Despite my respect for Saint-Saëns’ age, what he says about Chopin’s pedalling isn’t entirely true. I have very clear memories of what Mme Mauté de Fleurville told me. He (Chopin) recommended practising without pedal and, in performance, not holding it on except in very rare instances. It was the same way of turning the pedal into a kind of breathing which I observed in Liszt when I had the chance to hear him in Rome. I feel Saint-Saëns forgets that pianists are poor musicians, for the most part, and cut music up into unequal lumps, like a chicken. The plain truth perhaps is that abusing the pedal is only a means of covering up a lack of technique, and that making a lot of noise is a way to drown the music you’re slaughtering! In theory we should be able to find a graphic means of representing this ‘breathing’ pedal…it wouldn’t be impossible. Come to think of it, isn’t there a work on the subject by Mme Marie Jaëll, who was severe in the matter of piano technique?

— Debussy, in a letter to Durand, 1.9.1915.

F. Lesure & N. Nichols (ed.), Debussy Letters, London, Faber, 1987, p. 301.