L'isle joyeuse

L'isle joyeuse, L. 106 (The Joyful Island) is a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy composed in 1904.

It is assumed that the painting The Embarkation for Cythera by Jean-Antoine Watteau served as inspiration for the piece, with Debussy reimagining a group's journey to the island considered Aphrodite's birthplace, and their subsequent ecstatic unions of love upon arrival.

[1] According to Jim Samson (1977), the "central relationship in the work is that between material based on the whole-tone scale, the lydian mode and the diatonic scale, the lydian mode functioning as an effective mediator between the other two."

The other transposition of the whole tone scale, avoided in the outer sections, is used and provides further harmonic contrast.

The second subject appears in pure A major, the "ultimate tonal goal of the piece".