REFLECTIONS OF THE SEA
Classical Compositions Inspired by the Sea
By: Matt Joyner
Nature is an omnipresent beautiful thing that surrounds us each
and every day, and has long provided inspiration to the music we hear.
Countless musical compositions have been made thanks to this
inspiration.
This paper will discuss several classical compositions
from different genres that have been inspired by the sea and other
things relating to sea life.
It will also strive to discuss how some
of these composers depicted the sea with their compositional
techniques.
Symphonic Compositions
A Sea Symphony
British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, composed his first
symphony around the sea.
to as the Sea Symphony.
This is why this symphony is also referred
The first sketches for this work were made in
1903, and it was gradually worked on over the next seven years.1
British composers were expected to produce large choral works during
this time.2 Vaughan Williams took this into account in his composition
of his symphony by adding a large chorus and two soli (baritone and
soprano).
1
However, this work is still symphonic rather than narrative
David Manning, Vaughan Williams on Music (Oxford:
2008), 335.
2
Byron Adams, Vaughan Williams Essays (Burlington:
Company, 2003), 92.
Oxford University Press,
Ashgate Publishing
Joyner
or dramatic.3 The orchestra has an equal share with the chorus and
soloists in carrying on these musical ideas of the sea.4
The words to
the composition were selected from various poems in Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass, specifically ‘Sea Drift,’ ‘Song of the Exposition,’
and ‘Passage to India.’5
There are two main musical themes throughout the symphony.
The
first centers around a harmonic progress to which the opening words
for the chorus are sung.
The other theme centers around the melodic
phrase sung by the chorus: “and on its limitless heaving breast, the
ships…”6
Throughout, the sea is a metaphor for the ocean of existence,
on whose ‘limitless heaving breast’ the reckless soul sails forth for
deep waters, where no terrestrial mariner has dared yet to go.7
Vaughan Williams did not stop here with his compositions
reflecting the sea.
He also wrote a one-act opera, Riders to the Sea,
that will be discussed later in the paper.
La Mer
French composer, Claude Debussy, started composing a symphonic
work entitled La Mer (French for “the sea”) in the summer of 1903
while staying with his in-laws in the country.8
Debussy had long been
infatuated with the sea.9 To Debussy, the sea was the mightiest and
3
Manning, VW on Music, 335.
Ibid, 335.
5
Ibid, 336.
6
Ibid, 335.
7
Adams, VW Essays, 55.
8
Simon Trezise, Debussy: La Mer (Cambridge:
1994), ix.
9
Trezise, La Mer, 1.
4
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inescapable of natural phenomena.10
Nature had spoken to him and he
allowed his emotional world to be absorbed in his musical responses.11
Debussy once wrote:
“Who can know the secret of musical composition?
The sound of
the sea, the outline of a horizon, the wind in the leaves, the
cry of a bird -- these set off complex impressions in us.
And
suddenly, without the consent of anyone on this earth, one of
these memories bursts forth, expressing itself in the language of
music.
It carries its own harmony within itself.”12
Before composing La Mer, Debussy had written several pieces about
water such as Petite suite (1888-9), Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1889),
Trois mélodies (1891), Proses lyriques (1892), Nocturnes (1897-9),
Estampes (1903) and L’isle joyeuse (1904).13
La Mer is series of three symphonic sketches:
‘mer belle aux
Îles Sanguinaries’, ‘jeu de vagues,’ and ‘le vent fait danser la
mer’.14
Though these compositions are very reflective of the sea,
Debussy composed much of it away from the sea.
In any case, Debussy
expressed his passion for the sea on so many occasions, that it is
needless to say that the sea plays such an integral element in much of
his works.15
10
Simon Trezise, The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge:
University Press, 1994), 108.
11
Trezise, La Mer, 2.
12
Ibid, 2.
13
Ibid, 1.
14
Ibid, 12.
15
Ibid, 12.
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Figure 1: Example from Debussy’s La Mer, II mm. 36-9, and 163-6.16
An example of how Debussy depicts the sea in his musical writing
is depicted above.
