(Dialogue du vent et de la mer)
La Mer (trois esquisses symphoniques) was composed in 1903-05. Debussy has supplied no programme other than that contained in the titles of the different movements. The music is broadly impressionistic, a tonal rendering of colors and odors, of voices imagined or perceived, no less than of moods and reveries. The comment of the French critic, M. Jean d'Undine, is suggestive: "How can any one analyze logically creations which come from a dream, ... and seem the fairy materialization of vague, acute sensations, which, experienced in feverish half-sleep, cannot be disentangled? By a miracle, as strange as it is seductive, M. Debussy possesses the dangerous privilege of being able to seize the most fantastical sports of light and of fluid whirlwinds. He is cater-cousin to the sorcerer, the prestidigitateur...."
And it has elsewhere been written of these pieces, by way of an indication of their mood:
"For Debussy the sea is wholly a thing of dreams, a thing vaguely yet rhapsodically perceived, a bodiless thing, a thing of shapes that are gaunt or lovely, wayward or capricious; visions that are full of bodement, or fitful, or passionately insistent: but that always pertain to a supra-mundane world, a region altogether of the spirit. It is a sea which has its shifting and lucent surfaces, which even shimmers and traditionally mocks. But it is a sea that is shut away from too-curious an inspection, to whose murmurs or imperious commands few have needed to pay heed; a sea whose eternal sonorities and immutable enchantments are hidden behind veils that open to few, and to none who attend without, it may be, a certain rapt and curious eagerness."
FOOTNOTES:
[37] Debussy follows the sensible procedure of inscribing upon his scores the date of their composition, instead of their opus numbers.
[38] The tone of the horns and other brass instruments is sometimes muffled, for special effects, by the insertion of a pad in the bell of the instrument.
[39] Translated by Mr. Philip Hale.
[40] This third "nocturne" is scored for orchestra and a choir of women's voices. They sing no words, the eight soprano and eight mezzo-soprano voices being treated as part of the instrumental fabric.
[41] Translated by Mr. Philip Hale.