Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

La Mer (1903-1905)

It is impossible to separate Debussy’s scandalous personal life from the music of La Mer: is his change from thin, wispy harmonies, to thick, dissonant textures the natural progression of his evolving expression, or a response to the dark turn in his romantic life and reputation across Paris? 

Debussy, the son of a sailor, was always drawn to the sea. He wrote to fellow composer André Messager, “You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life and that it was only quite by chance that fate led me in another direction. But I have always retained a passionate love for the sea.” Debussy wanted to be so influenced by his memories of the sea for this composition, not the sea itself, that he fled to the mountains of Burgundy with his wife, Lilly, to better capture those impressions.

This was in the summer of 1903. Debussy had been four years married to Lilly, and three years infatuated with Emma Bardac, wife of a wealthy banker. It was well known (because he made it so) he only married Lilly to avoid her threat of suicide should he refuse. He grew to resent her popularity with his friends and openly regarded her as intellectually inferior. On Bastille Day 1904, he left her for Emma. 

Immediate scandal. When Lilly discovered her husband left her for their friend, she made true on her threat and shot herself, though failed to end her life. Debussy’s friends sympathized with Lilly and paid her medical bills, which caused Debussy to cut them out, which then caused his remaining friends to cut him out. By October 1905, when La Mer was premiered in Paris, he was friendless, ostracized by Parisian society, and two weeks away from the birth of his daughter. 

Debussy’s music was, in essence, a reaction against Wagner and the German tradition. In La Mer, he put what he considered the final knife in the obsolete classical symphony, and turned the world towards “symphonic sketches,” loose in form and free of regimented harmony. When writing of his orchestral technique: “Musicians no longer know how to decompose sound – to give it in all its purity … the sixth violin is just as important as the first. I try to employ each timbre in its purest form.” In La Mer, he divides the strings in up to fifteen parts, rather than the traditional five. 

La Mer did not find great success in Paris. Musicians considered it overly difficult, and the composer attended the premier with his married mistress, round with their child, neither bothering to divorce before the scandalous appearance. Reviews published the next day were just as much about the gossip as the music.

Though Debussy abhorred the term, La Mer is emblematic of the Impressionist style. Debussy is, according to many music historians, the first composer to create music entirely reliant on sonority: the sound of the music, not its rhythms and melodies, is the point. Rather than elicit direct images and sounds of the ocean, Debussy created orchestral poems that evoke fleeting emotions, the ever-changing essence of the sea instead of its appearance. He wrote in the same letter to Messager: “I have an endless store of memories, and to my mind they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty often deadens thought.”

Program notes by Laken Emerson