Debussy: La Mer
Claude Debussy
B. August 22, 1862 in St. Germaine-en-Laye, France
D. March 25, 1918 in Paris, France
Throughout most of Debussy’s career, he acknowledged Wagner’s influence on his music. Debussy made a pilgrimage to Wagner’s opera house in Bayreuth, and his own opera Pelleas et Mélisande is characteristically Wagnerian it its conception and composition. Debussy once commented about his difficulty avoiding “the ghost of old Klingsor (the evil wizard in Parsifal, who was characterized by highly chromatic music which stretched the bounds of tonal practice)…appearing at the turning of a bar.” La Mer thus presents a fascinating counterpoint to the Siegfried Idyll.
La Mer is a soundscape which seeks to capture the experience of a visitor at the sea. In the music, we hear the wind rushing over the ocean, the waves crashing to the shore, and the peaceful calm of the early morning. Immediately clear is that any common-practice sonata structure is entirely abandoned here. Rather than listening for form in the work, listeners are invited to allow the individual moments of La Mer to wash over them – to imagine spending the morning near the seashore in the first movement, De l’aube á midi sur la mer (from dawn to noon on the sea); to hear the rippling and crashing of waves in the second movement, Jeux de vagues (play of the waves); and feel the mist upon their brow as the salty air blows landward in the final movement Dialogue du vent et de la mer (dialogue of wind and the sea).
From a musical perspective, Debussy is often noted for his use of the wholetone scale. Rather than the asymmetrical series of half-steps and whole-steps which characterize our diatonic major and minor scales that allows our ears to hear a single, individual pitch as the fundamental ruling tonic, the whole-tone scale is a symmetrical scale of whole steps: C, D, E, F#, G#, A#, C. This symmetry makes it impossible to hear any one pitch as more important than any other, since every pitch relates to every other pitch by the same set of intervals. The result is a sense of tonal disorientation, a scale without horizon or gravitational pull. For this reason, the whole-tone scale, usually played by the harp, is a very common cinematic trope for accompanying transitions to dream sequences – and the listener will hear the roots of this trope in the second movement. Similarly, Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale assists our imaginations as they leave the concert hall and travel to the sea.
The DSO last performed La Mer in May 2007.
DSO Shop @ the Max Recomm ends: Debussy, La Mer: Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony, Telarc 80071.
Tags: Debussy
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