III. Three flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, two harps, eight soprano voices, eight mezzo-soprano voices, strings, modérément animé, 12-8.
Debussy before his death made many changes in the instrumentation of these Nocturnes.
“LA MER,” TROIS ESQUISSES SYMPHONIQUES
I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer II. Jeux de vagues III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer
As these sketches are frankly impressionistic, the enjoyment of the hearer depends largely on his own susceptibility and imagination. There are persons who do not like the ocean. Oscar Wilde was disappointed in the Atlantic; but there are more normal beings, far from being poseurs, who cannot exclaim with Jules Laforgue, “the sea, always new, always respectable!” We know a man who was doomed to spend a vacation in a summer hotel on a bluff looking down on Nantucket Sound. Whenever he sat on a bench he turned his back to the ocean and faced pine trees, giving as an excuse that “the sea got on his nerves.”
Debussy’s Sea is not for them, neither is it for those who find pleasure in Mendelssohn’s overture, Sea Calm and Prosperous Voyage, for Debussy knows a wilder ocean, many-faced, now exulting in Æschylean laughter, now spasmodic, sinister, terrible, and never so terrible as when calm, or inviting mortals to sport with it, and smiling—as though it were forgetful of rotting ships and sunken treasure and the drowned far down that were for a time regarded curiously by monsters of the deep.
These orchestral pieces (I. From Dawn till Noon on the Ocean; II. Play of the Waves; III. Dialogue of Wind and Sea) were performed for the first time at a Lamoureux concert in Paris, October 15, 1905. Camille Chevillard conducted.
Debussy wrote in August, 1903, from Bichain to his publisher Jacques Durand[24] that he was at work on La Mer. “If God will be good to me the work will be in a very advanced state on my return [to Paris].” He wrote later that the sketches would have three titles: Mer belle aux Îles Sanguinaires; Jeux de vagues; Le Vent fait danser la mer; and in September he said the work was intended for Chevillard. In September, 1904, he wrote from Dieppe, “I wanted to finish La Mer here, but I must still work on the orchestration, which is as tumultuous and varied as the sea (with all my excuses to the latter).” In January, 1905, he was not sure that the title, “De l’Aube à midi sur la mer” would do: “So many contradictory things are dancing in my head, and this last attack of grippe has added its particular dance.” He also wrote that he had remade the end of Jeux de vagues. He was disturbed because Chevillard spoke of the difficulties in the music, but if he gave the score to Colonne there might be a row. In July and September, 1905, he complained of “very curious corrections” made by someone in the proofs; and the idea of a performance at Chevillard’s first concert seemed to him as bad as a performance at the last one of the season. At rehearsal it was found that the proofs had been badly read.
The Sketches, dedicated to Jacques Durand, were published at Paris in 1905. Debussy made an arrangement for two pianos; André Caplet made one in 1908 for three pianos.