Debussy, before other serious composers, began to use new dances and music-hall rhythms in his work. According to I. V. Nesteev: "This is one of the first attempts to embody in a serious genre the infectious element of Negro dance and everyday music of the pre-jazzˮ period.
This number is also known for the deliberate quotation in the middle section of the love theme (tristan chord) from R. Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. Having become a kind of Wagnerian slogan in its time, this motif in Debussy sounds like a witty joke.
The theme from Tristan, accompanied by the author's remark “with great feeling”, appears surrounded by chords that seem to imitate laughter. It is well known that Debussy had previously been a great admirer of Wagner's music, but later grew cold to it, a fact he repeatedly expressed in his critical articles and interviews. According to popular legend, Debussy told the pianist Harold Bauer (an ardent Wagnerian) that he could make him laugh at Wagner in public. Bauer was utterly bewildered, but after playing the suite, Debussy pointed out to the pianist fragments from “A Doll's Cack-Walk”, where a quotation of a motif from “Tristan und Isolde” is followed by music imitating laughter. As Kremlev Y. A. notes, this legend is reported by N. L. Slonimsky in his book “The road to music” (The road to music): “and we must admit that it agrees well with our ideas about Debussy's humor in general.” According to another version, the composer said nothing to Bauer about the Wagner quote and he learned about it from musicological literature in the 1930s.
Debussy recorded “Puppet Cac-uoc” in his own performance on a Pleyel mechanical piano tape.