La Mer: trois esquisses symphoniques — Claude Debussy | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

De l’aube à midi sur la mer

Jeux de vagues

Dialogue du vent et de la mer

Debussy completed the orchestration of La Mer at Eastbourne in 1905. He had started the work two years earlier while on holiday at Bichain in Burgundy, which is nowhere near the sea. But, as he explained, he had “an endless store of memories of the sea and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.” Besides, La Mer is not just an exercise in observation. Declared enemy of the symphony though Debussy was, his “three symphonic sketches” are at least as symphonic as picturesque. At the same time, while the imagery is clearly inspired by the movement of the sea and the changing light, it is more often a case of generalised atmosphere than specific detail.

In De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Midday on the Sea) it is safe to assume only that it opens in darkness and ends under the bright sun of midday and that those two events correspond to the slow introduction and the expansive coda. Prominent among the features that begin to take shape in the introduction is a theme on muted trumpet which – it is revealed when it appears in full glory as a chorale on four horns in the coda – was intended from the start to carry the sunrise message of the whole movement.

The central scherzo, Jeux de vagues (Games of Waves), is so flexibly constructed that it seems to proceed on spontaneous impulse and so resourcefully scored that it seems to reflect every chance change of wind and current. Resourcefully abundant in melodic ideas, it presents new themes not only in the opening section but also in the central development, and in what might otherwise be called a recapitulation violins and cellos introduce a waltz that rises through the strings in ever increasing animation before the wind drops and leaves the sea comparatively becalmed.

There is little calm in the last movement, an eventful rondo, which opens with the low rumble of an approaching storm on cellos and basses. As well as its descriptive function, however, the Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea) has a long-term structural duty to perform. Within a few bars it recalls two motifs from the beginning of the work, including the muted trumpet theme which was converted to the midday horn chorale. The chorale appears once more towards the end of the movement where - intoned by the whole of the brass section in counterpoint with the wind-swept rondo theme on woodwind - it fulfils its long-destined function of welding the whole work, symphony and seascape, indivisibly together.

Claude Debussy

12 Preludes arranged for orchestra by Colin Matthews (born 1946)

Brouillards (Book II, No.1)

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (Book I, No.7)

Minstrels (Book I, No.12)

Canope (Book II, No.10)

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (Book I, No.4)

La Puerta del Vino (Book II, No.3)

Feuilles mortes (Book II, No.2)

Général Lavine – excentric (Book II, No.6)

La danse de Puck (Book I, No.11)

Les tierces alternées (Book II, No.11)

Le vent dans la plaine (Book I, No.3) –

La fille aux cheveux de lin (Book I, No.8)

‘The fact is,’ Debussy once remarked, ‘that the beauty of a work of art will always be a mystery, that is to say that one will never be able to work out “how it’s done”.’ There is no better illustration of the truth of that statement than Debussy’s own Preludes for piano – issued in two books of twelve each in 1910 and 1912 respectively – which so magically and so beautifully evoke sights, sounds and even scents by means of nothing more than what the composer called ‘that box of hammers and strings.’

The distinction of Colin Matthews’s orchestral arrangements of the 24 Preludes – written over a period of five years following a commission from Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra in 2001 – is that he seems to have worked out exactly ‘how it’s done.’ Far from writing note-for note transcriptions, Matthews has discovered the secret of each piece and in most cases translated it faithfully, which does not mean literally, into orchestral terms. “It has been fascinating,” Matthews has said, “to find ways of transcribing textures which are at first sight wholly pianistic into orchestral music which, I hope, would be just as difficult to translate back to the piano.”

One of the factors involved in converting piano music into authentic orchestral music is that the more varied palette sometimes requires a bigger canvas. Brouillards (Mists) is only a few bars longer in the orchestral version than in the original but the brief extension of the melody that passes from oboe to cor anglais over swirling celesta and harp arpeggios towards the end of the piece gives it the space it needs.

Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the West Wind Saw) was inspired by an account of the adventures of the Hans Andersen’s West Wind, the “wild boy” who “smacks of the sea.” It is a virtuoso piano piece featuring keyboard devices which would make little sense transfered literally to the orchestra. So, while the harmonies of the first five bars of the orchestral version (before the entry of the chorale theme on trombones and tuba) are implied by Debussy’s introductory arpeggios, the material is actually Matthews’s own. Another creative intervention is a series of horn calls in the central climax of the piece.

The protagonists of Minstrels are not medieval troubadors but thoroughly modern black-face entertainers of the kind Debussy is said to have encountered busking in the streets of Eastbourne when he was working on La Mer in 1905. Among the earliest exponents of jazz in Europe, they are celebrated here not so much for their musicianship as for their clowning, as Matthews’s wittily grotesqe scoring acknowledges.

In direct contrast, Canope is Debussy’s ode to an Egyptian urn: he was the proud owner of two of the much-prized head-shaped covers of these ancient funerary vessels. Apart from one extra bar where Debussy has a pause, the orchestral version - the chordal procession (recalling Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition) on woodwind, the incantatory muted trumpet, the invocations on solo woodwind - is very close to the original.

The title of “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” (The sounds and the scents dance in the evening air) comes from Baudelaire’s Harmonies du soir, which Debussy had set to music as a song in 1889. Less fragrantly but more helpfully, he might have chosen the next line, “Valse mélancholique et langoureux vertige” (“Melancholy waltz and dizzy languor”). While the change of key from A major to C major for the orchestral version is a purely practical strategy, the comparatively slow tempo applied by Matthews to this 5/4 waltz indulges the poetic languor.

La Puerta del vino (The Wine Gate) – inspired by a picture postcard of a gate in the Alhambra sent to the composer by his Spanish colleague Manuel de Falla - is also transposed into a different key. Whatever the tonality (D flat major for the piano, E flat for the orchestra), the habanera rhythm remains a persistent presence in the bass while the eventful material above it presents what Debussy described as “brusque contrasts between violence and impassioned sweetness.”

The title of Feuilles mortes (Dead Leaves) is thought to derive from a poem by the composer’s friend Gabriel Mourey beginning “Under the cold and melancholy autumn wind.” Its chilly sonorities lend themselves so readily to orchestral treatment that this is one case where the piano original might possibly be reconstructed from Matthews’s score, idiomatically written for strings though it is.

Général Lavine – excentric is another indication of Debussy’s amused interest in the jazz idiom. In this case it is a cake-walk as performed by the American clown Edward Lavine, “the main who has soldiered all his life,” at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs Elysées in 1910. With the military allusions presented by the trumpets (which are also entrusted with two brief references to “The Camptown Races”) and a little additional colour here and there, the orchestral version offers a particularly vivid caricature.

Two bars longer than the original and richer in texture, Matthews’s version of La Danse de Puck amounts to a tiny tone poem featuring not only Shakespeare’s sprite but also Oberon, whose presence is signalled by a magical off-key horn calls just after the first entry of Puck’s little dance tune on pirouetting flutes.

In that it is a technical study of the kind that Debussy was to collect in the piano Etudes three years later, Les tierces alternées (Alternating thirds) is an anomaly among the Preludes. Matthews converts it into a brilliant orchestral scherzo partly by discreetly sustaining a hidden melodic line on bassoons and cellos and partly by introducing subte metrical variations into Debussy’s regular 2/4.

If Les tierces alternées is the most inspired of Matthews’s orchestral arrangements, Le vent dans la plaine (The wind on the plain) and La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with flaxen hair) are the most radical departures from the original. Le vent dans la plaine, inspired by a line from Favart, is discreetly extended by a development absent from the original and is almost half as long again. As for La fille aux cheveux de lin, ‘What to do with such familiar music?’ Matthews asked himself. ‘I made several failed attempts at it, before deciding to slow it to half speed and score it for strings and harps. This gives it a weight which is admittedly at odds with the simplicity of the original, but - played without a break after Le vent - it seemed to make an appropriate coda to the set.’