Program Notes: Debussy La Mer

OLIVIER MESSIAEN 
Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings) 
BORN: December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France 
DIED: April 27, 1992, in Clichy, near Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1930 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 19, 1931, in Paris, France, with the Orchestre Straram conducted by Walther Straram. 

What to Listen For: 

• Although cast in a single movement, this work is divided into three distinct sections, discernible by tempo (slow, fast, very slow), volume (soft, brashly loud, very quiet) and mood (yearning, agitation, serenity). 

Although cast in a single movement, this work is divided into three distinct sections, discernible by tempo (slow, fast, very slow), volume (soft, brashly loud, very quiet) and mood (yearning, agitation, serenity). 

“With Messiaen, all is prayer,” wrote Charles Tournemire, a noted organist who mentored the young composer. Les offrandes oubliées reaches for a spiritual plane that is devotional, ecstatic and luminous.  

Steeped in Catholic mysticism, Olivier Messiaen prefaced the score with a short poem. Brief verses portray the offerings of God — the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross and promise of eternal life — along with what the composer considered to be humanity’s greatest sin: forgetting God’s grace. 

Les offrandes oubliées opens with a yearning declamation in the strings that confirm Messiaen’s statement that “my models were first Debussy, then plainchant and the work of the great Hindu rhythmician Śārṅgadeva.” Alongside a shimmering melody in divisi (“divided”) violins and violas, meek chords in the woodwinds and horns undulate; a slow accumulation of grouped 10, 11, 9 and 7 beats create a sense of timeless suspension — until interrupted by a blast of syncopated horns. 

Depicting “a panting, frantic, unceasing course” of sin in Messiaen’s poem — or perhaps a flight from temptation — galloping brass and strings propel the middle section. A booming bass drum punctuates slashing strings and belligerent tuttis led by the horns. The opening melody reappears, now sinuous and serpentine, only to sink into a furious welter of tremolo strings and clamoring cymbals. 

Marked in the score as “Extrêmement lent, avec une grande pitié et un grand amour” (extremely slow with great compassion and love), Messiaen elongates the delirious echo of plainchant from the opening. A glacially slow chorale in the strings crystallizes into serene, time-frozen transcendence. 

BÉLA BARTÓK 
Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, Opus Posthumous 
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary 
DIED: September 26, 1945, in New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1945, 1947–1949 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 2, 1949, in Minneapolis, with soloist William Primrose and the Minneapolis Symphony conducted by Antal Doráti. 

What to Listen For: 

• The cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the violist’s skill and finesse — appears in the first movement. The violist is challenged to play double and triple stops: two and three notes played at once. 

The cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the violist’s skill and finesse — appears in the first movement. The violist is challenged to play double and triple stops: two and three notes played at once. 

Olivier Messiean was deeply moved by the death of Béla Bartók. In a lengthy obituary, the French composer not only praised Bartók as a passionate defender of the then-controversial Debussy but observed that “the great force behind Bartók is his native land, its songs and its dances.” 

Although his concertos, string quartets and solo piano music won a secure a place in the repertory, Bartók was also a well-regarded ethnomusicologist. With their aching melodies and irregular yet catchy dance rhythms, the songs he collected and painstakingly transcribed formed the essence of his music.  

As war raged in Europe, Bartók and his family fled Hungary for the United States in 1940. Having last toured the U.S. in 1928, he was not well known and certainly underappreciated as a composer. As expatriates, he and his wife cobbled together an income from teaching stints, tours, publication royalties and a research stipend studying the collection of Yugoslavian folk music at Columbia University. 

The composer’s fame grew steadily, attracting commissions among which was a request for a concerto from violist William Primrose. Beset by illness, Bartók concentrated on the solo part, cautioning in a letter to Primrose that “some passages will prove uncomfortable or unplayable” and hinting at the demanding and virtuosic music to come. But Bartók died before he could finish the work. His friend, violist Tibor Serly, received the concerto’s sketches from the composer’s widow in 1947, and began fleshing out harmonies and instrumentation. 

Accompanied by what the composer planned as “rather transparent” orchestration, the soloist plays a brief, mournful introduction before unfurling the main theme in the Moderato. A series of exchanges follow, notably a bluesy interlude by the trumpet and strings. Preceded by a solo oboe, clarinet and bassoons, the cadenza serves as a bridge to the recapitulation of the main theme heard in the flute and horn. Serly notes that “the movement ends with strange harmonies in muted trumpets descending into the viola solo’s three chromatic notes.” 

Echoing his Third Piano Concerto, the Adagio religioso recalls the composer’s “night music” enfolded into many of his compositions: An atmosphere of loneliness and brooding contemplation. Horns and stomping timpani shake off this bleak reverie by ushering in a miniature cadenza with rapid-fire triple stops. 

