Date of composition: 1903-1905
Premiere: 15 October 1905 in Paris with the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard
Duration: 25 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
for the first time on 9 November 1918, conductor: Selmar Meyrowitz
In 1889, the 27-year-old Claude Debussy visited the Paris World Exhibition, where he encountered non-European music for the first time. He was fascinated! Above all, the Asian gamelan ensembles made a profound impression on him. Debussy imagined that these distant peoples had learned music as naturally as breathing: “Their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the trees, a thousand little sounds, which they attentively absorb without ever glancing at tyrannical textbooks,” he believed.
The rulebooks of Central European music, on the other hand, left him cold. What was the point of sonata form? Debussy found it all utterly meaningless. He preferred to take nature as his model for composition: “We must throw wide the windows to the open sky,” he insisted. And regarding Beethoven, he even turned polemical: “There is more to be gained from watching the sunrise than listening to the Pastoral Symphony.”
An observation of sunrise also stands at the beginning of La Mer, composed between 1903 and 1905. Debussy gave the first of these three symphonic sketches the title From Dawn to Noon on the Sea. It begins in pianissimo, with mysteriously shadowed sounds symbolising the break of day. As the sun rises higher, the texture becomes increasingly dense and powerful. In the coda, Debussy reaches the dazzling brightness of the midday sun, leading the full orchestra into a dynamic release. Here, for the first time, he anchors the previously fluid harmonies on the solid foundation of D flat major and introduces percussion instruments such as cymbals and the tam-tam, a large metal gong – echoing the Asian music he had admired at the World Exhibition.
In the second movement, Play of the Waves, Debussy evokes the glistening surface of the water with trills and repeated notes. He employs glissandi and rapid runs to depict the foaming spray, allowing the waves to rise and fall in dance-like rhythms. He deliberately avoids thematic development in the classical sense, preferring instead to string together freely associated motifs, none resembling another – just as no two waves are ever alike. In this way, he creates a vast, undulating organism, a true ocean of sound.
Debussy must have perceived the sea as a primal force. Thus, in the third movement, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, he unleashes tremendous energies. At times, he uses chromatic melodies, sequencing them in the manner of Richard Wagner, repeating them on ever-changing pitch levels. In these moments, the movement almost resembles a romantic tone poem about the sea.
Yet, at other points, Debussy employs Asian pentatonic scales, once again incorporating gamelan instruments. Then, La Mer sounds not merely like a conversation between the elements, but a bridge from the Festspielhaus of Bayreuth to the temples of Java. This synthesis was Debussy’s response to the question of music’s future. With La Mer, he set music on the path to a new era of liberty.