La Mer

Composition and premiere: Debussy started La Mer in summer 1903 and completed it in 1905. Camille Chevillard led the Lamoureux Orchestra in the first performance on October 15, 1905. The first BSO performance, on March 1, 1907, under Karl Muck, was the American premiere. Serge Koussevitzky led the BSO in the first Tanglewood performance on August 6, 1938.

It is hard to imagine what Claude Debussy’s La Mer sounded like at its premiere performance in October 1905, when it was truly new. To modern audiences, the work’s eternal freshness reveals innumerable details with each listening. But to first hearers of this pathbreaking composition, it failed to impress. He was able to respond directly to one critic, his friend Pierre Lalo:

I can’t follow you when you take it as a pretext for claiming all of a sudden that my other works lack logic and are held together only by a tenacious sensibility and a dedicated search for the “picturesque.”… You say—keeping your unkindest cut for the last—that you “do not see or smell the sea”…that’s a large claim and I do not know who is going to evaluate it for us…. I love the sea and I’ve listened to it with the passionate respect it deserves.

The public disapproval may have been largely circumstantial. Debussy himself was no fan of Camille Chevillard, the conductor who led the Orchestre Lamoureux’s first performance. Audiences may have been disconcerted by the stylistic difference in Debussy’s writing from his enormously successful opera Pelléas and Mélisande, premiered just three years earlier. As he began writing La Mer, Debussy wrote, “those people who are kind enough to expect me never to abandon the style of Pelléas are well and truly sticking their finger in their eye.” And a social scandal surrounded the premiere as well: Debussy had left his first wife Lilly without obtaining a divorce, and had begun an affair with Emma Bardac, moving in with her; their child was born two weeks after the orchestra concert. When he himself made his conducting debut with La Mer in Paris on January 19 and 26, 1908, and two weeks later in London, the audience reception was rapturous, and it was the composer’s greatest public success since Pelléas.

For Debussy, La Mer was clearly personal; the sea was “an old friend.” He wrote to a colleague, “You perhaps do not know that I was destined for the life of a sailor and that it was only by chance that I was led away from it. But I still have a great passion for the sea.” The “chance” that defined his path was piano instruction that put him on course to the Paris Conservatory at 10 years old. But Debussy’s draw to life on the water began with childhood summer vacations at Cannes, and he found an artistic translation of his “innumerable memories” of the ever-changing sea in La Mer. (His only sailing experiences were as an adult, crossing the English Channel.)

Debussy found an analogue to his passion in the precisely made yet dazzling print The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The composer chose to have it reproduced on the title page of the published score. Debussy brought a painterly sensibility to the piece, even more than his previous orchestral accomplishments of the three Nocturnes and Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun. His sound-painting of watery formations was further refined by his piano music, including  Reflets dans l’eau from the first book of Images and Jardins sous la pluie from Estampes (both very different depictions). The importance of sound color in music, on which Debussy staked his entire composing career, made a big advance into the orchestral realm in La Mer. The second movement is a particularly effective study in this, with a subito dynamic or a sudden harmonic change giving the effect of a color splash or a flash of sunlight, and notable orchestral timbres signaling a shift in musical direction, substituting for traditional symphonic narrative. Similarly, sensuality in music, including visceral impact on every scale, is Debussy’s route to emotional depth; in fact, they may be one and the same. Variety of sound color became an end in itself, but with no compromise of musical gravity. And in La Mer, Debussy found a whole spectrum of emotion and psychology reflected in the sea's current.

As Debussy wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand, “The sea has been very good to me. She has shown me all her moods…. Music is a free art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, and the sea.”

But to return to the misgivings of Pierre Lalo, what may have appeared as weaknesses in the piece have since become the hallmarks of its modernity. La Mer does “lack logic” in that its musical development does not resemble the exchange of themes in a symphony. La Mer is a three-movement suite, modestly called “symphonic sketches,” and its form shows Debussy’s dislike of German Romanticism, where more traditional orchestral thematic development would be expected. It has been called an anti-symphony, surely a concept that the contrarian Debussy would have found appealing. The sense of natural growth, ebb, and flow in La Mer result from an intuitive, internal composing logic, rather than one imposed by a prescribed form.

The first movement, “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea,” begins with low, overlapping strings, harps playing in echo, and rolling timpani just waking in the musical darkness. Debussy’s admiration for the 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s ravishing seascapes, encountered on trips to London, must have given him ideas of how to convey the mist on the water at sunrise. Indistinct shapes gradually gather clarity and weight. The movement’s progression unfolds in one long sweep, a symphonic crescendo as one’s consciousness sharpens and new senses are stimulated. The listener is moved as the nature portrayed is always in flux, delighting, surprising, and evoking awe. 

The composer’s distaste for the term “Impressionism” in art had something to do with his lack of sentimentality, and his need to portray images always in motion, rather than as a static framed tableau. Waves become a musical metaphor as well as a dominant image in the piece: we are meant to ride along even as the nature of musical development is not immediately clear. Themes are short, and have as much to do with their (usually rising) melodic contour as their pure rhythmic nature. On nearly every page of La Mer’s first movement, there is rhythmic interplay of groups of two and three heard together. This friction provides textural variety and also constant agitation, whether gentle or forceful.

“Jeux de vagues,” or “play of the waves,” serves as the contrasting scherzo of the work. One is challenged to find any theme that recurs more than once; Debussy preferred to represent the mischievous surf with a continuous development of fragmentary melodic cells, rhythmically transforming and shuffled through the sections of the orchestra. A new rhythm not heard before appears literally every few seconds. The movement has many exciting buildups, with momentary swells and some longer crescendos, but the overall effect of the wave-play is an enchanting divertissement. The winds and percussion, especially, gild the edges of the sound with short, gleaming solos, and the movement ends with a floating tune on trumpet and piccolo.

In the last movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and Sea,” Debussy reclaims any momentum that was lost, and turns his attention to the sea’s imposing grandeur. This movement comes the closest to treating a musical theme as a theme, perhaps, if one listens in this way, even assigning motives to the wind and sea in a constant duality. The theme one recognizes most often is a chromatic idea in triplets, first heard as a hovering, ethereal high trio between oboe, English horn, and bassoon. It dips down with graceful torque before climbing back up to be restated. The “dialogue” is enhanced by the return of recognizable material, including rhythms, from the first movement, which give a feeling of culmination.

The spectacular passages of gathering force in the movement also contain some of Debussy’s most intricate rhythmic writing for orchestra. To give a sense of billowing speed, each section of the orchestra assumes a different, faster and more detailed rhythmic figure, with superimposed triplets and duplets throughout. This helps the work’s climax, a triumphant tutti statement of the first theme, overwhelm as Debussy experienced the sea’s primal might: “It is really the thing in nature which best puts you in your place,” he wrote. After a moment of calm with stunning high violin harmonics, a magnificent brass chorale heralds the final rush, and the work ends with a syncopated fortissimo timpani stroke, with an extra bite from pizzicato tutti strings. 

An exploration of the piece’s general methods and nuanced workings can only go so far, though. What is key to the piece’s lasting impact, and why has it delighted orchestras for more than a century as a summit of 20th-century repertoire? When Debussy writes that he cannot measure the work’s power to summon thoughts of the sea, perhaps audiences have already had the final word.

JACOB GREENBERG 

Pianist and keyboardist Jacob Greenberg, a member of the Tanglewood Music Center faculty, released the complete Debussy Preludes on New Focus Recordings, a disc that also includes music of the Second Viennese School. His podcast, Intégrales, explores meaningful intersections of music and daily city life. He lives in Berlin. www.jacobgreenberg.net