No painter’s career reveals the evolution from late Romanticism into Modernism more vividly than that of Claude Monet and no painter created pictures as closely approaching the essence of music.
Monet: Morning on the Seine near Giverny 1897 Photo: Public Domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art
No composer, although he was twenty-two years younger than the painter, followed more closely in the same trajectory than Claude Debussy.
By the time Claude Monet was born in 1840, the Industrial Revolution had already turned what were formally rural market towns, particularly in the north of France, into factory and mining wastelands. These we have come to know through the novels of Émile Zola. The suburbs of large towns were also now expanded and darkened by manufacturing, sometimes forming rings around urban areas like the defensive moats that had once encircled these same towns in medieval times.
With this came a growing sense of separation from Nature.
The great impulse to return to Nature, which came with the Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century, was intensified in the mid-nineteenth century by a growing awareness of the dehumanisation and impoverishment that was a consequence of industrialisation.
The awareness of the need for Nature’s healing powers was made more acute. Elements, essential to well-being, were being eliminated in the smoke, iron, steam and noise of the dark satanic mills. This fear was manifested in all branches of the arts.
Monet: Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) 1891 Photo: Public Domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Obvious evidence of the dread of this plague stirring people to action was the search for and recording of folk songs throughout Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries.
In Monet's vibrant images of the sea, mostly the moody sea of France’s Atlantic coast, we observe water in motion. We see the clouds pass over the restless ocean. We experience the extreme flashes of light that reach the retina and are gone in a second. These sea pictures are prime examples of the Impressionist aspiration to capture a process not simply to freeze a state.
Monet: The Manneporte (Étretat) 1883 Photo: Public Domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art
It is the same aspiration, a parallel to Monet’s visions of the ocean, which is given voice in Debussy’s tone poem 'La Mer'.
Music Details:
DEBUSSY:
En Bateau, Petite Suite Chandos CHAN 8756
Cloches à travers les feuilles, Images Bk 2 Onyx 4028
Jeux de vagues, La Mer RCO Live RCO 08001
Clair de Lune, Suite Bergamasque Philips 456 874
Arr Stokowski: La Cathédrale Engloutie Telarc CD 80338
Nuages, Nocturnes DG 471 332
Jardins sous la pluie, Estampes Berlin Classics 1345
Reflets dans l’eau, Images Bk 1 BIS CD 1105
De l’aube à midi sur la mer, La Mer EMI 5 58045
Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune EMI 5 58045
Mandoline EMI CMS 7 64095
Printemps, Images EMI CDM 7 69588
