La Mer
- De l'aube à midi sur la mer [from dawn to noon on the sea]
- Jeux de vagues [Play of the Waves]
- Dialogue du vent et de la mer [Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea]
“Perhaps you don’t know that I was really destined for the wonderful life of a sailor and it was only chance which diverted me. I have nevertheless retained a sincere passion for [the sea],” wrote Debussy in 1903 to the conductor Andre Messager announcing that he was working on three “symphonic sketches”. Messager had recently played an important part in Debussy’s career by conducting the first performances of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande the previous year. This had been a huge success, and firmly established Debussy at the vanguard of the younger generation of French composers. Having been determined not to follow any established school himself, he found himself set as the leader of a movement, as “Debussyism” became the fashion, both as a term of enthusiasm and abuse.
Ironically, much of La mer was composed almost as far from the sea as it it possible to get in France; he began work on it while on holiday in Burgundy. As the composer explained to Messager, “I have an endless store of memories of the sea and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.” He completed it by the sea, but rather than the kind of sunny European vista one might expect, the scene before him as he finished the score was the seafront at Eastbourne. Debussy described Eastbourne to his publisher as “a charming, peaceful spot. The sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness.”
The composition of La mer coincided with a turbulent period in Debussy’s life. He had married a model, Lilly Texier, in 1899, but the marriage soon soured, and four years later he began an affair with Emma Moyse-Bardac, the mother of one of his pupils and wife of a prominent Paris banker. When in 1904 he left Lilly and absconded to Jersey with Emma, a scandal broke which was reported with glee by the French press. Matters worsened when Lilly subsequently attempted suicide, an act that Le Figaro suggested was the result of another affair on Debussy’s part. As a result of all this Debussy lost the support of a number of prominent patrons, as well as providing fuel to those who already felt an antipathy to him and his music. This partly explains the poor reception given to La mer at its premiere in 1905. It did not help that the performance itself was entirely inadequate and poorly prepared, and the result was that La mer was a resounding failure.
The criticism from his enemies came as no surprise. What hurt Debussy more was the negative reaction of some commenters whom he regarded as allies: the critic Pierre Lalo (son of the composer Edward Lalo) wrote, “For the first time listening to a picturesque work of Debussy’s, I had the impression of confronting not nature, but a reproduction of nature...The sea I do not hear, I do not see, and I do not feel.” Wounded, Debussy responded, “I love the sea and I’ve listened to it with the passionate respect it deserves. If I’ve been inaccurate in taking down what it dictated to me, that is no concern of yours or mine. You must admit, not all ears hear the same way. The heart of the matter is that you love and defend traditions which, for me, no longer exist or, at least, exist only as representative of an epoch in which they were not all as fin and valuable as people make out, and the dust of the past is not always to be respected.”
By 1908, Debussy had married Emma and the scandal had died down enough that the second performance of La mer in Paris, this time with the composer himself making his debut as a conductor, was a great success; even Lalo was now convinced. In the light of his experience conducting Debussy made a number of revisions to the score The following year he accepted an offer from Gabriel Fauré to join the advisory board of the Paris Conservatoire. His journey from avant-garde provocateur to the heart of the French musical establishment was complete.
Satie famously lampooned the title of the opening movement, “From dawn to noon on the sea” with the comment that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”. However, Debussy’s aim in all three movements is not to create a literal aural impression of the sea, let alone any particular point in the day, but rather to evoke the emotional and psychological reaction to a natural force (“the invisible sentiments of nature”). It is remarkable how little he falls back on the clichés of portraying the sea in music (and those ideas that seem like cliché to us are generally so because of the composers since who have imitated him). The three movements each present a different fact of the sea: the opening reflects the transformation effected by light, as the music proceeds from the darkness before dawn to the glory of full daylight. The second movement presents a playful image of the waves, which contrasts sharply with the violence of the storm of the finale.
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