Although Ernest Chausson may not have been a direct link between Franck and Debussy, he left a small but vital output whose formal intricacy and harmonic richness influenced future generations of French composers. Born into a wealthy Parisian family in 1855, he was in his mid-twenties before he studied composition with Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire, though his early songs confirm an acute musical sensitivity. In the early 1890s he completed three of his finest works: the song cycle Poème de l’amour et de la mer, Symphony in B flat, and The Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet, each combining structural breadth with an emotional fatalism evident throughout his maturity. His only opera, Le roi Arthus (1895), was audibly influenced by Wagner but unstaged in Chausson’s lifetime, while the languorous Poème (1896), written for violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, remains his most-played piece. Chausson had almost completed his String Quartet when a cycling accident at Limay caused his death in 1899.