In the second movement, Debussy quoted Luther's hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" as a symbol of militant Lutheran Germany.

The three movements were dedicated respectively to three people: Serge Koussevitzky, Jacques Charlot (an associate of Debussy's publisher who was killed in the war), and Igor Stravinsky.

In the second movement, he quoted Martin Luther's hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", known in English as "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God", as a reference to Lutheran Germany.

[4] In a letter dated 22 July 1915, Debussy wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand, shortly before offering him the composition, that he thought that the "Austro-Boches" were on their last legs[a] and that the French soul would always remain clear and heroic.

The composer and Jean Roger-Ducasse performed the work for the first time under its shortened title on 21 December 1916 at another charity benefit (for prisoners of war) in the Paris home of Madame Georges Guiard.

[7][8] Conservative romantic Camille Saint-Saëns, complaining about the style of the music, condemned the work, saying "We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut [de France] against a man capable of such atrocities; they should be put next to the cubist pictures.

[c] The German hymn "Ein feste Burg" by Martin Luther is quoted in the foreground, with a focus on its military aspect, while the French Marseillaise appears almost hidden.

Dedicated to Igor Stravinsky, another musician from Russia, the movement is prefaced by a quote from another 15th-century poet, Charles of Orléans: "Yver, vous n'estes qu'un vilain" (Winter, you are nothing but a villain).

[3] Pianists Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss played En blanc et noir as the final work in a recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 31 May 2008, which also included Schubert's Allegro in A minor, Debussy's arrangement of Schumann's Canons for pedal-piano, Beethoven's transcription of the Große Fuge and Stravinsky's Agon.

[2] En blanc et noir has been regarded as a subtle comment on the historical condition through literary and musical allusion, under the sparkling surface of brilliant pianistic artistry,[e] making it a key work of 1915.