Music Review: Claude Debussy - Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and La Mer

Claude Debussy was one of the most innovative composers bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, effectively marking the transition from romanticism to modernism. His music is sensuous and beautiful, while at the same time straying far outside the bounds of traditional harmony, the combination of the two aesthetics demonstrating an elusive, dreamy quality heretofore unknown in art music. Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, otherwise known in English as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, was based on an erotic poem by Stephane Mallarme, and is sometimes viewed as a Tone Poem, though it's subtly interweaving, free form textures do not conform to anyone's idea of a story set to music. What it seems to attempt to do instead is to evoke an atmosphere, an environment, in which the listener is invited to lose themselves in a hazy cloud of blurring tonalities and the impression of a lovely afternoon in the forest, amongst the pleasures of nature. In fact, Debussy's music was often labeled impressionism because it seemed to impress images and scenes upon the listener, rather than explicitly evoke them. La Mer is a three part orchestral composition essaying the mysteries, joys, and turbulence of the sea. Debussy here pulls out all the orchestral stops, as he had an intense identification with and admiration of the sea. La Mer's lulls and intensities can seduce any listener into instantly falling in love with the sea, even if they have never seen it, as Debussy hadn't when he started writing it. Although it is not a form of exact programme music, it, like Prelude... before it, is a masterpiece of impressionism. La Mer suggests the sea, the waves, a storm, so masterfully that one sometimes feels as if they were actually experiencing them somehow, while listening. Debussy was one of the most important composers that beget the experimentalism of the 20th century, while still being considered a mainstream composer.