You can see the violas and cellos playing
arpeggiations of chords with double strikes of the bow below the
violins and flutes trilling.
This effect creates a picture of rocky
waves crashing against one another.
Operatic Compositions
The Flying Dutchman (Die fliegende Holländer)
One of Richard Wagner’s many operas centers around a famous ship,
The Flying Dutchman.
The maritime subject was appropriate for Wagner.
Wagner, with his family, fled in 1839 from Riga, Latvia to London and
endured three and a half weeks of seasickness on a trip that typically
lasts eight days.17
They encountered three terrible storms, one of
which forced them to anchor at Sandvike, Norway.18
16
This comes as a
Trezise, La Mer, 77.
Michael Steen, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman: A Short Guide to a Great
Opera (Dublin: Original Writing Ltd., 2014), 2.
18
Steen, The Flying Dutchman, 2.
17
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major inspiration for his full poem Der fliegende Holländer, The
Flying Dutchman which was completed in May 1841 with the score
following in mid-November.19 The Flying Dutchman premiered in Dresden
on January 2, 1843, with Wagner himself conducting the performance.20
The audience reception was poor as the found it “too gloomy.”21
The opera is set in Norway and tells of a seaman, the Dutchman,
who has tried for seven years to end his life, but has failed.
He is
condemned to the sea until the Day of Judgement, unless he can find a
bride.
wife.
Daland, a Norwegian skipper, offers his daughter Senta as a
Senta falls in love with the Dutchman. However, Senta has a
fiancée, Erik.
Erik temporarily convinces Senta to stay with him,
until the Dutchman starts to leave for the sea, at which point Senta
rushes to the cliff top, pledges herself to the Dutchman and leaps
into the sea, redeeming the Dutchman from his curse.22
The Pirates of Penzance
On a less serious side of things, Sirs Gilbert and Sullivan
composed several operas and operettas that involved or alluded to the
sea.
One of these compositions is the famous work, The Pirates of
Penzance. Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated while in New York on this
new work in hopes that it would be copyrighted in the United States in
the hope of avoiding pirated productions…no pun intended.23
Sullivan
completed the score on December 28, 1879, only a day before the dress
19
Steen, The Flying Dutchman, 2.
Ibid, 3.
21
Ibid, 3.
22
Ibid, 5-6.
23
Alan James, The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers:
Sullivan, (London: Omnibus Press, 1989), 77.
20
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rehearsal and two days before its opening.24
To make matters worse,
the time crunch was exacerbated by Sullivan leaving his original score
sketches in London.
He was then forced to rewrite all of the opera
from memory.25 The first performance still took place in England at the
Royal Bijou Theatre on December 30, 1879.
be quite frantic.
The performance proved to
The overture was not ready, there were no proper
costumes (only those from the previous opera), and the entire cast
performed with their score in hand.26
However, the New York
performance, the following day, was much less frantic and received
grand successes.27
While not directly alluding the sea, the plot does involve
pirates.
The opera is centered around a young man, Frederic, who had
been apprenticed to pirates due to an error made by his nursery-maid,
Ruth.
Ruth, realizing her mistake, stays on board as one of the
crew.
Frederic, who loathes the idea of piracy, plots an expedition
to destroy the pirates.
However, he is confronted by the Pirate King
and Ruth with bad news – since his birthday is February 29th, Leap Day,
he has technically only had five “birthdays”, meaning that he is
technically still a pirate.
Frederic is forced to reveal his plan of
debauchery, and the pirates go to seek revenge.
Ruth saves the day by
revealing to the pirates that they are really just noblemen who have
gone astray.
Frederic and the pirates are freed and can finally marry
their love interests.28
24
25
26
27
28
James, Gilbert & Sullivan, 77.
Ibid, 77.
Ibid, 77.
Ibid, 77.
Ibid, 197.
