Debussy started work on La mer in the summer of 1903 while staying with his parents-in-law in the country. Over two years later the ‘three symphonic sketches’ were poorly presented by one of Paris's most prestigious orchestral societies to a public seething with indignation at Debussy's marital misdemeanours. This first audience had no inkling it was in the presence of a work that was to acquire, in Edward Lockspeiser's words, ‘the appeal and significance for our generation of a work such as the Beethoven Fifth Symphony at … the beginning of the century’.

What La mer meant to its creator we may never know, for Debussy gave little away in his writings and correspondence. Many emotional and artistic influences may have been caught up in this multi-faceted work, including repercussions of his preoccupation with Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and the emotional turmoil of his flight to Jersey with Emma Bardac, shortly to be his second wife. I have attempted to discuss as many of the artistic, musical, and personal influences on La mer as space permitted.

The analytical tasks undertaken in chapters 6 and 7 would probably have had little appeal to Debussy, for whom analysis was a wanton destruction of the mystery that formed the soul and heartbeat of music. When he wrote ‘there is at present a strange mania that demands that the music critic explain, take things to pieces, and, to put it bluntly, kill in cold blood all the mystery or even the emotion of a piece’ he was probably referring to the fairly modest thematic and formal analyses that were then appearing of his music.