Debussy’s La Mer

When theater managers awoke to the novelty and subtle appeal of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 play Pelléas et Mélisande, it was staged all over Europe — always with incidental music that joined together scenes or under­scored moments of particular importance or tension. Few plays, in fact, were ever staged in the 19th century without musicians in the pit, and because Maeterlinck’s highly suggestive and atmospheric drama was perfect for musical illustra­tion, several composers were called on to provide incidental music.

Gabriel Fauré’s music — from which this suite was drawn — was commissioned in 1898 for a production in London, which was taken to New York soon after. In 1902, Debussy’s operatic treatment of Maeterlinck’s text — approved by the playwright himself — premiered in Paris to resounding acclaim. Composers outside France also created their own musical takes on the story in the following years. Sibelius’s incidental music for the play was first heard in 1905 in Helsinki. Schoenberg — then on the cusp of his experiments in atonality — composed a richly scored tone poem on the subject in 1903. All in all, it was a time of many musical views on the play’s subject and atmosphere.

Fauré’s beautiful, wistful music is perfect for the drama. The play tells, in muted tones and against a dimly medieval background, of Mélisande’s love for Pelléas, half-brother of her husband, Golaud. The latter is character­ized by the second main theme of the Prélude (in the woodwinds and cello) and, at the end, his horn call is heard in the depths of the forest. The movement has been described as “less a décor than a state of mind,” with some chordal string writing strongly reminiscent of Fauré’s well-known Requiem, written between 1887 and 1890. The second movement, Fileuse, follows a long tradition of spinning-wheel pieces, and moves to the minor mode for a melody that is fully exploited in the last movement.

The Sicilienne is perhaps the best-known movement of the suite, with its charac­teristic and charming melody and its suggestions of modal color. It had been composed earlier for a different purpose and has little connection with the play, but its charm is inescapable. The final movement, in contrast, is charged with the tragic emotions of the last act, when Mélisande dies under the remorse­ful gaze of Golaud and his household.

When pressed for time, Fauré sometimes passed the orchestration of his works to his pupils. After his death it was disclosed that the orchestrator of this suite (and much of the entire full score of incidental music) was Charles Koechlin, who was Fauré’s biographer and himself a composer of unrecognized achievement. This suite was a task he undertook with exceptional skill.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

As a composer, Francis Poulenc habitually wrote dates at the end of his manuscript scores, and on the last page of the score of his Organ Concerto we read: “Noizay, April 1938–Anost, August 1938,” suggesting that this work occupied him for only four months.

In fact, this concerto’s gestation was long and difficult, and the composer openly admitted that it was one of the hardest pieces he ever wrote. Part of the challenge came because he had never written for the organ before, and although there were a few works for organ and strings widely played (Handel’s concertos for example), the addition of timpani to the mix created a completely new ambience for which there was no precedent.

The difficulty may also be attributed in part to the shift in Poulenc’s world­view at the time. His earlier music earned him prodigious success in the period just following World War I and, as a member of the group of composers known as Les Six (The Six), he was the one who most clearly personified the spirit of clowning and frivolity for which they became quickly notorious.

Later on, through his reattachment to the Catholic faith, a new strain of religious devotion blossomed in his music. He was aware that the Organ Concerto would probably be performed in churches, and its devotional tone likely belongs to that understanding. It was, likewise, in keeping with his quest for a deeper spiritual language that he set for himself certain obstacles of instru­mentation and form.

Two remarkable women were at the heart of the concerto’s origin. The first was the Princess Edmond de Polignac (born Winnaretta Singer), heiress to the sewing-machine fortune. After her husband’s death in 1901, the Princess established a pattern of commissioning works by composers for performances at her home, including Satie, Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Tailleferre. At its height, between the wars, the Princess’s salon was where the most important new French music of any kind was to be heard.

The other godmother to Poulenc’s concerto was composer and conductor Nadia Boulanger, who pioneered the revival of early music, taught several generations of young composers, and pushed for the acceptance of women conductors. She became a close friend of the Princess and, in 1933, started conducting concerts in the salon. The following year, the Princess suggested that Boulanger commission an organ concerto simple enough for her, Winnaretta, to play. The young composer Jean Françaix was initially asked but the task was soon passed to Poulenc.

