Ivan HEWETT
Debussy’s La mer (1905)
La mer is the greatest seascape in music, and also the greatest example of how the sounds of the natural world can become music. “We don’t pay enough attention to the thousand noises of nature around us,” wrote Debussy. “We don’t listen out for this music which is so varied, and which she offers us so generously.” As this masterpiece shows, Debussy clearly listened hard.
Background
Born in the outskirts of Paris, Debussy loved the sea, as long as it didn’t come too close. Much of La mer was written in 1903 and 1904 in landlocked Burgundy, where Debussy could rely on his memories “without its reality pressing in too heavily”, as he put it. But visits to Jersey and a resort near Dieppe freshened those memories. He loved the sea’s various colours: “Blue as a waltz [presumably The Blue Danube]; grey as an unusable sheet of metal; most often; green as the absinthe the old captain does without.”
Work went slowly, because of his affair with the wife of a banker, his ensuing divorce from his wife Lilly, and most of all his incredibly painstaking working method. The premiere in 1905 inspired more bafflement than joy, but when Debussy conducted the work himself in 1908, the collective penny finally dropped.
What makes it so great?
Debussy was a great painter in sound, and he also threw open the door to musical modernism. This piece reveals both aspects of him, with surpassing brilliance. There’s the miraculous orchestration, which makes you taste salt spray and see the glitter of light on the waves, and there’s also the radically novel, unpredictable form. This piece is one surprise after another, and yet we feel a coherence underneath. This is partly because the echoes of the French symphonic tradition are quite strong, and its full title is in fact The Sea, Three Symphonic Sketches for Orchestra. But more important is the subtly unpredictable way Debussy brings back ideas, like little islands of stability in the music’s surging onrush.
What to listen out for
The version I’ve used here (available on Youtube) is by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Pierre Boulez.
First movement: De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Midday on the Sea)
The beginning is like first light, the high violins at 00.45 like the sun’s first rays. The oboe melody here is more gesture than tune, just a note flicking upwards (Ta-dum) and then down. This idea will recur in a dozen different guises, often as a background to something else. Immediately afterwards, at 00.57, comes a melody that circles around on itself endlessly. This sort of motion is very characteristic of La mer, as is the graceful undulating motion heard in the oboe at 2.00.
The horn melody heard at 2.07 and 3.10 is actually new, but it seems as if we’ve heard it before, a feeling we often have in this piece. A new sinuous melody at 3.30 and a solo violin bring a hint of Rimskykorsakov at his sultriest, as does the wavering flute at 3.55.
The first climax at 4.34 (which you’ll hear again, fortissimo, at the end of the movement) subsides, and leads to a wonderful surprise: a kind of “rocking boat” idea in massed cellos at 5.06. The brassy climax of this “rocking” idea at 6.12 subsides from majesty to mystery, leading via a passage of becalmed beauty to a solemn chorale at 7.58. You’ll encounter this again, at the very end of the piece.
Second movement: Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
This is the most radical movement of the three, as immaterial as cloud-shadows scudding across waves. After a shiver of strings and a downward plunge in flutes (seagulls perhaps?), we hear at 9.24 a melancholy upward swoop on the cor anglais, repeated high in the oboe. Then comes the movement’s main melody at 9.59, basically a decorated trill followed by an agitated skipping, followed at 10.43 by its opposite, a deliciously sultry melody.
Just as you grasp this, it’s whipped away by a sudden gust, and then returns just as unexpectedly at 12.06.
At 12.30, we hear that melancholy upward swoop, and then a new trumpet call at 12.40 and again at 13.02 and 13.18. Its big moment will come, but first we get a brilliant restatement of the “flicking” idea from the first movement at 13.32 and then a return of the main melody at 13.49. As the music gathers heft and excitement, the trumpet call appears half-hidden at 14.27 and then bursts out in full view, at 14.59. From there, the music dissolves into mist, with little echoes of the cor anglais’s opening gesture in piccolo.
Third movement: Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue between Wind and Waves)
Now comes something new: terror and foreboding. As with the other two movements, this one has a scene-setting introduction, marked by menacing eruptions in the bass, outcries in the oboes, and a piercing melody in the trumpet at 17.24. Finally, at 18.01, comes the movement’s main melody. It has a more “human”, yearning quality than anything heard so far, with at 18.32 a variant of the “flicking” idea heard in the first movement.
In the agitated section beginning at 18.58, we hear the piercing trumpet melody, now dark and lumbering in the bass region. At 19.53, the chorale from the first movement returns. This will close the piece in a blaze of glory, but first the main melody returns in two guises: a mysterious moonlit one at 20.46 and a triumphant one at 21.48.
One final surprise: the trumpet melody, now more terrified than anxious, returns at 22.23, but this is only to set us up for a final return of the main melody. This eventually has to cede pride of place to that magnificent chorale, at 23.27, until this too is swept away by the final tumult.
Recommended recordings
Pierre Boulez is, for many, the ideal Debussy conductor. His best recording is the one with the Cleveland Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon, though my personal favourite – for its combination of drama and clarity – comes from the Hallé Orchestra and Mark Elder, on the orchestra’s own label.
Debussy brings back ideas, like little islands of stability in the music’s surging onrush