Orchestre Lamoureux
The premiere was given on 15 October 1905 in Paris, by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard. The piece was initially not well received. Pierre Lalo, critic of "Le Temps", hitherto an admirer of Debussy's work, wrote, "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea". Another Parisian critic, Louis Schneider, wrote, "The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer." When the conductor Karl Muck gave the first American performances of "La mer" in March 1907, the critic Henry Krehbiel wrote: