| La mer | |
|---|---|
| byClaude Debussy | |
 The first edition ofLa mer, featuringThe Great Wave off Kanagawa | |
| English | "The sea" |
| Catalogue | L. 109 |
| Genre | Impressionism |
| Composed | August 1903 – 5 March 1905 |
| Premiere | |
| Date | 15 October 1905; 120 years ago (1905-10-15) |
| Conductor | Camille Chevillard |
| Performers | Orchestre Lamoureux |
La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (French forThe sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), or simplyLa mer (The Sea),L. 109, CD. 111, is an orchestral composition by the French composerClaude Debussy.
Composed between 1903 and 1905, the piece premiered in Paris in October 1905. It was initially not well-received; even some who had been strong supporters of Debussy's work were unenthusiastic, even thoughLa mer presented three key aspects of Debussy's aesthetic:Impressionism,Symbolism andJaponism.[1] The work was performed in the US in 1907 and Britain in 1908; after its second performance in Paris in 1908, it quickly became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works.
The first audio recording of the work was made in 1928. Since then, orchestras and conductors from around the world have set it down in many studio or live concert recordings.
La mer was the second of Debussy's three orchestral works in three sections, the other beingNocturnes (1892–1899) andImages pour orchestre (1905–1912). The first, theNocturnes, premiered in Paris in 1901 and though it had not made any great impact on the public, it was well-reviewed by musicians includingPaul Dukas,Alfred Bruneau andPierre de Bréville.[2][n 1] Debussy conceived the idea of a more complex tripartite orchestral piece and began work in August 1903.[4] He began composing the work while visiting his parents-in-law inBurgundy; by the time it was complete, he had left his wife and was living withEmma Bardac, who was pregnant with Debussy's child.[4]
Debussy retained fond childhood memories of the beauties of the sea but when composingLa mer, he rarely visited it, spending most of his time far away from large bodies of water. He drew inspiration from art, "preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature" to the physical sea.[5] Although the detailed scheme of the work changed during its composition, Debussy decided from the outset that it was to be "three symphonic sketches" with the titleLa mer. In a letter toAndré Messager, he described the planned sections as "Mère belle aux Îles Sanguinaires", "Jeu de vagues", and "Le vent fait danser la mer".[6][n 2] The first of these, inspired by a short story of the same name byCamille Mauclair,[7] was abandoned in favour of a less restrictive theme, the sea from dawn to midday. The last was also dropped as it was too reminiscent of ballet and the less specific theme of the dialogue between the wind and the sea took its place.[8]
Debussy completedLa mer on 5 March 1905[9] and took the proofs to correct on holiday at theGrand Hotel inEastbourne on theEnglish Channel coast when he went there on 23 July 1905; he described Eastbourne to his publisher,Durand, as "a charming peaceful spot: the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness".[10] He arranged the piece for piano four hands in 1905;[11] in 1909, Durand published a second edition ofLa mer with the composer's revisions.[12]
La mer is scored for 2flutes,piccolo, 2oboes,cor anglais, 2clarinets in A, 3bassoons,contrabassoon, 4French horns, 3trumpets in F, 2cornets in C (3rd movement only), 3trombones,tuba,timpani,bass drum,cymbals,triangle,tam tam,glockenspiel, 2harps andstrings.[13]
A typical performance of the piece lasts about 23 or 24 minutes.[n 3] It is in three movements:
The titles are usually translated as:
Debussy calledLa mer "three symphonic sketches," deliberately avoiding the termsymphony.[16] Simon Trezise, in his 1994 bookDebussy: La Mer, comments: "He had not composed an orthodox symphony, but neither did he wantLa mer to be known as a symphonic poem ... [and by calling it] 'Three symphonic sketches' ... [Debussy] must have felt that he had deftly avoided association with either genre".[16] The work has sometimes been called a symphony, including by Debussy himself.[17] It consists of two powerful outer movements framing a lighter, faster piece which acts as a type ofscherzo.Jean Barraqué describedLa mer as the first work to have an "open" form – adevenirsonore or "sonorous becoming... a developmental process in which the very notions of exposition and development coexist in an uninterrupted burst". Trezise says "motifs are constantly propagated by derivation from earlier motifs".[18]
Trezise writes that "for much ofLa Mer, Debussy spurns the more obvious devices associated with the sea, wind, and concomitant storm in favour of his own, highly individual vocabulary".[19] Caroline Potter, inThe Cambridge Companion to Debussy, comments that Debussy's depiction of the sea "avoids monotony by using a multitude of water figurations that could be classified as musicalonomatopoeia: they evoke the sensation of swaying movement of waves and suggest the pitter-patter of falling droplets of spray" (and so forth), and–significantly–avoid thearpeggiated triads used bySchubert andWagner to evoke the movement of water.[20] InThe Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Mark DeVoto describesLa mer as "much more complex than anythingDebussy had written earlier", particularly theNocturnes:
…the phrases are more freely shaped and more smoothly blended from one to the next. Timbral and textural changes, with spare and widely spaced textures and abundant instrumental solos, occur in La mer more frequently than in 'Sirenes', often with dizzying rapidity.[21]