The concluding Allegro vivace launches into a lively rondo with a running, quintessentially Bartókian melody. Dramatically contrasting calls-and-responses — and a sprightly, Scottish-sounding Romanian folk tune anchoring the movement — culminate in a buoyant ending. 

LILI BOULANGER 
D’un soir triste (Of a Sad Evening) 
BORN: August 21, 1893, in Paris, France 
DIED: March 15, 1918, at Mézy-sur-Seine 
WORK COMPOSED: 1917–1918 
WORLD PREMIERE: January 19, 1921, in Paris, France, with the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique. 

What to Listen For: 

• Lili Boulanger had an ear for unusual and ethereal combinations of instruments. Celesta and harp tiptoe against hushed clarinets and tremolo violas during the central section’s violin solo. 

Lili Boulanger had an ear for unusual and ethereal combinations of instruments. Celesta and harp tiptoe against hushed clarinets and tremolo violas during the central section’s violin solo. 

Before her death at age 24, Lili Boulanger was hailed as a promising composer. In 1913, she was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome — France’s most prestigious music prize, previously won by Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet and many others. A decade earlier Claude Debussy, another winner of the Prix, made what was then a radical suggestion in one of his newspaper columns: the competition should be open to women. 

Born into a musical family, Lili (a diminutive nickname for “Marie-Juliette”) suffered from chronic illness and was deemed too fragile to formally study music despite her obvious gifts. Sworn by her elderly father to take care of Lili after his death, her older sister Nadia remembered meeting the newborn Lili: “I walked into the room a carefree child and I left it as an adult.” Nadia turned 6 a few weeks later. The two sisters remained intertwined from birth and beyond death. Frail and weak in her final years, Lili sang and otherwise dictated her final compositions to Nadia, who helped complete D’un soir triste. 

Nadia never married. She became a pioneering conductor, a confidante of Igor Stravinsky and the most influential music teacher of the 20th century. She taught multiple generations of American composers, including Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, George Walker and Philip Glass. Nadia also held an annual memorial service for Lili: Olivier Messiaen performed one year but his unique improvisations on the organ ended their friendship. 

Poignant and foreboding, D’un soir triste is a funeral procession. Amid a cortège of chords in the strings, the main theme is played by the clarinet and bass clarinet. This lament gradually contorts into a searing exclamation by the orchestra. 

The roar of a tam tam and guttural pounding of a bass drum shifts into a sombre episode evoking a deflated military band. Heartbeat-like timpani mark a return to a parade whose hopeful mood is soon disfigured by anguished dissonance. A final violin solo, supported by rippling chords in harp and celesta, offers glimmers of a forthcoming dawn. 

CLAUDE DEBUSSY 
La mer (The Sea) 
BORN: August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris, France 
DIED: March 25, 1918, in Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1903–1905 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 15, 1905, in Paris, France, with the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Camille Chevillard. 

What to Listen For: 

• Debussy divides the strings — double basses at the beginning and the cellos later in the first movement — resulting in rich, wave-like timbres. 

Debussy divides the strings — double basses at the beginning and the cellos later in the first movement — resulting in rich, wave-like timbres. 

Capturing the the ever-evolving, often churning rhythms of the sea, La mer is the closest Claude Debussy came to writing a symphony. The composer’s subtitle, “Three Symphonic Sketches,” conjures a sense of improvisation with unexpected, protean forms and kaleidoscopic timbres. 

Throughout La mer, tremolo strings create giant waves of sound, cresting and falling (or vice-versa) from higher (violins, violas) to lower (cellos, double basses) pitched instruments. Short, undulating melodic fragments repeat in groups of two and three to create rhythmic excitement. 

De l'aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea) unveils a quiet sunrise with muted and divisi double basses. As some play plucked notes while others bow, divisi cellos and violas rise ever higher towards a lyrical oboe solo. The noontime sun is welcomed with fanfare of declamatory brass, crashing cymbals and throaty tam tam swells. 

Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves) is a scherzo with whirling colors, from frolicking woodwinds and playful staccato trumpets to capering strings. After a series of episodes, tremolo violas and cellos followed by two harp glissandi open a passage into an uneasy calm with a wistful, ascending motif repeated successively in the clarinet, oboe, trumpet, flute and glockenspiel. 

In the Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and Sea), Debussy unites La mer’s musical wind and waves — motifs, themes and orchestral textures — into an oceanic finale. 

Christopher DeLaurenti © 2024 

Christopher DeLaurenti researches orchestral music, jazz, soundscape composition and computer music. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. Christopher has taught ongoing courses at the Peabody Institute, Cornish College of the Arts and The College of William & Mary.