![]() We experience this music as a vast, gradually-unfolding musical stream of consciousness in which motives evolve with an organic, self-organizing perfection. La Mer is filled with this sense of the intangible and ephemeral. For the cover of the score, he chose The Great Wave (pictured above), a woodblock print by the Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) which influenced French painters such as Monet. Debussy called distant childhood memories of summers spent by the Mediterranean at Cannes, “worth more than reality.” In a published review of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, the composer wrote that music should, “not attempt at direct imitation, but rather the invisible sentiments of nature.” He drew more inspiration from depictions of the sea in paintings and literature than from actual salt water. As with the sea, La Mer runs the cosmic gamut from serene tranquility to terrifying, awe-inspiring power.ĭebussy finished the work, which he subtitled “Three Symphonic Sketches,” in March, 1905 at the Grand Hotel at Eastbourne on the coast of the English Channel- a location he described to his publisher as “a charming peaceful spot: the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness.” But most of the composition was done far from water. Shimmering colors, the play of light on water, and a vivid sense of motion blend together to form a magical, ever-changing soundscape. ![]() Instead, La Mer takes us deep into the world of atmosphere, metaphor and synesthesia (a blurring of senses). There is no “program” or story, as we might hear in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony or a Strauss tone poem. Claude Debussy’s La Mer (“The Sea”) is not a literal portrait of the ocean.
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