A tour of Europe in a few strokes

“When you can’t afford to travel, you have to make up for it with your imagination,” wrote Claude Debussy in 1903, when he was working on his piano work Estampes. Indeed, for a composer, no extensive knowledge of a country is really needed in order portray it through his music. Exoticism in the works of French composers was often inspired by snippets of information gleaned from the World Fairs (the Expositions Universelles) and from drawings and photographs, or from globe-trotters’ accounts of their travels. And thus, combining these with their own personal, Romantic or Symbolist, world, they transported their listeners to fabulous destinations.