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:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“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)