LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Debussy: La Mer
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Although Pelléas was Debussy's only completed opera, he began several opera projects which remained unfinished, his fading concentration, increasing procrastination, and failing health perhaps the reasons. He had finished some partial musical sketches and some unpublished libretti for operas based on Shakespeare's As You Like It, Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, and Joseph Bedier's La Legende de Tristan.
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This is a splendid collection of essential orchestral Debussy, masterfully played and very well recorded. Haitink perhaps is not the most atmospheric conductor of Impressionistic music, but he is sensitive to the many nuances, and it is a pleasure to hear this music so well performed. La Mer and Nocturnes are outstanding, and a welcome inclusion is the 1957 recording of Berceuse héroique conducted by Eduard van Beinum, the Concertgebouw's previous music director. It is only of four minutes' duration, but a shining example of the artistry of this unjustly neglected master conductor, whose own magnificent recordings of La Mer, Nocturnes, and Images have just now been issued in Holland on Philips (462 069). Limited program notes on this Philips Duo set, but they are in four languages. High quality here, representing some of the better engineering efforts of the Philips engineers.
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The music of La boite à joujoux, which lasts 40 minutes, is delicate, witty and subtle, full of references to popular songs, well-known classical themes and allusions to Debussy's own compositions. Although there are some notable parodies - e.g. of Gounod's Soldier's Chorus and Mendelssohn's Wedding March - the score is never vulgar or bombastic. At one point there is an exotic solo woodwind arabesque which Debussy claimed in a footnote was 'an old Hindu chant still used today in the taming of elephants'.
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This is probably Debussy's best-known orchestral work. It was inspired by a pastoral of Stephane Mallarme, evoking a pagan landscape in which the faun--a mythological creature of the forest who is half man, half goat--awakes in the woods and tries to remember: Was he visited by three lovely nymphs or was this but a dream? He will never know. The sun is warm, the earth fragrant. He curls himself up and falls into a wine-drugged sleep.
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In the last and longest of the four essays in this volume, Lewin turns to the last and longest of Debussy's twelve Preludes for piano, Book II. In a rigorous, no-nonsense style, he applies concepts of set theory to explain the sometimes rather elusive compositional logic of "Feux d'artifice."
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This vivid yet suggestive imagery is very well suited to the spirit of Debussy's works. It is seen in Debussy's view of nature, which is typically vague, dreamy, with a type of "luminosity." La Mer is an obvious example and will be dealt with further on in the paper.
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La Mer