Claude Debussy out to sea?

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Music Played in Today's Program

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): La Mer; New Philharmonia; Pierre Boulez, conductor; Sony 68327

On This Day

Births

• 1775 - Finnish-born Swedish composer Bernhard Crusell, in Nystad (Uusikaupunki), Finland

• 1844 - German philosopher and occasional composer Friedrich Nietzsche, in Röcken, near Lützen

• 1905 - Swedish composer Dag Wirén, in Noraberg, Oerebro

Deaths

• 1900 - Czech composer Zdenek Fibich, 49, in Prague

• 1964 - American composer Cole Porter, 73, in Santa Monica, California

Premieres

• 1780 - Haydn: opera La Fedelta Premiata, at Esterházy

• 1886 - Mussorgsky: A Night on Bald Mountain, posthumously, in a re-orchestration by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, in St. Petersburg, by the Russian Symphony conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov (Gregorian date: Oct. 27)

• 1886 - Dvorák: oratorio St. Ludmilla, at the Leeds Festival in England

• 1905 - Debussy: La Mer, at a Lamoureux Concert in Paris, conducted by Chevillard

• 1933 - Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 1, by the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Fritz Stiedry, with the composer as piano soloist, and the trumpet solos played by Alexander Shmidt

• 1938 - R. Strauss: opera, Daphne, in Dresden at the State Opera, karl Boehm conducting, with vocal soloists Margarete Teschemacher (Daphne), Torsten Ralf (Apollo), Helena Jung (Gaea), and Martin Kremer (Leukippos)

• 1943 - Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings, in London

• 1943 - Lukas Foss: The Prairie, by the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky conducting

• 1946 - first concert performance of Britten: Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell), in Liverpool. This music was written for an education film, The Instruments of the Orchestra, which was first shown on November 29, 1946

• 1955 - Xenakis: Metastasis for 61 instruments, in Donaueschingen, Germany

• 1981 - Robert Starer: Violin Concerto, by the Boston Symphony, Seiji Ozawa conducting, with Itzhak Perlman as soloist

• 1985 - Christopher Rouse: Lares Hercii for violin and harpsichord, in Rochester, New York, by Charles Castleman (violin) and Arthur Haas (harpsichord)

• 1988 - Conlon Nancarrow: String Quartet No. 3, in Cologne, Germany, by the Arditti Quartet

• 1997 - Peter Maxwell Davies: The Jacobite Rising, in Glasgow, with the composer conducting soloists and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus

• 2003 - Peter Maxwell Davies: Naxos Quartet No. 3, at Wigmore Hall, London, by the Maggini Quartet

Others

• 1738 - London music publisher John Walsh the younger issues Handel’s Organ Concertos (see Julian date: Oct. 4)

• 1739 - Handel completes his Concerto Grosso No. 6 in London (Gregorian date: Oct. 26)

• 1739 - Handel completes his Concerto Grosso No. 2 in London (see Julian date: Oct. 4)

• 1844 - Johann Strauss, Jr., 18, conducts his own orchestra for the first time, at Dommayer’s Casino in Hietzing (just outside Vienna)

• 1956 - Leonard Bernstein named co-principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic (with Dimitri Mitropoulos)