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Riders to the Sea
In addition to composing his first symphony around the sea,
entitled A Sea Symphony, British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams,
also composed a short, one-act opera around the sea entitled Riders to
the Sea. Williams completed this short composition in 1927 with
libretto from J.M. Synge’s play of the same title.29 In this opera, the
sea is the protagonist of the story,30 so it is probable to state that
the theme of man-against-nature is every present throughout the
story.31
The sense of key throughout the opera is generally fluid and
indeterminate, likened to the ebbs and flows of the sea.32
The opening
of the entire opera begins with the orchestra depicting the sea in all
its violence and unpredictability.
This is accomplished through
techniques like crescendos and decrescendos (essentially volume
swells) and the rolling bass line (the tremolo in lower string
voices).33
The ambiguous sense of key and tonality is also present in
the opening orchestra through use of the octatonic scale and
bitonalities.
The intervals of the lower voices are stacked “A ♭-D ♭-
A ♭”, which is what is referred to as a quartal-quintal harmony.
This
is a classic example of bitonality.34 An example of the opening passage
of Riders to the Sea is provided below.
29
D. Hugh Ottaway, “Riders to the Sea,” The Musical Times 93, no. 1314
(1952), 358.
30
Ottaway, “Riders to the Sea,” 358.
31
Adams, VW Essays, 56.
32
Ottaway, “Riders to the Sea,” 359.
33
Adams, VW Essays, 61.
34
Ibid, 61.
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Figure 2: The opening passage to Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea.35
Vocal/Choral Compositions
Sea Pictures
Sir Edward Elgar composed a song cycle for soprano and orchestra
in 1899 entitled Sea Pictures. The cycle begins with ‘Sea Slumber
35
Adams, VW Essays, 61.
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Song’ with words by Roden Noel (1834-94).36
Beginning with an
undulating motion in the lower voices, like many other composers use,
depict, in this case, sleeping sea birds.37
Perhaps the most sea-involved section of this piece comes from
‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’.
Barrett Browning.38
The text is from a poem by Elizabeth
Here, the text is most important as the five
verses make for an uneasy transition from the progress of a solemn
ship to a higher place where saints keep an ‘endless Sabbath
morning.’39
Tonality throughout the piece bounces from key to key, at time
sporadically.
For example, in ‘Sea Slumber Song’, the tonal centers
focus around C major, then to E major, to A ♭ major, then finally back
to C major.40
This constant change of keys is common when depicting
the sea.
Conclusion
When it comes to natural inspiration for musical compositions,
the sea has long been a source of inspiration.
From Wagner’s The
Flying Dutchman (1843) to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea
(1932), the classical music world is filled with allusions to the sea.
The technique that composers use seems to be closely related.
Tonality becomes ambiguous to depict the ambiguous shape and flow of
the waves.
36
37
38
39
40
The bass line has ominous sounds to demonstrate how brutal
Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York:
Anderson, Elgar, 289.
Ibid, 290.
Ibid, 290.
Ibid, 290.
Schirmer Books, 1993), 289.
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the sea can be.
The upper voices have fluttering moments that
demonstrate the chaotic nature of the sea.
All in all, the voicings
and orchestrations are similar.
For compositions specifically about the sea, one might tend to
choose more of a symphonic piece.
The power of the full orchestra
tends to paint a wonderful picture of the sea.
Operas and vocal works
tend to talk about life or things of the sea, such as pirates or
ships, though this is not a completely exclusive subject for this
genre.
Some may say that the sea is entrancing, and for some composers
that is the case.
entranced.
Debussy was one of these composers who was
The sheer beauty of the sea cannot be denied, and it has
been the center for many classical compositions.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Byron. Vaughan Williams Essays.
Publishing Company, 2003.
Anderson, Robert.
Elgar.
New York:
Burlington:
Ashgate
Schirmer Books, 1993.
James, Alan. The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers:
Sullivan. London: Omnibus Press, 1989.
Manning, David. Vaughan Williams on Music.
University Press, 2008.
Oxford:
Gilbert &
Oxford
Ottaway, D. Hugh. “Riders to the Sea” The Musical Times 93, no. 1314
(1952): 358-360.
Steen, Michael. Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman: A Short Guide to a
Great Opera. Dublin: Original Writing Ltd., 2014.
Trezise, Simon. Debussy: La Mer.
Press, 1994.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Trezise, Simon. The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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