the unfamiliar sounds from Asia that he heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition.