La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (French for The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), or simply La mer (The Sea), L. 109, CD. 111, is an orchestral composition by the French composer Claude Debussy.
Composed between 1903 and 1905, the piece premiered in Paris in October 1905. It was initially not well-received; even some who had been strong supporters of Debussy's work were unenthusiastic, even though La mer presented three key aspects of Debussy's aesthetic: Impressionism, Symbolism and Japonism. The work was performed in the US in 1907 and Britain in 1908; after its second performance in Paris in 1908, it quickly became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works.
The first audio recording of the work was made in 1928. Since then, orchestras and conductors from around the world have set it down in many studio or live concert recordings.
Background and composition
thumb|upright|alt=portrait of middle aged European man with full head of hair and neat beard|Debussy photographed by [[Otto Wegener, probably a few years after the composition of La mer]]
La mer was the second of Debussy's three orchestral works in three sections, the other being Nocturnes (1892–1899) and Images pour orchestre (1905–1912). The first, the Nocturnes, premiered in Paris in 1901 and though it had not made any great impact on the public, it was well-reviewed by musicians including Paul Dukas, Alfred Bruneau and Pierre de Bréville. Debussy conceived the idea of a more complex tripartite orchestral piece and began work in August 1903. He began composing the work while visiting his parents-in-law in Burgundy; by the time it was complete, he had left his wife and was living with Emma Bardac, who was pregnant with Debussy's child. Although the detailed scheme of the work changed during its composition, Debussy decided from the outset that it was to be "three symphonic sketches" with the title La mer. In a letter to André Messager, he described the planned sections as "Mère belle aux Îles Sanguinaires", "Jeu de vagues", and "Le vent fait danser la mer". The first of these, inspired by a short story of the same name by Camille Mauclair, was abandoned in favour of a less restrictive theme, the sea from dawn to midday. The last was also dropped as it was too reminiscent of ballet and the less specific theme of the dialogue between the wind and the sea took its place.
Debussy completed La mer on 5 March 1905 and took the proofs to correct on holiday at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne on the English Channel coast when he went there on 23 July 1905; he described Eastbourne to his publisher, Durand, as "a charming peaceful spot: the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness". He arranged the piece for piano four hands in 1905;
Analysis
La mer is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets in A, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 French horns, 3 trumpets in F, 2 cornets in C (3rd movement only), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tam tam, glockenspiel, 2 harps and strings.
A typical performance of the piece lasts about 23 or 24<!--AVERAGE DURATIONS SET AFTER WWW.FREEDB.ORG OF 20 VERSIONS--> minutes. It is in three movements:
The titles are usually translated<!--NAMECHECKING 2 TRANSLATIONS, COMMONEST FIRST--> as:
Debussy called La mer "three symphonic sketches," deliberately avoiding the term symphony. Simon Trezise, in his 1994 book Debussy: La Mer, comments: "He had not composed an orthodox symphony, but neither did he want La mer to be known as a symphonic poem ... [and by calling it] 'Three symphonic sketches' ... [Debussy] must have felt that he had deftly avoided association with either genre". It consists of two powerful outer movements framing a lighter, faster piece which acts as a type of scherzo. Jean Barraqué described La mer as the first work to have an "open" form – a devenir sonore or "sonorous becoming... a developmental process in which the very notions of exposition and development coexist in an uninterrupted burst". Trezise says "motifs are constantly propagated by derivation from earlier motifs".
Trezise writes that "for much of La Mer, Debussy spurns the more obvious devices associated with the sea, wind, and concomitant storm in favour of his own, highly individual vocabulary". Caroline Potter, in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, comments that Debussy's depiction of the sea "avoids monotony by using a multitude of water figurations that could be classified as musical onomatopoeia: they evoke the sensation of swaying movement of waves and suggest the pitter-patter of falling droplets of spray" (and so forth), and–significantly–avoid the arpeggiated triads used by Schubert and Wagner to evoke the movement of water. In The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Mark DeVoto describes La mer as "much more complex than anything Debussy had written earlier", particularly the Nocturnes:
The author, musicologist and pianist Roy Howat has observed, in his book Debussy in Proportion, that the formal boundaries of La mer correspond exactly to the mathematical ratios called the Golden Section. Trezise finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", but cautions that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy consciously sought such proportions.
Reception
The premiere was given on 15 October 1905 in Paris by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard. The piece was initially not well received. Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, hitherto an admirer of Debussy's work, wrote: "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea".