Reception
In a book of interviews, the great Ukrainian/Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter called La mer "A piece that I rank alongside the St. Matthew Passion and the Ring cycle as one of my favorite works". Richter said further, on listening to his favorite recording (by Roger Désormière), "La mer again; shall I ever tire of listening to it, of contemplating it and breathing its atmosphere? And each time is like the first time! An enigma, a miracle of natural reproduction; no, even more than that, sheer magic!" Richter also mentioned two other Soviet admirers of the work: "One day, after listening to this work, Anna Ivanovna exclaimed, 'For me, it's exactly the same miracle as the sea itself!'". Richter also said that for his teacher, the legendary Heinrich Neuhaus, La mer was "the work by Debussy that he loved above all others ('Slava, put on La mer,' he almost always used to say whenever he came round here.)". Of the Désormière recording, which he played for Neuhaus, Richter said it is "The most beautiful in the whole history of the gramophone."
Read more about this topic: La Mer (Debussy)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)