I am continuing with conductors this week. This posting is about Debussy’s La Mer and a famous recording of it by Roger Désormière and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1950. Désormière, was a brilliant French conductor, and he was an outstanding interpreter of the French repertory. He also championed 20th-century French music, conducting premieres of works by Satie, Koechlin, Roussel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Messiaen, Boulez et al. I hope that you enjoy the piece.
I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer (0:00) “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea”
II. Jeux de vagues (8:50) “The Play of the Waves”
III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (14:59) “Dialogue of the Wind and Sea”
Debussy, La Mer
However problematic the label “impressionistic” is for the music of Claude Debussy, it does serve to highlight a crucial moment in the relationship between music and the other arts. After a century in which the Romantics celebrated music as the highest form of artistic expression, writers and painters began to free themselves from the ties to concrete reality that had seemed so limiting next to music’s ineffable, abstract qualities. Their resultant breakthroughs inspired composers, most fruitfully Debussy, to think about the materials of their art in new and previously unimaginable ways. Specific visual inspiration for the 1905 orchestral triptych La mer came, ironically, from the earlier generation of painters: J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), whom Debussy lauded as the “finest creator of mystery in art,” and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), whose The Great Wave off Kanagawa print was the composer’s choice to adorn the title page of the score. Debussy’s own life experience provided an emotional canvas; he had thought at one point to become a sailor and kept a lifelong attachment to “my old friend, the sea; it is always endless and beautiful. It is really the thing in nature which best puts you in your place.”
Among the visual artists’ innovations was the use of color as an end in itself, and among the most influential legacies of Debussy was the use of musical color as an end in itself. Other musical elements also become agents of color. Harmonic changes serve as color washes; chords dissolve rather than resolve. Short melodic motives rather than fully developed themes sparkle in brief solos, substituting timbre and movement for narrative coherence.
Roger Désomière
September 13, 1898 – October 25, 1963
During his childhood, the young Roger Désormière would give small summer concerts instead of playing children’s games. In due course, he entered the Paris Conservatory. Désormière then worked as a flautist in various Parisian orchestras before making his debut as a conductor with the Concert Pleyel in 1921. From 1923 onwards he collaborated with the group of composers known as Les Six, and was himself a member of the École d’Arcueil, which was founded by Erik Satie, Henrie Sauguet, Maxime Jacob, and Henri Cliquot-Pleyel. He conducted the four performances of ballets choreographed by Massine with music by Satie and Milhaud at the Soirées de Paris, and composed the music for Cocteau’s abbreviated production of Roméo et Juliet. After a year as chief conductor with the Ballets Suedois, he took the same position with Diaghliev’s Ballets Russes in 1925, staying with the company and touring widely until 1929. Among the composers who worked with the company and whose music Désormière conducted were Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Poulenc.
Désormière changed the focus of his repertoire when in 1930 he became the director of the Société de Musique d’Autrefois, conducting numerous works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by composers such as Campra and Rameau. Alongside this work, he became active in films from 1932 onwards, both as a composer of film music and as the director of music for the company Pathé-Nathan. Another close association, lasting from its foundation in 1934 until the end of his conducting career was with the Orchestre National de Radio France, France’s premier radio orchestra. In 1936, Désomière became chief conductor of the Paris Symphony Orchestra as well as permanent conductor at the Opéra-Comique, Paris; here he refreshed the repertoire with operas by Chabrier, Ravel, and Richard Strauss, and in 1942 led a legendary production of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande with Irène Joachim and Jacques Jansen. Between 1944 and 1946, he was the director of the Opéra-Comique, Paris; and during 1945-1946, he was the associate director of the Paris Opera.
Following the end of the war, Désormière conducted abroad, with increasing frequency, notably with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in 1949, he appeared with the Orchestre National de Radio France at the Edinburgh Festival. During this period, he helped to form the Association Française des Musiciens Progressistes with Serge Nigg and Elsa Barraine, and gave the first performance of many new works; in 1952, he suffered a stroke, which paralyzed him, and he died eleven years later. A musician of definite political views, to the left of the spectrum, he was also a keen birdwatcher and a lover of flowers. The importance of Désomière to contemporary French music cannot be overstated; he conducted the first performances of such notable works as The Prodigal Son, by Prokofiev (1928), Action de grace and Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine by Messaien (1936 and 1945), the Organ Concerto of Poulenc (1939), the Symphony in Three Movements by Stravinsky (1946), Le Soleil des eaux by Pierre Boulez (1950), and the Symphony No. 1 of Henri Dutilleux (1951).
Taken from A-Z of Conductors, by David Patmore