La Mer, Three Symphonic Sketches, L. 109

Program notes

About the Work

Debussy loved the sea, and distrusted the idea of writing about it. ‘I have an endless store of memories,’ he wrote to a friend while at work on ‘La Mer’, and in composing it he drew on those memories, and on paintings and prints, far more than on the sea itself. He composed the score between 1903 and 1905, much of it not by the water at all but inland: in Burgundy and, crucially, during the personal upheaval in which he left his first wife for Emma Bardac, the woman who would become his second. In the same letter he noted, half-joking, that he had been intended for ‘the fine career of a sailor’ and that only the chances of life had led him away from it. What he produced is not a postcard but a memory of the sea, recollected and recomposed: less a depiction than an evocation of light, motion, and immensity.

He was careful, too, about what to call it. Debussy resisted the word ‘symphony’, preferring the cooler designation ‘three symphonic sketches’ (‘esquisses symphoniques’), as if to deny the work the architectural pretensions of the German tradition he wished to escape. Yet ‘La Mer’ is among the most tightly built of all his orchestral scores. Beneath its shimmering surface lies real symphonic logic: themes that are introduced, transformed, and recalled across movements, and a long-range plan that drives the whole toward a blazing conclusion. The ‘sketch’ label is a feint. This is large-scale construction disguised as impression.

The premiere, given in Paris on 15 October 1905 by the Orchestre Lamoureux under Camille Chevillard, was not a success. The climate around Debussy was poisoned: his abandonment of his wife (who had attempted suicide) had cost him friends and sympathy, and some of the hostility in the hall was personal rather than musical. Critics carped; Pierre Lalo of Le Temps famously wrote that he did not hear, see or feel the sea. The work’s reputation recovered quickly, and ‘La Mer’ is now recognised as one of the supreme orchestral achievements of the century, a score that taught later composers, and film music after them, how to make an orchestra glitter and surge.

The published score carried on its cover Hokusai’s woodblock print ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’, Debussy’s own choice. It is a telling emblem. Like the Japanese print, ‘La Mer’ stylises the sea rather than reproducing it: the wave is pattern as much as water, design as much as nature. Debussy’s three movements move from dawn over the open sea, through the restless play of the waves, to a dramatic dialogue between wind and water, a progression that is at once a time of day, a rising weather system, and a purely musical crescendo of energy.

What makes the score endlessly fresh is its orchestration. Debussy treats the orchestra as a single vast instrument of colour, dividing the strings into many parts, threading solo woodwinds through the texture, deploying harps, muted brass, and a glinting battery of percussion to catch the light. Nothing is merely decorative; every shimmer is structural, every flash of colour part of the form. ‘La Mer’ is the sound of a composer who has heard the ocean so often that he can dream it more truly than he can see it.

What to Listen For

The first movement, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’ (From dawn to midday on the sea), begins in near-darkness: low, slow stirrings, a bare fifth in the strings, distant timpani like a swell felt before it is seen. Listen as the light comes up almost imperceptibly: fragments of melody surfacing in the woodwinds, the harps rippling, the texture thickening as the sun climbs. The seed of the whole work is sown in these first quiet minutes: short rising-and-falling motifs that will recur, transformed, across all three movements. The movement ends in a sudden blaze of brass and a great cresting chorale: midday, the sea at full light.

The second movement, ‘Jeux de vagues’ (Play of the waves), is the scherzo: quicksilver, weightless, never settling. Here Debussy’s orchestration is at its most dazzling: glissandos in the harps, flickers of glockenspiel and triangle, solo woodwinds tossing fragments back and forth like spray. There is no firm theme to hold onto, and that is the point: the music imitates the constant, purposeless, gleaming motion of water, light scattering on a moving surface. Let it shimmer; don’t search for a tune.

The finale, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ (Dialogue of the wind and the sea), is the most dramatic and the most clearly symphonic. It opens darkly and turbulently, the wind rising, and stages a genuine struggle between two forces, the brass and lower strings answering the agitated upper voices. Listen for the return, transformed, of the rising motifs from the first movement: Debussy gathers his earlier material and drives it forward. A long, surging build leads to a final climax in which a grand, hymn-like brass theme (foreshadowed at midday in the first movement) returns in glory, and the whole sea seems to rear up at once. The closing pages are pure exhilaration, wind and water resolved not into calm but into overwhelming, radiant force.