This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is La Mer by Claude Debussy (The Sea: Three Symphonic Sketches for Orchestra). Completed in 1905, the work is an orchestral masterpiece, and Debussy's greatest large-scale instrumental work.

Debussy had long been fascinated by the sea and water imagery in poetry, painting and Japanese art. Debussy himself grew up in Paris, not by the sea — in fact, he admitted: “I was destined for the seashore only in my imagination.” Debussy took inspiration from the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet, as well as Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (he kept a print in his study, and it was used on the cover of the first edition of La Mer). Debussy was also an admirer of the Symbolist poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire, both of whom often used water as metaphor.

Debussy began composing La Mer around 1903, working on it intensively through 1904–1905. It should come as no surprise that he was nowhere near the sea during the time he worked on the piece. Most of the work was done while he was living in Bichain, Burgundy, a countryside village about as far inland as one can get in France. Some drafting was done in Dijon, which is also landlocked. That was the point of La Mer: the piece was not seeking to depict a literal seascape but an imagined, symbolic vision of the sea.

Debussy subtitled it “Three Symphonic Sketches for Orchestra”; it was not a supposed to be a symphony--it emphasized mood over classical form. He sought to create a work truer to French sensibilities: color, suggestion, fluidity. Rather than depicting crashing waves literally, he aimed at capturing the essence and emotional resonance of the sea — its vastness, changeability and mystery.

The three sketches of La Mer form a loose triptych moving from dawn and calmness, through motion and play, to a powerful climax.

Critics and audiences were initially less than enthused. They found the work confusing, formless and lacking melody. Some thought it was a collection of “effects” without substance. One critic--Pierre Lalo (1866–1943), music critic for "Le Temps" and son of Édouard Lalo--sneered that “There is no sea, and no sun in this work. There are only small mistakes in form and harmony. Debussy has forgotten that music should be clear."

As modern music developed, La Mer began to look visionary rather than incoherent. Conductors such as Pierre Monteux and Arturo Toscanini championed it, celebrating the work for its structural strength as well as its colors. By the 1920s, critics hailed the composition as Debussy’s orchestral masterpiece, on a par with the symphonies of the German tradition but utterly different in approach. La Mer, they argued, was not “formless” at all. Instead, Debussy built organic structures in which themes evolve and transform continuously, rather than follow the sonata form. Debussy was now no longer seen merely as an “Impressionist” but as a serious symphonic thinker.

Debussy's La Mer stands as one of the most influential and admired orchestral works of the 20th century, a model of how music can evoke nature without resorting to literal description. La Mer remains Debussy's peak orchestral statement, and his most enduring concert-hall work.

In this performance from 2023, Alain Altinoglu conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
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