With the three movements Pagodes, La soirée dans Grenade (An evening in Granada) und Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the rain) Debussy creates a poetic world of landscapes and distant lands in the cycle Estampes. He composed the pieces in summer 1903 while he was staying in Bichain in the north of Burgundy. As he wrote in a letter at the time: “If one cannot afford to travel, one substitutes the imagination.” In the virtuosic final movement he draws on his pioneering Images from the year 1894 (HN 846).
