Claude Debussy did not have an easy childhood. His father was a travelling salesman and his mother worked as a seamstress. He learned the piano when he was young and was inducted into the Paris Conservatoire at age 11. For a time it seemed that he would become a concert pianist, but he did not do well enough in his examination. After winning an important prize, the Prix de Rome, he went to Rome for two years but he did not enjoy it. He visited Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889 to hear Wagner’s operas but he did not like them. He preferred sounds like that of the Javanese gamelan which he heard in Paris at the World Exhibition.