The author, musicologist and pianistRoy Howat has observed, in his bookDebussy in Proportion, that the formal boundaries ofLa mer correspond exactly to the mathematical ratios called theGolden Section.[22] Trezise finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", but cautions that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy consciously sought such proportions.[23]
The premiere was given on 15 October 1905 in Paris by theOrchestre Lamoureux under the direction ofCamille Chevillard.[11] The piece was initially not well received.Pierre Lalo, critic ofLe Temps, hitherto an admirer of Debussy's work, wrote: "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea".[24][n 4] Another Parisian critic, Louis Schneider, wrote, "The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer".[25] When the conductorKarl Muck gave the first American performances ofLa mer in March 1907,[26] the criticHenry Krehbiel wrote:
Last night's concert began with a lot of impressionistic daubs of color smeared higgledy-piggledy on a tonal palette, with never a thought of form or purpose except to create new combinations of sounds. … One thing only was certain, and that was that the composer's ocean was a frog-pond and that some of its denizens had got into the throat of every one of the brass instruments.[27][n 5]
The work was not performed in Britain until 1908, when the composer – though a reluctant conductor[n 6] – gave a performance at theQueen's Hall; the work was enthusiastically reviewed inThe Times,[30] butThe Observer thought it lacked "real force of elemental strength".[31]The Manchester Guardian thought the work an advance on Debussy's earlier work in some respects, although "the vagueness of thematic outline is carried to hitherto unheard-of lengths", and found "moments of great beauty" in the work.[32]The Musical Times reserved judgment but noted that the audience had been highly enthusiastic.[33] Debussy commented that his music was more popular in London than in Paris.[34]
One reason for the negative reception at the Paris premiere may have been public disapproval of Debussy's treatment of his wife,[35] but another was the mediocre performance by the conductor and orchestra. Chevillard was a respected interpreter of the classics, but was not at home with new music.[36] It was not until 1908, at the second performance of the work in Paris (conducted by the composer) thatLa mer became a success with the public. Trezise records that at the time, many felt the 1908 concert presented the real first performance of the piece.[37]
Although some of Debussy's contemporaries drew analogies betweenLa mer andFrench Impressionist paintings, much to the composer's irritation, others have detected the influence of his admiration for the English painterJ. M. W. Turner and Debussy's choice ofHokusai's c. 1831 woodblock printThe Great Wave off Kanagawa for the cover of the printed score indicates the influence of Japanese art on him.[5][38] Despite Debussy's scorn for the term "impressionism" applied to his or anyone else's music,[39] a matter on which he andRavel were of the same firm opinion,[40] the term was used by some of his most devoted admirers. His biographerEdward Lockspeiser calledLa mer "the greatest example of an orchestral Impressionist work"[41] and more recently, inThe Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Nigel Simeone commented, "It does not seem unduly far-fetched to see a parallel inMonet's seascapes".[41]
Decades after its premiere,La mer established itself in the core orchestral repertoire. In 2018, the online archive of theNew York Philharmonic Orchestra reported that the orchestra had played the work at 135 concert performances since 1917, under conductors includingWillem Mengelberg,Arturo Toscanini,John Barbirolli,Pierre Monteux,Leonard Bernstein,Pierre Boulez andValery Gergiev.[42] In 1979,The Musical Times ratedLa mer the composer's most important orchestral work.[43] The pianistSviatoslav Richter calledLa mer "A piece that I rank alongside theSt Matthew Passion and theRing cycle as one of my favourite works".[n 7]
The first recording ofLa mer was made by theOrchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, conducted byPiero Coppola in 1928. It has been reissued on LP and CD.[48] Recordings conducted by other musicians who had known and worked with Debussy include those by Monteux andErnest Ansermet, who both conducted the work on more than one recording.[49] Well-known recordings from themonaural era include those by theNBC Symphony Orchestra and Toscanini, and thePhilharmonia on recordings conducted byHerbert von Karajan andGuido Cantelli.[50] Of recordings from thestereophonic LP era,The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music singled out those by theChicago Symphony Orchestra underFritz Reiner, and theBerlin Philharmonic under Karajan.[51]
Of the many recordings available, a comparative survey forClassic FM (2018) recommended a short list of five, those by theOrchestre National de France andJean Martinon, theCleveland Orchestra and Boulez, the Berlin Philharmonic andSimon Rattle, theSeoul Philharmonic andMyung-Whun Chung, and theRoyal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted byBernard Haitink (its top recommendation).[52]
La mer has influenced a number of composers throughout the 20th century. British composersFrank Merrick andHope Squire arranged La Mer for piano duet and performed it in 1915 in one of their new music recitals.[53]Luciano Berio quotedLa mer in the 3rd movement of his compositionSinfonia in 1968.[54][n 8]John Williams used simplified versions of motifs fromLa mer in the score he wrote forJaws (1975).[55] In 2002, the Norwegian composerBiosphere loosely based his ambient albumShenzhou around looped samples ofLa mer.[56] The British composerSally Beamish has arrangedLa Mer for piano trio.It was first peformed in 2013.
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