Short answers, pulled from the story.
Debussy's first major international success was the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on the 30th of April 1902 when he was nearly 40 years old. The Times reported that it had provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting those of Richard Strauss.
Claude Debussy was born on the 22nd of August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise, on the north-west fringes of Paris. He was the eldest of five children; his father ran a china shop and his mother was a seamstress.
Debussy strongly objected to the term Impressionist as applied to his music, stating that anyone who used it was an imbecile. He described his artistic inspiration not in painterly terms but in relation to nature, and in a 1911 interview he declared that he had made mysterious nature his religion.
Debussy's influence extended to Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin, and the jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans, among many others. Roger Nichols wrote that a list of 20th-century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th-century composers altogether.
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is an orchestral work Debussy completed in 1894, based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have regarded it as his first orchestral masterpiece, and Pierre Boulez stated that it was the work that awakened modern music.
Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889. The gamelan's scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him and can be heard in his piano suite Estampes, particularly in "Pagodes", and in the pizzicatos and cross-rhythms of his 1893 String Quartet.
Debussy died of colon cancer on the 25th of March 1918 at his home in Paris, aged 55. Paris was under German aerial and artillery bombardment at the time; the funeral procession passed through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery. He was later reinterred at the Passy Cemetery, fulfilling his wish to rest among the trees and the birds.