La Mer
Claude Debussy (arr. Iain Farrington)
1.De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to noon on the sea)
2. Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
3. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea)
About the Composer
One of the most important musicians of his time, Claude Debussy spent his compositional career developing harmonic and timbral innovations that would profoundly influence generations of composers to come. Debussy was born on August 22, 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (just north-west of Paris) to a non-musical family. In 1870, Debussy’s mother took him and his sister to their aunt’s home in Cannes to escape the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. It was in Cannes that the seven-year-old Debussy had his first piano lessons, with Italian musician Jean Cerutti. Debussy’s talents soon became quite evident and by the age of ten, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied for eleven years. Throughout his time at the Conservatoire he was chastised for his failure to follow the orthodox rules of composition at the time; however, in 1884 he won France’s most prestigious musical award, the Prix de Rome, and as a result spent January 1885 to March 1887 in residence at the Villa Medici, where he continued to explore composition in his own way.
Debussy was remarkably aware of the ways in which music and the world were changing and he was driven by a strong nationalistic desire to nurture and develop French music. He was influenced by an astonishing number of interdisciplinary fields, ranging from eighteenth-century French Composers like Jean-Philippe Rameau, avant-garde composers like Erik Satie, popular music like ragtime, ideas and textures from Impressionist painting, Symbolist literature, and the emergence of new technologies in sound recording and film. The ideas from visual and literary arts were perhaps most impactful on the developing young composer, as they nurtured his focus on the sound and expressive effect of melody and harmony and freed him from the boxed-in conventions of traditional compositional methods. While his compositional career was relatively short, around 30 years, Debussy contributed to almost every genre including, opera, orchestral music, solo piano music, and chamber music.
About the Music
Debussy began working on La Mer in 1903; the musical triptych, subtitled “symphonic sketches” was the last of his large-scale works. The three sections of the work transport the listener on a psychological exploration of the complexity of the sea and its spellbinding powers. Debussy’s love of the sea was fueled by both his father, a sailor who captivated young Debussy with stories of his life on the ocean, and visual art, which was highly influential as he developed his compositional style. In a note to his publisher, Jacques Durand, Debussy wrote, “the sea is always endless and beautiful. It is really the thing in nature which best puts you in your place . . . The sea has been very good to me. She has shown me all her moods. You do not know perhaps that I was intended for the fine career of a sailor and only the changes of life led me away from it . . . I have an endless store of memories . . . Music is a free art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, and the sea.”
The first movement, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, begins with the cellos as the sun rises and a new day begins. The water is calm; however, Debussy is able to convey the great power that the sea holds and gradually the water begins to pick up movement, which is depicted in woodwind flourishes. As the sea becomes more animated, Debussy weaves in additional melodic fragments, ebbing and flowing as organically as the waves themselves. As the movement reaches its climax a chorale breaks through in the brass as the sun would, shining in the middle of the sky when the clock strikes noon.
In the second movement, The Play of the Waves, Debussy once again shows how the sea can go from complete stillness to boundless energy. However, this time instead of a beacon of sunlight shining over the water’s surface Debussy evokes waves, crashing in irregular rhythms and speeding up as water rushes to the shoreline. This section highlights Debussy’s immense talent for woodwind writing and quintessentially characterizes the French school style. By the end of the section the sea has calmed once more and returned to a mysterious stillness.
The final movement, Dialogue of the Wind and Sea, recalls thematic material from the first and in doing so evokes a sense of settling down and the piece coming to an end. Here, Debussy offers a more traditional treatment of thematic material than the previous two movements as the elements converse with one another. In the end, the great power of the sea perseveres as the dissonant harmonies rush over listeners and leave us all feeling as though the sea has put us “in [our] place.”
Note by Christina Dioguardi