By the time that Poulenc completed the concerto in 1938, it was no longer intended for the Princess as its solo performer. It premiered that December with celebrated composer and organist Maurice Duruflé playing the solo part, with Boulanger conducting. Still, the score is dedicated to the Princess and also acknowledges Duruflé’s help with the organ registrations (voicing the instrument in the appropriate octaves and timbres to be heard as distinct from the ensemble).

The form of the single-movement work is perhaps best understood as an introduction and five principal sections (respectively fast–slow–fast–slow–fast), with many suggestions of themes and figures borrowed from one section to another. The introduction offers an imperious statement in a solid G minor from the organ with a mild-mannered response. The strings suggest a lamenta­tion, and the music remains tentative until a decisive Allegro offers a bright forward motion, signaling the first main section. This reaches a brilliant G-major ending that gives way to another Andante, in which the music flows modestly along, mostly subdued. This too rises to a brilliant ending, with huge A-minor and A-major chords on the organ.

The third episode is speedy and agitated; the fourth is calm. The fifth is a reworking of the first Allegro, followed by the return of the opening bars. The remainder is a sublimely peaceful coda in which a viola and cello join the organ chords against a gently rocking figure in the rest of the strings and a long-held G from the organ’s foot pedals.

— adapted from a note by Hugh Macdonald

By the close of the 19th century, Italy had become the epicenter of the opera world. The staged sagas of Verdi and Puccini, teeming with volcanic drama and heart-melting melodies, had whisked audiences across time and place with gripping tales of kings, queens, and gods. Meanwhile, Mascagni and Leoncavallo hewed closer to home with their theatrical visions, contributing to the new verismo style of opera focused on stories of everyday life.

But at the dawn of the 20th century, a new crop of composers emerged to take Italian music in a new direction. Or rather, an old direction. Known as the Generazione dell’ottana (Generation of the ’80s), these young composers made it their mission to recapture the full breadth of Italy’s musical traditions. Before opera began dominating our stages, they reminded their compatriots, instrumental music was revered as the pinnacle of Italian art.

At the front lines of this movement stood Alfredo Casella. An artist of international pedigree — he studied under Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire and was mentored by Mahler — Casella devoted much of his early career to promoting the music of pre-19th-century Italy. He co-led a major revival of Vivaldi’s vast catalog and produced orchestral suites that paid homage to decorated composers of Italy’s past, including Scarlatti and Paganini.

Casella’s breakthrough arrived in 1910 with the premiere of Italia, the 27-year-old’s sweeping, patriotic love letter to his homeland. Unlike works penned foreigners that captured Italy in picture-perfect musical postcards — such as Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence — Casella’s goal was to evoke the joys, sorrows, and passions of the Italian people.

To accomplish this, he turned to Canti della terra e del mare di Sicilia (Songs of the Land and Sea of Sicily), a book of regional folk songs that reflected the lives of the island’s working class. Similar to verismo opera, Casella aimed to probe deep into the Italian soul, using these source materials to shine light not on the gilded glory of the country’s cultural riches, but the workday songs and devotional prayers his countryfolk kept close to their hearts.

“It was natural,” Casella later wrote in his memoir, Music in My Time, “that when I wished to create a national music, I should look for a basis in the national folklore. It is a phase of nationalism which always characterizes the dawn of a new school or the first steps of a personality who is trying to create a national style.”

The first of Italia’s four interconnect­ed movements sets the scene with seismic drama. Unison strings invoke a song of Sicily’s Caltanissetta province, in which a man pronounces a curse on his mistress, as hammered chords from winds and brass slash through the texture like shrapnel. This fiery mood turns tender later in the movement as a new melody emerges, a moving lament sung by workers in the province’s sulfur mines, who recount their realities of hard labor and resilience.

The chime of a distant bell, conjuring a mood of pastoral calm, marks the beginning of the second movement. Soaring above a bed of shimmering strings, the English horn sings a hymn of faith often heard during Good Friday processionals. The third movement returns us to the world of manual labor — this time a lively tune sung by women at work in the marble quarries of Trapani, tasked with striking ropes against freshly excavated marble blocks.

