In a letter to André Messager dated September 12, 1903, Claude Debussy announced, “I am working on three symphonic sketches entitled: 1. ‘Calm Sea around the Sanguinaires Islands’; 2. ‘Play of the Waves’; 3. ‘The Wind Makes the Sea Dance’; the whole to be titled La Mer.” In a rare burst of autobiography, he then confided, “You’re unaware, maybe, that I was intended for the noble career of a sailor and have only deviated from that path thanks to the quirks of fate. Even so, I have retained a sincere devotion to the sea.” Debussy points out to Messager the irony that he is working on his musical seascape in landlocked Burgundy, but declares, “I have innumerable memories, and those, in my view, are worth more than a reality which, charming as it may be, tends to weigh too heavily on the imagination.”

But the quirks of fate, of which Debussy wrote so lightly in 1903 led him back to the sea over and over again in the two years that elapsed between this letter and the premiere of La Mer on October 15, 1905, performed in Paris by the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard. It was a twist of fate that Debussy finished correcting the proofs of his symphonic sketches by the sea while staying at the Grand Hotel in the quirky British resort of Eastbourne. The otherwise ironical composer had washed up on the Atlantic shores of this little town swept away by that most oceanic of emotions: love.

What did the concierge at the Grand Hotel think of the curious French couple staying there during July and August of 1905? The other guests, who were probably too British and well-bred to have initiated a conversation, must have been intrigued by the saturnine Frenchman with the protruding forehead, who spoke no English and, indeed, rarely said a word even in his native tongue. But what of the woman with him, speaking fluent English with an enchanting accent, charming, vivacious, and clearly pregnant? Surely represented to the hotel management as Debussy’s wife, she was in reality Emma Bardac, née Moyse, a socialite and gifted singer who had left her wealthy husband for an impecunious composer. Her husband, Sigismund, who had tolerated with indulgent good humor her earlier affair with the discreet Gabriel Fauré, assumed that she would return to him after her passion for Debussy cooled. But Emma never looked back: She bore Debussy a daughter, Claude-Emma, nicknamed “Chou-Chou” by her adoring father, who was born some two weeks after the first performance of La Mer.

In the scandal that followed their elopement, especially after Debussy’s first wife made an ineffectual attempt at suicide, he lost many friends—but not the loyal Messager. In consequence of her adultery, Emma lost a lavish inheritance from her wealthy uncle, thus condemning her reticent husband to seek lucrative but agonizing public appearances as a pianist and conductor. They finally married in 1908, enjoying their life together until he died of cancer on March 25, 1918, as German artillery bombarded Paris; despite the acute danger, Emma refused to leave her husband’s side. 

During his lifetime and after, critics labeled Debussy as an “Impressionist,” associating him with the then-radical but now beloved painters Monet and Renoir. Debussy protested that he was not merely an Impressionist but a Symbolist like Maurice Maeterlinck, whose play Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) he had transformed into an opera, or his friend Pierre Louÿs, whose poems he set in the voluptuous song cycle Chansons de Bilitis (1898). Despite the suggestive titles of his pieces, Debussy was at least as much a “literary” composer as he was a “visual” one. By insisting that his publisher, Jacques Durand, place a stylized picture of a wave by the great Japanese artist Hokusai on the cover of La Mer, Debussy indicated implicitly that his score was not merely a seascape painted rapidly from prosaic reality nor a pantheistic rhapsody, but rather an evocation of those elemental forces that the sea itself symbolizes: birth (in French, the word for the sea, mer, is a homonym for the word for mother, mère); desire (waves endlessly lapping the shore, forever unsatisfied); love (all-enveloping emotion in which the lover is completely submerged); and, of course, death (dissolution into eternity). 

Furthermore, as was evinced in his choice of a Japanese print for the score’s cover, Debussy went to considerable trouble to differentiate his work from the aesthetics of the Impressionist painters. Although its subtitle has puzzled critics over the years, Debussy knew exactly what he was doing when he called La Mer a series of “symphonic sketches.” “Symphonic” because of the sophistication of the processes involved in generating the musical materials, but the word “sketches” is not used in the sense of something rapidly executed or unfinished, but rather to denote a clearly delineated line drawing, nothing remotely “Impressionistic.”

Writing shortly after the premiere of La Mer, the critic Louis Laloy noted, “in each of these three episodes … [Debussy] has been able to create enduringly all the glimmerings and shifting shadows, caresses and murmurs, gentle sweetness and fiery anger, seductive charm and sudden gravity contained in those waves which Aeschylus praised for their ‘smile without number.’” The slow, tenebrous, and mysterious opening of the first “sketch,” which Debussy ultimately called From Dawn to Midday at Sea, contains all of the thematic motifs that will pervade the rest of the entire score, just as in a Beethovenian symphony. The resemblance to the German symphonic tradition essentially ends there, however, for only the most evanescent lineaments of sonata form, with its contrasting themes and development section, can be discerned flickering behind Debussy’s complex formal design. There is no formal section devoted exclusively to development in La Mer because Debussy develops incessantly from the very first notes. The second of the “sketches,” Play of the Waves, is constructed from tiny mosaic-like thematic and harmonic fragments, a process that anticipates the extraordinary subtlety of Debussy’s last completed orchestral score, Jeux (1912–13), in which the “games” are more explicitly erotic. The final “sketch,” Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, begins in storm and, rising to grandeur, concludes with an orgasmic burst of enveloping, oceanic rapture.

—Byron Adams