From our archive: La Mer

Our Music Season continues with writing from our archive by Nicholson Baker. Baker is the author of eight novels, including Vox (1992); among his works of non-fiction are U&I, about the author’s appreciation of John Updike, published by Granta Books. This piece was originally published in Granta’s Music issue of 2001, which you can buy online at a 30% discount.

La Mer

One day after school, when I was thirteen, my bassoon teacher told me that the Rochester Philharmonic, where he played second bassoon, was rehearsing a piece of music called La Mer. Mer didn’t mean ‘mother’, he said, it meant ‘sea’, and the remarkable thing about the piece, according to him, was that it really and truly did sound like the sea. He played me some bits from the score while I put together my instrument. What he played didn’t sound like the sea to me, but that wasn’t surprising, because nothing sounds like the sea on the bassoon. A few months later, I bought a record of Pierre Boulez performing La Mer with the New York Philharmonic. I put on the heavy, padded headphones, that were like inflatable life-rafts for each ear, and I heard Debussy’s side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests, and I saw the sudden immensity of the marine horizon that followed the storm, and I was amazed by how true to liquid life it all was. It was just as good as Joseph Conrad’s ‘Typhoon’, then one of my favourite stories – maybe even better.

Claude Debussy

Later, after I’d applied to music school, I bought the pocket score of La Mer and tried to figure out how Debussy did it, but the score didn’t help much. What gave Debussy the confidence to pick up half a melody and then flip it away, like a torn piece of seaweed, after a moment’s study? How did he turn an orchestra, a prickly ball of horsehair and old machinery, into something that splashed and surged, lost its balance and regained it? There may be things about La Mer that are slightly dissatisfying – there may be too much of the whole-tone scale in a few places (a novelty then, worn out by cop-show soundtracks now), and Debussy made a mistake, I think, when he revised the brass fanfare out of the ending – but this piece has so many natural wonders that you drive past the drab moments as if they are convenience stores, without paying attention to them, looking out at the tidal prodigies.

Debussy finished La Mer – adjusting its orchestration and correcting proofs – during a month in England in the summer of 1905, in Eastbourne, a late-Victorian summer resort where he had gone with Emma Bardac. Emma was married to a well-to-do banker at the time, and was very pregnant with Debussy’s only child. A few years ago, paging through one of the biographies, I stopped at a picture of Debussy frowning down into the viewfinder of a camera, on the stone-parapeted balcony of the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne. The camera was pointed out at the English Channel. I was living in Ely at the time, north of Cambridge, but it occurred to me, as I consulted a map and a schedule, that I could easily go to Eastbourne and return the same day.

I rode the screeching, battered local train out one March morning; I walked into town and stopped at a used book store, which had nothing about Debussy, and then at the tourist information centre, where a kind woman pulled out a red notebook entitled FAMOUS PEOPLE, with entries for Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne (who wrote ‘To a Sea Mew’ nearby, at Beachy Head), King Arthur and Debussy. The woman pointed me in the direction of the Grand Hotel, and when I finally found it, after turning the wrong way on the shore road, I was told that room 277 was the Debussy Suite, but that they couldn’t let me in to look out its windows because it was almost check-in time and that night’s guests might arrive at any moment.

So I sat in the garden on a white bench, with my back to the sea, looking up at the balcony where Debussy and Emma had, not so many years ago, looked out over the channel toward an invisible France. The balcony was directly above the main entrance, under the letters that spelled GRAND HOTEL. In the pale sunlight, I sketched the facade of the hotel, with its eye-guiding beaux-arts urns and scrolls (designed by R. K. Blessley in 1876); it seemed to me that Debussy, often penniless and foolish about money, had felt industriously rich here, perhaps for the last time, as he put the final touches on his ebullient sea poem. A few months later, back in Paris, his wife, abandoned and heartbroken, shot herself near the heart, and though she recovered, everyone’s life was different afterwards.

I went back inside the hotel and up the fire stairs to the second floor. (The stairs had nicely carved banister-knobs.) It was one of those buildings in which the flights of stairs and the placement of windows are out of synchrony: in the stairwell, the top of the window frame was low to the floor, so I had to bend way down, my head pounding, to get a proper view. I had only a minute or two before I needed to leave to catch the train back. There was dried rain-dust on the outside of the glass, but I looked out over the water and saw, near to shore, an unexpected play of green and gold and turquoise waves – not waves, really, because they were so small, but little manifestations of fluid under-energy. The clouds had the look that a glass of rinse water gets when you’re doing a watercolour – slowly diluting black roilings, which move under the white water that you made earlier when you rinsed the white paint from the brush. But the sea didn’t choose to reflect the clouds that day; it had its own private mallard-neck pallet, the fine gradations of which varied with the slopes of the wind-textured swells. Through the dirty window, I thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen.

Coming up in our Music Season: an extract of Colin Grant’s group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics; and writing from our archive by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times.

Granta published its Music issue (right) in 2001 – it included writing by Andrew O’Hagan, Blake Morrison, Julian Barnes, Julie Burchill, Amit Chaudhuri, Janice Galloway and Alan Rusbridger. You can buy it here for our special online discount of £7.70.