Rest assured, Casella’s vision of Italy is not all workplace toil and religious solemnity. For the finale, he escorts us from shadowy sulfur mines to the sun-drenched mountains of Naples, where we hear the jaunty opening strains of “Funiculì, Funiculà,” a popular Neapolitan song composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza. Written to celebrate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius, the song generates an explosive energy in Casella’s wild orchestrations, as bright fanfares erupt in the brass, fleet-fingered flutes whip across the stage like gale-force winds, and pounding drums drive the music to its ecstatic conclusion.

Casella took particular pride in using Denza’s beloved tune in his homegrown rhapsody. Twenty-five years earlier, Richard Strauss, believing “Funiculì, Funiculà” to be a traditional Italian folk song, had used the tune prominently in his tone poem Aus Italien, leading to a plagiarism lawsuit from Denza. Strauss lost the court case and was forced to pay royalty fees to the Italian. But when Casella approached Denza for the rights to use his tune in Italia, Denza was only too happy to personally sign off on Casella’s request.

— Michael Cirigliano II

Michael Cirigliano II is a freelance writer who has worked with The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His newsletter, Shades of Blue, explores the human stories behind classical music’s most melancholy moments as a means to cultivate calm, connection, and healing.

When it comes to roots, origins, sources, and influences, Claude Debussy is one of the most complex of composers. He was so sensitive to experiences of all kinds — and so absorbent of images and ideas — that we may well envy his capacity to select and marshal artistic impressions of many kinds and then fashion them into new works of art.

Both the outer and inner world contributed to this storehouse of expression, which implies, in the case of La mer (The Sea) that he was not only affected by his own image of the sea and his own contact with it, but that he was also stirred into creating this musical portrait by other artists, especially painters.

His actual contact with the sea was no more varied than that of other reasonably well-to-do Frenchmen of his generation. He spent holidays in Cannes and Arcachon and took advantage of a nearby seacoast during his time at the Villa Medici in Rome. In 1889, he suffered through an alarming voyage in a small boat off Saint-Lunaire, in Brittany.

Visits to London in 1902 and 1903 not only involved Channel crossings, but they also allowed him to see a selection of paintings by J.M.W. Turner, whose work he knew and admired but only then was able to study in depth. That prompted Debussy to begin working on La mer in summer 1903, completing the work two years later.

It was not only Turner whose vivid treatment of such subjects touched Debussy. The impressionists had always appealed profoundly to him, and his work is in many ways a musical counterpart to theirs, La mer especially. The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, whose woodblocks inspired Monet, Degas, and Cassatt, also attracted the composer; the artist’s famous woodblock print, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, appeared on the cover of the full score at Debussy’s request.

“I have loved the ocean and listened to it passionately,” Debussy wrote, as the music instantly confirms. The surge and flow of the sea, the tiniest drops of spray, and its whole broad sweep are vividly portrayed. At the same time the three movements, while only claiming to be symphonic “sketches,” add up to a more than passable imitation of a traditional symphony, the outer movements (themselves connected by cyclic recall of earlier themes) enclosing a brisk and breezy scherzo.

The first movement, De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea), evokes the sun rising to its full splendor over the ocean. It is the furthest from inherited ideas of formal rigor or musical structure, as it expands and progresses without ever going over its earlier material. Some striking ideas are heard many times, notably the abrupt little rhythm of two notes with which the cellos begin, and the rising and falling melody played very early by the trumpet and English horn in octaves. As the movement gathers momentum, the wavelike phrases are more recognizable, and a striking episode for 16 cellos stands out.

The second movement, Jeux des vagues (Play of the Waves), illustrates the intricate splashing and sloshing of waves. Debussy’s delicate orchestral skill is on full display, although there are episodes of disturbing force among the tracery of lighter textures.

The third movement, Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of Wind and Sea), portrays a discourse between the wind and the sea, with clear evocations of the first movement. A broad new theme, not unlike those written by Debussy’s compatriot César Franck, recurs in various guises; two cornets join the brass section, and the themes tumble over each other as the work reaches its shimmering conclusion.

— Hugh Macdonald